Whamit!

Phonology Circle this week features a CLS practice talk by Youngah Do

Speaker: Youngah Do
Title: Why do Korean children learn some alternations before others?
Time: Monday 3/29, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Korean verbs show numerous alternations. Children acquiring Korean are reported to go through a stage in which they produce some alternations but not others (Do, to appear). The current simulation uses the MaxEnt Grammar Tool (Hayes, 2006) to explore why some alternations are acquired late. It shows that the frequency of different alternations in Korean can give rise to the attested intermediate stage, without assuming intrinsic bias.

The learner is assumed to have a set of constraints, and weights them according to the frequency of violations in the data. Following Hayes (2004), learning is simulated in two stages; phonotactic and morphological learning. The phonotactic learning stage models the fact that even prior to learning morphology, learners master phonotactic distributions. Once morphological relations are discovered, learners may wish to avoid alternations. I model this with output-output faithfulness constraints (OO-F), demanding faithful to a base form.

After two-stage learning, the learner was able to demote all OO-F to master all alternations. The interest of the current study, though, is to simulate a stage in which learning is incomplete. I simulated this by controlling how freely the model can change the weights of OO-F. By decreasing sigma, the learner is biased to leave the weights closer to their high initial weights.

The grammar trained purely by the frequency of different alternations perfectly predicts the child forms. Therefore, this study demonstrates that even without intrinsic bias, the statistics of Korean gives rise to the attested intermediate learning stage.

Upcoming talks:

• Apr 5 Mafuyu Kitahara (Waseda University)
• Apr 12 Haruka Fukazawa (Keio University)
• Apr 26 Jae Yung Song (Brown University)
• May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
• May 10 Donca Steriade
• May 17 Ari Goldberg (Tufts)

Access real-time updates, on-line:

via the web (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or through iCal

Please join us for our post-spring break Syntax Square meeting. David Pesetsky will lead the discussion.

TIME: Tuesday, 3/30, 1-2PM
PLACE: 32-D461

For the rest of the semester, the LFRG meeting time will alternate between the old slot on Monday, 11:30am, and the new slot on Wednesday at 4pm. So please double-check if a particular meeting you want to attend in on Monday or on Wednesday. The next week the meeting is on WEDNESDAY.

WHAT: Talk
WHO: Patrick Grosz
TITLE: German ‘doch’: An Element that Triggers a Contrast Presupposition
WHEN: March 31, Wednesday, 4PM - 5:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY (abstract):

This talk investigates the German particle “doch”, contrasting it with the particle “ja” (Weydt 1969). I propose that in declaratives, “ja” and “doch” are weak and strong counterparts of each other, in the following sense. They share a core meaning component (uncontroversiality/familiarity, cf. Kratzer 1999), but “doch” has an additional meaning component (contrast/correction, cf. Thurmair 1991). It follows that “ja” and “doch” on their own are in competition. The particle “ja” is used when the presuppositions for “doch” are not met; in contrast, “doch” is used when its presuppositions are met, due to Maximize Presupposition (Heim 1991).

In my analysis of “doch”, I argue that the correction component operates on propositional alternatives (“doch” reinforces the modified proposition p in contrast to a contextually salient alternative q that contradicts p) and is presuppositional in nature. I argue that “doch” makes use of an alternative semantics, associating with focus. This predicts correctly that “doch” triggers intervention effects (Beck 2006): It cannot associate with the same focus as another focus-sensitive element, such as “nur” (‘only’). My analysis accounts for ordering restrictions, which permit “ja doch”, but rule out “doch ja”. Kratzer (1999) argues that “ja” operates on complete propositions and cannot occur between a quantifier and a variable that it binds. I show that “ja” also cannot intervene between a focus-sensitive particle, like “nur” (‘only’) and the focus. Given that “doch” is focus-sensitive, we correctly rule out “doch ja”, but not “ja doch”.

FUTURE LFRG MEETINGS:

• 4/5, Monday: Peter Graff and Greg Scontras, “Comparing Pluralities” (practice talk for CLS)
• 4/12, Monday: DaeYoung Sohn and Yasutada Sudo

Please join us for this week’s Ling-Lunch:

Speaker: Pritty Patel
Time: Thurs 4/1, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: First Conjunct Agreement under Agreement Displacement

This paper focuses on the object-verb agreement pattern present in the perfective aspect in Kutchi Gujarati (Indo-Aryan). The language has a 3rd person object reflexive NP, whose presence triggers agreement mismatch: The verb appears to reflect the features of the subject instead of the object. Such agreement displacement also occurs in clauses where the subject consists of two conjoined DPs and a plural reflexive object, pot-pothane. Canonically, in clauses with conjuncts in argument positions, the verb typically shows plural agreement. However the presence of this 3rd person reflexive results in 1st conjunct agreement (Benmamoun 1992). I propose reflexives cannot trigger verbal agreement (an anaphor agreement effect, Rizzi 1990), causing agreement displacement: The verb actually agrees with the subject rather than the reflexive object. I argue plural agreement is established via Agree under c-command (Chomsky 2001), a relationship between a probe and a goal, established when an agreeing head is merged.

Contrastively, I argue that first conjunct agreement is a second cycle effect (Bejar and Rezac 2009), where a probe on v can search as high as its specifier if it does not find a suitable goal in its c-command domain. I argue subject &P’s are phases, and spell out at the next phase level; the difference between plural agreement and first conjunct agreement is whether the &P has spelled out (which results in first conjunct) or not (which results in plural agreement). It follows that agreement displacement happens late in the derivation, explaining 1st conjunct agreement.

This week’s scheduled colloquium talk by Hubert Truckenbrodt has had to be postponed until next semester, so there will be no colloquium this Friday, April 2nd.

The next colloquia are on April 9th, by Elliot Morreton (UNC Chapel Hill), and on April 16th, by Ash Asudeh (Carleton).

The MIT News site has a very nice article about Norvin’s book Uttering Trees (MIT Press). The article appeared last Friday and on that day, the MIT home page was fully Norvin-themed:

MIT was well represented at PLC 34 (March 19-21), which featured talks by Norvin Richards (“A Prosodic Account of Head-Movement”), Kirill Shklovsky (“Person-Case Effects in Tseltal: What PCC in Ergative Languages Looks Like”) and Kirill Shklovsky and Yasutada Sudo (“No Case Licensing: Evidence from Uyghur”).

This week Patrick Grosz is off to speak at Yale’s Syntax Colloquium Series. His talk, which will be on Friday 3/26, is entitled: “Movement and Agreement in Right-Node Raising Constructions”

Phonology Circle will not meet next week, due to spring break. It will resume on 3/29 with a talk by Youngah Do; the schedule for the rest of the semester is below.

Upcoming talks:

• Mar 29 Youngah Do
• Apr 5 Mafuhu Kitahara (Waseda University)
• Apr 12 Haruka Fukazawa (Keio University)
• Apr 26 Jae Yung Song (Brown University)
• May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
• May 10 Donca Steriade
• May 17 Ari Goldberg (Tufts)

Access real-time updates, on-line:

via the web (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or through iCal

WHAT: Work in progress
WHO: Igor Yanovich
TITLE: A non-standard theory of vagueness
WHEN: March 15, 11.30AM - 1PM
WHERE: 32-D831

I will present a “solution” of the sorites paradox (aka the heap paradox, the bald man paradox, etc.) which I believe is new and distinct from earlier solutions. The main idea is that vague predicates come with meaning postulates which are true in a certain kind of infinite models, and are useful for some kinds of practical reasoning, but which lead to dire consequences when used as axioms for reasoning about finite models such as the ones of the sorites paradox situations.

FUTURE MEETINGS:

• 3/22 no meeting - Spring break
• 3/29 Patrick Grosz
• 4/5 Peter Graff, practice talk for CLS
• 4/11 DaeYoung Sohn and Yasutada Sudo

Speaker: Adam Albright
Title: Cumulative complexity effects and phonotactic acceptability
Time: Monday, 3/15, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

A design feature of both ruled-based and constraint-based models of phonology is that processes apply independently of one another: for example, final consonant clusters with disagreeing voicing are always banned in English, causing voicing alternations regardless of whether the word has a simple or complex onset (`caps’ /kæp+z/, `claps’ /klæp+z/ ? [kæps], [klæps]), a round vowel (`copes’ /ko?p+z/ ? [ko?ps]), or any other marked structure. By forcing rules or constraints to apply independently, we exclude the possibility of `superadditive’ effects in which the well-formedness of a structure depends on the presence of another structure. In this talk, I argue that when we move beyond alternations and turn to static phonotactics, superadditive effects do seem to occur. For example, English allows words beginning with /bl-/ and /gl-/ clusters, as well as words ending in /-sp/ and /-sk/ clusters, but there are no words with both together (*blesk, *glisp). As it turns out, the rarity or lack of such combinations cannot be predicted from the independent frequencies of /bl-/, /-sp/, etc. I discuss several sources of evidence for superadditive effects, including lexical underattestation in Lakhota and English, and acceptability ratings for English nonce words. In all three cases, it appears that marginal structures become worse in the presence of other marginal structures. Crucially, however, not all combinations are penalized in this way. Relatively common combinations, such as /kr-/ and /-st/ co-occur about as often as expected (crust, crest, etc.), and do not show superadditive effects. Furthermore, although frequency is often a factor in predicting superadditive effects, in many cases, phonetic biases appear to play an even more important role in determining the marginality of a structure. I propose a model in which acceptability judgments arise through a combination of two levels of evaluation: (1) a non-grammatical evaluation of phonotactic probability, which assesses the joint probability of the substrings in a word, and (2) evaluation by a grammar of weighted constraints, further penalizing sequences that violate highly weighted constraints.

Upcoming talks:

• Mar 29 Youngah Do
• Apr 5 Mafuhu Kitahara (Waseda University)
• Apr 12 Haruka Fukazawa (Keio University)
• Apr 26 Jae Yung Song (Brown University)
• May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
• May 10 Donca Steriade

Access real-time updates, on-line:

via the web (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or through iCal

This week in Syntax Square:

Kirill and Yasu will lead a discussion of their work on Uyghur Case.

Time: Tuesday 3/16, 1-2PM
Place: 32-D461

Please join us for this week’s ling-lunch:

Speaker: Simon Charlow (NYU)
Time: Thurs 3/18, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: TBA

Last Tuesday, Norvin Richards was named a MacVicar Fellow, honoring him for outstanding undergraduate teaching, mentoring and educational innovation. The provost said “Appointment as a MacVicar Fellow recognizes professors who have made exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and complete education of MIT undergraduates, which includes their dedication inside the classroom and beyond.” Fellows receive $10,000 a year of discretionary funds for support of educational activities, research, travel, and other scholarly expenses.

An MIT news article included these quotes:

“Every conceivable virtue is evident in Norvin’s teaching,” explains one of his colleagues. “His planning is extensive and perfect. He comes to class, lays out the issues, data and analysis with clarity and beauty. Norvin is the kind of teacher who makes his audience think and ask questions because they find it fun to do so.”

“Professor Richards is easily one of the best instructors I’ve had in my life,” one of his students told the selection committee. “His lectures are entertaining, interesting and content-packed. The care and attention he pays to his students is very evident and quite inspirational.”

Linguistics & Philosophy has had one previous recipient of this award: David Pesetsky, who received the honor in 2005.

Congratulations, Norvin!

WHAT: Talk
WHO: Hadas Kotek
TITLE: An indefinite amount relative: evidence from Romanian
WHEN: March 8, 11.30AM - 1PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:

I will present some data and ideas about so-called definite and indefinite amount relatives in Romanian. I identify two main differences between these two constructions - to do with the kinds of information that they presuppose, and the kinds of readings that they allow. I suggest an analysis that deals with (at least some of) these facts, and then open the discussion to talk about some residual issues, most importantly regarding so-called “substance readings” of amount relatives, and to similar phenomena in your favorite language.

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz, MIT
Title: Vocale Incerta, Vocale Aperta
Time: 5pm, 32-D831

It is well known that Standard Italian distinguishes between open and closed mid vowels in stressed syllables and that this contrast is neutralized in unstressed syllables. Less well known is a process which realizes mid vowels as open when stress shifts from an unstressed to a stressed syllable of the base, as in numero but nume?ric. This process can be detected in certain isolated corners of the derivational morphology and more systematically in loanword adaptation. In the first part of this presentation we document the process and in the second we explore two alternative phonetic motivations: sonority enhancement under stress and dispersion in F1-F2 vowel space.

This week in Syntax Square:

Omer will present (and maybe even discuss) some nifty data from a talk he heard at the LSA in January, by Johanna Nichols and David A. Peterson, with the dramatic title “Contact-induced spread of the rare Type 5 cIitic,” concerning data from 6 different languages in the Nakh-Dagestanian family (eastern Caucasus, Russia/Georgia/Azerbaijan).

Time: Tuesday 3/9, 1-2PM
Place: 32-D461

Please join us for this week’s ling-lunch:

Speaker: Peter Jenks (Harvard)
Time: Thurs 3/11, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: Quantifier float, adverbs, and scope in Thai

Novel data in Thai suggest that quantifier float, properly analyzed, lends further merit to the idea that quantifiers and argument NPs do not always join the clause as a single DP. More specifically, Thai data suggest that quantifier float occurs when an adverb is base generated in its scope position, triggering covert movement of an argument NP. Thai has SVOAdv word order, with floated quantifiers appearing in adverbial positions. I present arguments against a “pure” stranding analysis, where the NP is always generated Q-internally and then moved, as well as arguments against Q-float as extraposition. However, island sensitivity and the interpretation of these quantifiers suggest that they are directly associated with argument NPs by movement. In order to resolve this conflict, I rely on three notions: a) base generation of FQs in their scope positions b) QR via movement or reconstruction to somewhere in the Thai middlefield by an NP and c) generalized VP-raising. I will also try to show that that this analysis can account for the typology of quantifier float in classifier languages, which is limited to languages which allow the DP-internal order N-Q-Cl.

Speaker: Paul Portner (Georgetown University)
Time: Friday, March 12, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141
Title: Imperatives and the Analysis of Permission and Choice

Despite the fact that they are sometimes seen as being canonically associated with the function of imposing a requirement (e.g., ordering), imperatives can easily be used to give permission, including free-choice permission:

1. Take an apple!
2. Take an apple or a pear!
3. Take any piece of fruit you like!

Because they are inherently directive, imperatives are likely to prove revealing as we seek to understand the phenomena of permission and choice. It is well known that imperatives can instantiate a wide range of pragmatic “readings”, including orders, suggestions, and requests, often without any special marking. This fact suggests that the various subtypes of imperatives differ from one another primarily in their interaction with context. Permission imperatives and imperatives in free choice sentences are like other imperatives in this regard.

I will present a dynamic analysis of imperatives which are used to give permission, including free choice permission with disjunction, which draws crucially on two theories: a treatment of imperatives which says that they help to impose an order on the worlds compatible with the common ground (Portner 2004, 2007), and a semantics for disjunction based on alternatives (e.g., Alonso-Ovalle 2006). I will also discuss the relevance of this analysis to our understanding of free choice with modal sentences, though my main point here will be that different types of modals need to be distinguished and studied more carefully than they have been in the past.

WHAT: Tutorial
TITLE: “Some things you want to know about modal logic, but don’t know you do”, by Igor Yanovich
WHEN: 11.30AM - 1PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:
The idea is to review, in an informal manner (read: without doing much technical stuff), several simple results from the modern period of modal logic development. Instead of focusing on different systems like K etc. and completeness, the tutorial will take the so-called semantic perspective and discuss modal logic as a tool for talking about relational structures in a certain way. Topics which are likely to emerge: the standard translation from modal logic into a fragment of first-order logic; bisimulations and bisimulation-equivalence; limits of the expressive power of the standard modal logic, and some ways to enrich it, etc.

Plus, if you want to learn something in particular - drop an email to Igor with your question. No guarantees, but he’ll try to answer it on Monday.

If you want to read, or at least browse, something before going to the meeting (or instead of going), read this:

• http://www.illc.uva.nl/Publications/ResearchReports/PP-2006-30.text.pdf

It is a wonderful introductory chapter from the “Handbook of modal logic”, written by Johan van Benthem and Patrick Blackburn - two really important guys in current modal logic, who also happen to write very readable texts accessible even for beginners.

Speaker: Marina Bedny (PhD, Postdoctoral Associate, Saxe Lab)
Title: Language in the visual cortices of congenitally blind adults
Time: Tues 3/2, Noon, 46-3310

This week in Syntax Square:

Hrayr Khanjian will lead a discussion on modals and negative concord in Western Armenian.
Location: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday, March 2, 1-2pm

Please join us for this week’s ling-lunch:

Speaker: Jessica Coon
Time: Thurs 3/4, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: Transitivity and Split Ergativity in Chol

In this talk I discuss two types of split ergativity and their interaction in Chol: aspect-based split ergativity (perfective vs. non-perfective), and a “split-S” system (unergative and unaccusative subjects pattern differently). I begin by showing that Chol makes an important distinction between those stems which subcategorize for internal arguments (transitives, unaccusatives, and passives) and those that do not (unergatives and antipassives). Specifically, all and only those stems which subcategorize for internal DP arguments are verbs. If a theta-role assigning stem combines with an internal argument DP, it is a verb; if not, it must be realized as a noun. I’ll argue that despite the appearance of aspect-based split ergativity, agreement marking in Chol follows a very simple rule: all internal arguments are marked absolutive and all external arguments are marked ergative. That is, Chol is robustly split-S. This is obscured, I show, by the fact that the non-perfective aspect markers are themselves verbs which embed nominalized clauses.

Though I focus on data from Chol, I discuss two points at which this analysis has broader implications. First, I discuss implications of the proposal that all and only verbs combine with DP complements. While this does not obviously appear to hold in other languages, we see hints of it elsewhere, for instance in the proposal that unergatives are always light verb constructions (Hale & Keyser 1993). Second, I show that in aspect-based splits in languages around the world we find evidence for a biclausal analysis of aspect-based split ergativity (see Laka 2006). Under the analysis proposed here, there is no split in agreement or case assignment; rather the difference between ergative-patterning and nominative-patterning clauses is reduced to the difference between simple versus complex clauses.

Speaker: Alec Marantz (NYU)
Time: Friday, March 5, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (Stata Center)
Title: Locality Domains for Contextual Allosemy

At least since work within Lexical Morphology and Phonology, the issue of the connection between word structure and allomorphy has been heavily investigated by morphophonologists. Recent advances within Distributed Morphology (see in particular Embick 2010) have shown that the general cyclic architecture of a phase-based Minimalist Program syntax provides the proper locality domains for the interaction of information determining contextual allomorphy, although phonology- specific notions like adjacency also play a role, restricting possible interactions even more than what might be allowed within a cyclic domain. Less well understood are the parallel issues at the syntax/ semantics interface, namely the computation of possible meanings of morphemes in context. Against some recent work disputing claims in Marantz (1997, 2000) linking the domain of special meanings to phases and against recent proposals that the locality domains for phonology and semantics might differ, this paper clarifies the issues in contextual meaning determination and supports the idea that the locality domains for contextual allosemy are just those for contextual allomorphy. As a specific notion of phonological adjacency further constrains allomorphic interactions, so too does a semantic specific notion of “adjacency” constrain allosemic interactions and may restrict possible interactions among morphemes even more strongly than the general cyclic architecture of phases.

Phonology Circle will resume next week, with a presentation by Michael Kenstowicz. There are still open slots (see below); please let Adam know if you would like to present.

• Mar 8 Michael Kenstowicz
• Mar 15 [available]
• Mar 29 [available]
• Apr 5 Mafuhu Kitahara (Waseda University)
• Apr 12 Haruka Fukazawa (Keio University)
• Apr 26 Jae Yung Song (Brown University)
• May 3 Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade
• May 10 Adam Albright

Access real-time updates on the web (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or through iCal

Congratulations to Norvin Richards, whose LI Monograph, Uttering Trees, is now available from MIT press!

Advance praise for Uttering Trees:

“A brilliant book by one of the most creative minds in the field sets an example of how theory should be combined with data, vividly illustrating why syntactic research can be so exciting.” - Elena Anagnostopoulou

“[A] stimulating and provocative illustration of linguistic inquiry at its most satisfying.” - Noam Chomsky