Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Archive for April, 2010

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The world of linguistics this weekend saw not one, but two conferences with “Formal Approaches” in its name. At Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) hosted by the University of Maryland, Liudmila Nikolaeva (Liuda) presented a paper entitled “On the Nature of Preverbal Internal Arguments in Russian”, and Sasha Podobryaev presented a paper coauthored with Natasha Ivlieva on “How Many Splits in Russian: A View From LF”. All three are second-year graduate students.

Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics last weekend

FAMLi sign
Meanwhile, our department hosted the first-ever conference on “Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi)” this weekend. We won’t repeat all the details of the conference. which we already described in last week’s WHAMIT — except to say that it was a tremendous success. The papers were excellent — many breaking new ground in grammatical description, others offering competing explanations for particularly puzzling phenomea in Mayan (especially Agent Focus, central to at least three of the talks). The discussion was lively and productive after each and every talk, the room was full, and the spirit of the conference was magnificent. The two official languages of the conference were English and Spanish, as about half the participants were native-speaker linguists. Combinations of English handout with Spanish presentation (and vice-versa) were common and worked very well for those of us with less than perfect bilingualism skills. From our own department, talks were given by Kirill Shklovsky (“Person-Case effects in Tseltal”); by Jessica Coon with Pedro Mateo (University of Kansas) (“Extraction and embedding in two Mayan languages” — Chol and Q’anjob’al); and by Norvin Richards, who was one of the five invited speakers. A particular highlight of the conference (and a chance to get out of Cambridge) was a Friday dinner reception at the Mexican Consulate in Boston, hosted by Consul Fernando Estrada. Thank you, Jessica, Robert, Kirill and Katie for this unforgettable workshop, and thanks also to everyone who helped!
FAMLi conversation
(photo credits: Mitcho Erlewine. More photos here.)

Shklovsky at GLOW

Fourth-year student Kirill Shklovsky is back from GLOW (Generative Linguists in the Old World) in Wroc?aw, Poland, where he gave two talks. The first, co-authored with third-year student Yasutada Sudo, was “No Case Licensing: Evidence from Uyghur”. The second, related to his presentation a week later at FAMLi, concerned “Person?Case Effects in Tseltal”. In between the two conferences, Kirill spent an unexpected five days in Berlin, thanks to a certain Icelandic volcano.

Phonology Circle 4/26 - Jae Yung Song

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation will be by Jae Yung Song, of Brown University.

Speaker: Jae Yung Song (Brown University)
Title: The development of acoustic cues to coda voicing and place of articulation
Time: Monday 4/26, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Studies on young children’s speech perception and production suggest that voicing and place of articulation (POA) contrasts may be acquired early in life. However, most of these studies have focused on onset consonants; little is known about the development of cues to feature contrasts in codas. To this end, we investigated children’s representations of coda voicing (voiced vs. voiceless) and POA (alveolar vs. velar) by conducting detailed acoustic analyses of their speech. In particular, we examined longitudinal, spontaneous speech data from 6 American English-speaking mother-child dyads. The results showed that children as young as 1;6 exhibited many adult-like acoustic cues to coda voicing and POA contrasts, such as longer vowels and more voice bars before voiced codas, and more frequent releases, a greater number of bursts, and longer post-release noise duration for alveolar codas. In contrast, some cues, such as glottalization at the end of the vowel, were still not systematically produced by 2;6. In general, younger children used more exaggerated cues compared to mothers, but showed nearly adult-like patterns by 2;6. In conclusion, although 2-year-olds produced some adult-like acoustic cues to voicing and POA distinctions, others take time to become adult-like. Physiological and contextual correlates of these findings are discussed.

Upcoming talks:

  • 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

Syntax Square 4/27: Kirill Shklovsky

Join us this week for Syntax Square. Kirill Shklovsky will lead the discussion with a report from GLOW.

TIME: Tuesday, April 27, 1-2PM
PLACE: 32D-461

If you would like to lead the discussion at next week’s Syntax Square, please email Claire (halpert@mit.edu).

Ling-Lunch 4/29: Bane, Graff, & Sonderegger

Speakers: Max Bane (University of Chicago), Peter Graff (MIT), Morgan Sonderegger (University of Chicago)
Title: Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system
Time: Thurs 4/29, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Previous work shows that in short term, laboratory settings, aspects of one’s speech can change under exposure to the speech of others (e.g. Goldinger 1998, Nielsen 2007), and that this change is mediated by social variables such as (speaker) gender (e.g. Namy et al. 2002, Pardo 2006). An implicit hypothesis is that these effects can help explain dialect formation and the social stratification of speech. However, it is not known whether such change occurs in natural interaction over a longer term.

This study shows longitudinal change in VOT in a closed linguistic system, mediated by social interaction. Our corpus consists of speech from Big Brother UK (2008), a reality TV show in which 16 contestants live in a house for 93 days, subject to 24 hour audio/video recording. VOT was measured for 4 contestants over the season. We model the effect of time on VOT for different contestants, controlling for known confounds (e.g. speech rate, place of articulation), and allowing for intrinsic differences in the VOTs of different words. Each contestant’s modeled VOT time trajectory shows significant longitudinal change, and all trajectories appear to move closer together over time.

We then examine the effect of two measures of social interaction on differences between VOT trajectories for pairs of contestants. The more a pair interacts, as measured via live blog entries by a UK newspaper, the closer their VOTs become. When a pair is on the same side of an artificial divide in the house (present for half the season), their VOTs become closer than if they are on different sides.

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 4/30 - Bruce Hayes

Speaker: Bruce Hayes (UCLA)
Time: Friday, April 30, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (Stata Center)
Title: Accidentally-true constraints in phonotactic learning

The phonotactic learning system proposed by Hayes and Wilson (2008) follows the principle of the inductive baseline: it tries to learn phonotactics using as few principles of Universal Grammar (UG) as possible. The leading idea is that one could learn from such a system’s failures just as much as from its successes. For instance, the simplest version of the system fails to learn patterns of vowel harmony or unbounded stress, but it becomes able to learn them when amplified with UG principles corresponding to classical autosegmental tiers and metrical grids—thus forming a new kind of argument for such representations.

There is a second way in which failures of the baseline system might be informative: it could learn too much rather than too little. The baseline system involved a rather permissive concept of what can be a phonotactic constraint: a constraint’s structural description is simply a sequence of feature matrices, each representing one of the natural classes of segments in a language. Where there are C natural classes and constraints are allowed to have n matrices, there will be Cn possible constraints. In actual practice, this can be a very large number.

With such a large hypothesis space, it is imaginable that the system might find constraints that are “accidentally true”: they have few or no exceptions in the lexicon, but are not apprehended by native speakers and play no role in their phonotactic intuitions. Hayes and Wilson’s learning simulation for the phonotactics of Wargamay may have done this. While the 100 constraints the system learned included 43 that successfully recapitulate the known phonotactic restrictions of this language (Dixon 1981), a further 57 constraints were discovered that struck the authors as complex and phonologically mystifying. An example is *[–approx, +cor][+high,+back,–main][–cons], which forbids sequences of coronal noncontinuants ([d, ?, n, ?]), followed by unstressed or secondary-stressed [u, u?], followed by a vowel or glide. Almost any phonologist would agree that this an unlikely configuration for a language to forbid.

Do real speakers apprehend constraints of this kind? I will report an experimental study now in progress that addresses this question for English. When trained on English data, the Hayes/Wilson system behaves just as it did with Wargamay, learning both sensible and accidental-seeming constraints. The experiment used 20 nonce-word quadruplets, each containing:

  1. a word that violates exactly one constraint, of the “accidental” type
  2. a word that is violation-free but otherwise similar to (1)
  3. a word that violates exactly one constraint that would be considered by phonologists to be natural (e.g. a sonority-sequencing constraint), and has a weight similar to the constraint in (1)
  4. a violation-free control word similar to (3).

The results of the experiment indicate that the (1)-(2) difference is considerably smaller than the (3)-(4) difference—i.e. that unnatural constraints really do have a weaker effect on native speaker judgment than natural constraints.

I will then explore two hypotheses that might explain the disparity: (a) a statistical approach based on comparing the explanatory power of added constraints (Wilson 2009); (b) a UG-based approach under which language learners are biased (Wilson 2006) to assign the natural constraints high weights relative to unnatural ones.

References

  • Dixon, Robert M. W. 1981. Wargamay. In Handbook of Australian languages, volume II, ed. Robert M. W. Dixon and Barry J. Blake, 1–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Hayes, Bruce and Colin Wilson (2008) A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 379-440.
  • Wilson, Colin and Marieke Obdeyn (2009) Simplifying subsidiary theory: statistical evidence from Arabic, Muna, Shona, and Wargamay. Ms., Johns Hopkins University.

Katz accepts CNRS post-doc

Jonah Katz has accepted a post-doctoral position at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, to begin in the fall. Congratulations, Jonah!

Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics this Friday-Sunday!

FAMLi logo
On April 23-25, our department will host the first-ever international workshop on Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics (FAMLi). This NSF-funded conference will bring together specialists from Europe, North America, Mexico and Guatemala, to discuss the unique properties of Mayan languages — and the light they shed on language in general. FAMLi features 15 presentations, a poster session, and invited talks by Judith Aissen, Heriberto Avelino, Ximena Lois, B’alam Mateo-Toledo, and Norvin Richards. A particularly exciting (and unprecedented) feature of this workshop is the fact more than half of the presentations will come from linguists who are also native speakers of Mayan languages. The organizing committee is headed by our own Jessica Coon, currently writing her dissertation on Chol, a Mayan language of Chiapas, Mexico, and Robert Henderson, a third-year graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and specialist in the Mayan languages of Guatemala — as well as fourth-year grad student Kirill Shklovsky, Tseltal specialist and designer of the FAMLi logo, and Katie Franich of Boston University.

The official languages of the conference are English and Spanish, but all speakers have been encouraged to include English in their handouts. We hope you all can make it!!

Pritty Patel-Grosz to speak at CUNY - 4/20

This Tuesday (4/20), Pritty Patel-Grosz has been invited for the second time to present at CUNY Syntax Supper. She will be presenting her current research project, “Anaphor Agreement Displacement Effects”. See the announcement at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/lingu/.

No Phonology Circle this week

Phonology Circle will not meet this week due to the Patriots Day holiday. We resume next week with a talk by Jae Yung Song of Brown University.

Upcoming talks:

  • 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

No Syntax Square this week

Due to the Tuesday holiday, there will be no Syntax Square this week. If you would like to lead a discussion, there are two available dates remaining: April 27 and May 4. Please email Claire (halpert@mit.edu) to volunteer for a spot.

LFRG Wednesday 4/21: Paolo Santorio on bindable indexicals

WHO: Paolo Santorio (MIT Philosophy)
TITLE: Modals are monsters: On indexical binding in English (SALT Practice Talk)
WHEN: April 21st, Wednesday, 4PM - 5:30PM
WHERE: tentatively, 32-D461; if we are not there - there will be a note on the door
WHAT EXACTLY (abstract): click here

Ling-Lunch 4/22: Shigeru Miyagawa

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa
Title: Primacy of Person Agreement: Revisiting Jaeggli and Safir’s Morphological Uniformity for Pro-drop
Time: Thurs 4/22, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Pro-drop is typically correlated with rich agreement (Jespersen 1924, Perlmutter 1971, Rizzi 1978, Taraldsen 1978). However, languages such as Chinese evidence pro-drop without any overt agreement (Huang 1984). To account for both types, Jaeggli and Safir (1989) propose that languages that are morphologically uniformly complex (e.g., Romance) or uniformly simple (Chinese) allow pro-drop, calling it “Morphological Uniformity” (MU). In this talk, I will flush out some of the empirical issues associated with pro-drop to try to understand what is behind MU. An important observation made in the 1990s is that not all instances of pro-drop are associated with a pronominal element (Huang 1991, Otani and Whitman 1991). Oku (1998) shows that in some cases the empty element is the site of noun-phrase ellipsis (NPE). His work shows that the distribution of pro and NPE can be predicted by and large from the presence or absence of agreement: only pro is allowed in the presence of agreement; NPE is only allowed in the absence of agreement (see also Saito 2007). Based on recent studies by Miyagawa (2010), ?ener and Takahashi (to appear), and Takahashi (2008, 2010), I will show that when there is no morphological indication of agreement whatsoever at finite T, the default is to interpret person agreement at T, leading to the possibility of pro but not NPE. This is the morphologically uniformly simple phenomenon in MU and it characterizes Chinese, which shows person agreement at T without any morphology. Data from Basque and Japanese provide further evidence for this new version of MU.

LFRG 4/12 - DaeYoung Sohn and Yasutada Sudo

WHAT: Work in progress
WHO: DaeYoung Sohn and Yasutada Sudo
TITLE: Scale Dependency in Comparatives and Other Degree Constructions in Korean
WHEN: April 12th, Monday, 11.30AM - 1PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Phonology Circle 4/12 - Haruka Fukazawa

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation is by Haruka Fukazawa, of Keio University.

Speaker: Haruka Fukazawa
Title: How to restrict the architecture and sub-components of the grammar
Time: Monday 4/12, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Along with its development, the simple architecture of classic OT has shown its limitation: there are many difficult or unexplained cases. Several sub-components have been introduced to compensate for this limitation. In this talk, I am going to discuss how the architecture and sub-components of the grammar can be integrated or restricted within OT focusing particularly on Local Conjunction, Relativized Faithfulness, and OT-CC.

Upcoming talks:

  • Apr 19 (No meeting—Patriots Day Holiday)
  • 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

Syntax Square 4/13: Alya Asarina & Jeremy Hartman

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Alya Asarina and Jeremy Hartman will discuss “Subject case and verbal morphology in Uyghur embedded clauses.”

Time: Tuesday, 4/13, 1-2PM
Place: 32D-461

Harvard GSAS Workshop - 4/13 - Daniel Kaufman

The GSAS Workshop in Language Universals and Linguistic Fieldwork presents:

Speaker: DANIEL KAUFMAN (UNFR and CUNY Graduate Center)
Title: ‘Greenberg’s 16th slayed in the Bronx? Language universals and fieldwork in New York City’
Time: Tuesday, April 13th, 5:30-7pm
Location: Boylston Hall 104

Upcoming Universals Talks

  • Hazel Pearson (Harvard University)
    April 20, 5:30-7pm; Boylston 104
    Title: “Towards a crosslinguistic typology for comparatives: Evidence from Fijian and Japanese”

  • Michael Diercks (Georgetown University)
    April 27, 5:30-7pm; location TBA
    Title: “Complementizer Agreement in Lubukusu”

LingLunch 4/15 - Aniko Csirmaz

Speaker: Aniko Csirmaz (University of Utah) Title: Degree achievements - achieving specific aspectual properties

Time: Thurs 4/1, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Degree achievements verbs (DAs, Dowty 1979), which include ‘dry’, ‘darken’, ‘cool’ and ‘narrow’, can appear in different types of event descriptions. For some DAs, the telicity of the event description can vary: ‘the soup cooled’ can be telic or atelic, and accordingly permit modification by ‘in an hour’ and ‘for an hour’, respectively. Intuitively, ‘the soup cooled in an hour’ describes an event where at the conclusion of the event, the soup attained a specific temperature — a temperature suitable for eating, for instance. The atelic ‘the soup cooled for an hour’ describes an event where the temperature of the soup decreased somewhat, but it does not need to have reached a specific temperature. This characterization suggests that telic interpretation requires the availability of a specific adjectival value; a maximal or contextually determined endpoint of the adjectival scale. For the atelic interpretation, any change along the scale is sufficient. It is predicted that for DAs where the adjectival scale lacks an endpoint (eg. ‘widen’), only an atelic interpretation is available. Accordingly, in absence of a salient contextually defined endpoint, ‘the road widened’ can only be atelic (cf. discussions in Kennedy and Levin 2008, Kearns 2007, a.o.).

In contrast with the these observations about the correlation between telicity and the nature of adjectival scales, I argue that the scale does not necessarily determine whether a telic interpretation is available. I show that Hungarian event descriptions unambiguously determine telicity, irrespective of the closed or open nature of the adjectival scale. For a closed scale DA, some event descriptions permit only an atelic interpretation, and for open scale DAs, some event descriptions can only be telic. I propose a treatment of telicity where the endpoint of the adjectival scale and the endpoint of an event (which yields telicity) are kept distinct, and telicity amounts to lack of continuation for an event.

I also show that Hungarian event descriptions with DAs can differ in another respect: in the argument that is homomorphic to the event. The event can be homomorphic either to the adjectival scale or to the affected argument; a given event description is also unambiguous in this respect.

Finally, I address verb particles in some detail; in Hungarian, it is these particles which yield event descriptions that are unambiguous with respect to telicity and the homomorphic argument.

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 4/16 - Ash Asudeh

Speaker: Ash Asudeh (Carleton University)
Time: Friday, April 16, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (Stata Center)
Title: Evidence for Parallel Composition from Resumptive Pronouns

An important tenet of linguistic semantics is the principle of compositionality, which states that the meaning of a linguistic expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and their arrangement. Two approaches have arisen in compositional semantics. The rule-by-rule or categorial approach holds that syntax and semantics are constructed in parallel. The interpretive approach holds that semantics interprets the output of syntax. These traditions are often viewed as fundamentally equivalent, since the main interest in formal semantics is typically in the models. Sometimes theoretical distinctions are highlighted, as in the direct compositionality and variable-free programs. However, rarely is there an empirical issue that seems to favour one approach over the other. I will present such an empirical challenge based on resumptive pronoun data from Irish, Swedish, and Vata. The facts seem to favour the parallel approach to syntax and semantics over the interpretive approach.

von Fintel & Stalnaker in Nebraska

This week (April 16 & 17), there is a conference on epistemic modals at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. MIT speakers: Kai von Fintel (presenting with co-author Thony Gillies, Rutgers), Bob Stalnaker, and MIT philosophy alum Eric Swanson.

LFRG Monday 4/5: Two CLS practice talks

WHAT: Practice talks for CLS
WHEN: April 5th, Monday, 11.30AM - 1PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Talk 1: Gregory Scontras (Harvard University), Peter Graff (MIT), and Noah Goodman (MIT)
Title: Comparing Pluralities

Talk 2: Luka Crnic
Title: Imperatives in Unconditionals

Speakers have reliable truth-judgments when comparing pluralities. The semantics of these constructions, however, cannot straightforwardly follow from the semantics generally assumed for comparatives (e.g., von Stechow 1984, Heim 1985, Kennedy 1997) or plurals (e.g., Link 1983, Landman 1989, Schwarzschild 1996). Past work on plural comparison (Matushanksy and Ruys, 2006) attempts to capture speakers’ intuitions in a semantics that reduces plural comparison to a multitude of comparisons between the individual members of compared pluralities. We present experimental evidence that plural comparison does not reduce to the comparison of degrees true of individual members, but rather to the comparison of collective degrees inferred from the pluralities involved.

Our results support the hypothesis that a plurality can have a single degree associated with it that differs from the maximal degrees true of each of its parts, and that this degree is calculated by averaging the maximal degrees of the individuals belonging to the plurality. Thus, collective properties of pluralities are compared. Plural comparison then proceeds just as singular comparison, where the property relevant for comparison is inferred by averaging the degrees associated with the individual members of each plurality. Translating differences between pluralities into a probabilistic truth value significantly improves the model’s fit to human data. Ongoing work investigates how the gradience in human judgments arises.

Phonology Circle - 4/5 - Mafuyu Kitahara

This week’s Phonology Circle presentation is by Mafuyu Kitahara of Waseda University.

Speaker: Mafuyu Kitahara
Title: The lexical distinctiveness of tones and segments in Japanese
Time: Monday 4/5, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Phonological events are not equally utilized. Some events (particular segments, features, or tones) are highly useful and crucial for phonological distinctions while others are not. Such distinctive properties can be estimated from the distribution of lexical items in the lexicon.

Upcoming talks:

  • 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

Chung to speak at Harvard - 4/5

The Harvard Department of Linguistics presents the Fifth Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture, featuring a talk by Sandra Chung (UCSC).

Speaker: Sandra Chung (UCSC)
Title: Parts of Speech and the Limits of Exoticism
Time: Monday 4/5, 4pm
Location: Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall

Booij @ Harvard, Tues 4/6

On Tuesday, Geert Booij will give a talk as part of the GSAS Workshop in Language Universals and Linguistic Fieldwork:

Speaker: Geert Booij (Visiting Erasmus lecturer from Universiteit Leiden)
Title: ‘Noun incorporation and particle verbs in Dutch: a challenge for linguistic models’
Time: Tuesday, April 6th, 5:30-7pm
Location: Boylston Hall 104

Verbs with noun incorporation such as adem-halen ‘to breathe’ and particle verbs such as aan-vallen ‘to attack’ look like complex verbs, and they do behave as lexical units in a number of ways. They often have idiosyncratic meanings, and feed word formation. Dutch orthography requires them to be written as one word. Yet, the two parts are separable in root clauses, as in:

  1. Jan haalt zwaar adem ‘John breathes heavily’
  2. De tijger viel ons aan ‘The tigre attacked us’

Such ‘separable complex verbs’ are therefore phrasal in nature, but they have a number of properties that distinguish them partially from what the regular syntax of Dutch predicts. Hence, they have to be analysed as cases of optional syntactic compounding.

Their phrasal structure corresponds with specific meanings. Noun incorporation evokes the meaning of conventional action. The word door ‘through’ used as a particle expresses continuative aspect, as in door-gaan ‘lit. through-go, to continue.’

The existence of these separable complex verbs therefore implies a lexicon with a set of phrasal constructional idioms, phrasal constructions of the type [X V],with the X position lexically specified. Hence, there is no sharp boundary between lexicon and syntax, unlike what many models of grammar assume.

Coon back from UCSC

Jessica Coon has just returned from giving a colloquium talk at UCSC on April 2, on the topic of “Split Ergativity and Transitivity in Chol”.

MIT @ CLS 46

MIT will be well represented at the 46th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society this weekend (April 8-10). The program includes talks by:

  • Luka Crnic: “Imperatives in unconditionals”
  • Young Ah Do: “Why do Korean children learn some alternations before others?”
  • Peter Graff: “Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system” (with Max Bane and Morgan Sonderegger, University of Chicago), and “Comparing Pluralities” (with Gregory Scontras of Harvard and Noah Goodman of MIT)
  • Patrick Grosz: “German doch: An Element that Triggers a Contrast Presupposition”
  • Pritty Patel-Grosz: “First Conjunct Agreement under Agreement Displacement”
  • Kirill Shklovsky: “Person-Case Effects in Tseltal”

Two talks by Jim McCloskey @ BU

Jim McCloskey (UC Santa Cruz) will give two talks at BU this week.

  • “Sex and the Irish Language: The Cultural Politics of Language Attrition”
    Thursday, April 8, 2010 @ 7:30 PM, followed by a reception
    Location: KCB (565 Commonwealth Ave.), room 101.
  • “Yes, No, and the Construction of Finite Verbs in a VSO Language”
    Friday, April 9, 2010 @ 3:30 PM Location: KCB (565 Commonwealth Ave.), room 106.

Details can be found in the PDF poster announcement.

MIT Linguistics Colloquium 4/9 - Elliott Moreton

Speaker: Elliott Moreton (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Time: Friday, April 9, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141
Title: Connecting paradigmatic and syntagmatic simplicity bias in phonotactic learning

Phonotactic patterns are easier to learn in the lab when they are simple and systematic in terms of phonetic features (e.g., LaRiviere et al. 1974, Saffran & Thiessen 2003, Kuo 2009, Wilson 2003, Moreton 2008). This is true in two ways: A category contrast is easier if it is defined by possession of a specific feature (paradigmatic simplicity, e.g. [p t k]/[b d g] rather than [p d k]/[b t g]), and also if it is characterized by within-stimulus dependencies between instances of the same feature rather than of different features (syntagmatic simplicity, e.g., height harmony rather than height-voice correlation). Both biases are important to linguists because of their possible impact on natural-language typology. This talk presents evidence for syntagmatic simplicity bias, and discusses the relationship between paradigmatic and syntagmatic simplicity bias, in connection with theories of general human and non-human category learning, and of phonotactic pattern learning.

Although paradigmatic simplicity bias is consistent with what is known about human category learning in other domains (Shepard et al. 1961, Nosofsky et al. 1994), syntagmatic simplicity bias has not been addressed. Paradigmatic simplicity bias in non-linguistic domains can be accounted for by error-driven learning in which constraints compete for influence on the basis of how well they explain unexpected data (the “delta rule”, Gluck & Bower 1988). The same learning rule is used in Maximum Entropy (Jaeger 2004), Harmonic Grammar (Boersma and Pater 2008), and Stochastic OT (Boersma 1997, Boersma & Hayes 2001), resulting in the same bias (Pater et al. 2008).

These results can be extended to account for syntagmatic simplicity bias, *if* there is a guarantee that the constraint set provides more-general constraints only for featurally-simpler within-stimulus dependencies. But evidence from both the lab and natural language suggests that constraints can also be induced from phonological data (Hayes et al. 2009). This talk will present a model of supervised phonotactic learning in which constraint induction is restricted by Feature-Geometric constraint schemas which support general constraints only for featurally-simple between- and within-stimulus dependencies, while still allowing great flexibility in the formulation of constraints. The model implements the delta rule in Harmonic Grammar as an evolutionary competition among constraints which reproduce with variation and selection, so that constraint induction and ranking (weighting) happen simultaneously. The model correctly predicts superior acquisition of syntagmatically- and paradigmatically-simple patterns. Discussion will focus on alternative models of category learning and phonotactic learning.

Ling-Lunch 4/8: Daniel Jaspers

Due to a cancellation, the ling-lunch slot on April 29th is now available. Please email Bronwyn and Alya if you are interested in giving a ling-lunch talk on that date.

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

Speaker: Daniel Jaspers (CRISSP/HUBrussel)
Time: Thurs 4/8, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: Logic of Colours

Starting from the Aristotelian oppositions as represented in the logical square on the one hand and Höfler’s (1897) colour octahedron on the other, it will be shown algebraically how definitions for the relations of opposition in predicate logic – entailment, contradiction, contrariety and subcontrariety – carry over to the realm of colours and describe very precisely the relations of opposition obtaining between primary and secondary colours. This result has the potential to provide a better characterization of a lot of diffuse everyday knowledge people generally have about colours. Moreover, there are interesting consequences from a linguistic perspective too, relating to the fact that certain colour terms (such as red, green, etc.) are ordinary natural language words whereas other terms such as magenta and cyan are not.

The observed isomorphism between colour perception and logical reasoning also raises interesting philosophical questions: are the logical oppositions as deeply embedded in the physiological structure of human cognition as the colour opposition system?

Gallagher accepts job at NYU

Gillian Gallagher has accepted a position as a one year visiting assistant professor at NYU for 2010-11. Congratulations, Gillian!