Whamit!

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This is the last issue of this academic year. Whamit! will resume publication on Tuesday Sept 7.

Announcing the 1st summer meeting of the Phonology Circle: Monday May 17 at 5PM.

Claire Halpert (MIT): “Place assimilation changes its triggers”

This is a rehearsal for a talk at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.

Guillaume Thomas has received a Travel Grant for Dissertation Research from MISTI Brazil. Congratulations, Guillaume!

Adam Albright’s promotion to tenure has been approved by MIT’s Executive Committee. Congratulations, Adam!!

Well, it is not actually an extravaganza, but the idea is for our student semantic community to gather and celebrate the end of the semester - and at the same time have some small talk related to our professional activities.

Among possible items on the agenda:

• who has been up to what during the semester, and who plans to work on what projects in the summer and the fall;
• what experiences we had taking classes outside of the department: which were useful and interesting, which were boring, which level of prior knowledge they presuppose, and whether it makes sense to take them;
• possible topics for more traditional reading group/small informal seminar activity in the fall - maybe in smaller focus groups?
• having coffee, tea, and (hopefully) cookies

See you at the usual place at the usual time, 11:35-12:25!

The last installment of Phonology Circle for the spring semester will feature a talk by Donca Steriade.

Speaker: Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: Rhyming evidence for intervals
Time: Monday 5/10, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Stress and meter operate on rhythmic units, each of which consists of a nucleus plus some neighboring consonants. Since Dionysius Thrax (2nd cent. BC), these units have been assumed to be syllables. This talk presents a survey of rhyming conventions whose analysis supports a different rhythmic unit, the Vowel-to-Vowel interval. An interval is the unit containing the nucleus plus any segments following it, up to the next nucleus or to the end of the domain. So interval divided into intervals = (?nt)(?rv)(?l). Intervals contain, like syllables, exactly one nucleus, but their left and right edges are shifted rightwards relative to those of syllables. Intervals have been invoked in the analysis of durational invariance effects, where syllables proved less useful (Farnetani and Kori 1986 JPhon, Fant and Kruckenberg 1989 PERILUS, McCrary 2005, UCLA diss.)

The goal of the talk is to find the constraints that characterize, for each rhyming tradition, the contents of the Rhyming Domain (RD). The RD is the recurring string in rhyming lines. There are three relevant findings. First, there is considerable diversity in the contents and location of the RD, much more than one expects from exposure to standard European poetry: the RD need not be line final, or word final, it need not contain a stressed syllable, or a heavy syllable; and the degree of similarity required between RD’s can be low. Second, despite the great diversity of rhyming practices, the RDs of all traditions share two properties: their left edge is the left edge of an interval, not the left edge of a syllable onset; and their right edge is the right edge of an interval, not the right edge of a syllable coda. Finally, RD internal sub-constituents are occasionally needed, to distinguish degrees of required similarity between rhyming lines: these sub-constituents are intervals too.

Taken together, these results suggest that only intervals – not syllables, or sub-syllabic units – are the units invoked by constraints on RD structure.

Please join us for the last Syntax Square of the semester* on Tuesday, 1-2PM. Mitcho Erlewine will present “Independent Dependency and the Mandarin b? Comparative.”

SPEAKER: Mitcho Erlewine
TIME: Tuesday, 5/11, 1-2PM
PLACE: 32-D461
TITLE: Independent Dependency and the Mandarin b? Comparative

Most recent analyses of the Mandarin b? comparative have posited a syntax with only one copy of the predicate in the derivation (Xiang 2003, Erlewine 2007, Lin 2009). In this talk I will argue that this assumption cannot explain a range of comparative data. I refer to this new hypothesis — that the Mandarin comparative must have two copies of the predicate, one for each of the compared items — as Independent Dependency. We will also touch on the phenomena of internal argument comparison with a restricted distribution that no theory on the market can currently account for. I will then hone in on two analyses — an ellipsis approach and a multidominance approach — which are compatible with Independent Dependency and show that they also give a natural account for the internal argument comparatives.

*Stay tuned for Syntax Square: Summer Edition!

WHO: Klaus von Heusinger (U. Stuttgart)
TITLE: Specifictiy, Referentiality and Discourse Prominence
WHEN: May 14, Friday, 3PM-4:30PM
WHERE: TBA, probably 32-D461

There are various notions of specificity, ranging from Fodor & Sag’s (1982) referentiality view to Givon’s discourse prominence view. Ionin (2006) discusses the relation between these two perspectives by analyzing the English indefinite this. She represents indefinite this as a referential operator in the sense of Fodor & Sag (1982), but also adds the felicitous condition of “noteworthiness”. She notes that there is an open question how these two properties of indefinite this are linked to the discourse property of signaling high prominence in a discourse.

The talk will address this open question by analyzing the two German equivalents of the English indefinite this: the indefinite demonstrative dies and the form so’n, which is composed of do ‘such’ and the reduced and enclitic form ‘n of the indefinite article ein. Both forms are primarily used in informal registers and signal discourse prominence, i.e. that more will be said about the referent introduced by these expressions. First, I argue that these two forms are in fact two indefinite articles in German; I present some results from corpus searches that provide evidence for their discourse function, and I report on a subtle difference in their referential behavior under extensional and intensional operators. I suggest some new links between the referential properties and the discourse properties of these specific indefinite article in German and conclude with even more open questions.

1. Peter traf gestern eine Frau.
2. Peter traf gestern diese Frau.
3. Peter traf gestern so’ne Frau.
   Peter met yesterday a / this / such-a woman.

References
Fodor, Janet & Sag, Ivan 1982. Referential and Quantificational Indefinites. Linguistics and Philosophy 5, 355-398.
Givon, Talmy 1981. On the Development of the Numeral ‘one’ as an Indefinite Marker. Folia Linguistica Historia 2, 35-53.
Ionin, Tanja 2006. This is definitely specific: specificity and definiteness in article systems. Natural Language Semantics, 14, 175-234.

Michel DeGraff was in Haiti the week before last (April 25 — May 1st) with Professors Dale Joachim and Barry Vercoe from the Media Lab and with seven students from the new Media Lab class “New Media Projects For Haiti.” The students had four projects to further develop and test in Haiti:

1. “Uplifting expressions”: Theater, music, dance and craft as therapy for children’s post-traumatic stress disorder (Asha Martin and Clinton Scroggins)
2. Health education in post-earthquake Haiti (Amritaa Ganguly)
3. Low-cost water testing (Anila Sinha, Jess Kim and Kathy Li)
4. “Pedal Power”: Lost-cost system to produce electricity by pedaling (Marvin Arnold and Daryl Fairweather)

Two of the students (Jess Kim and Amritaa Ganguly) have blogged about their experiences in Haiti:

http://www.mitadmissions.org/JKim.shtml

http://amritaahaiti.blogspot.com/

Jessica Coon tells us that she will be a post-doc next year in Masha Polinsky’s language processing lab at Harvard. Congratulations, Jessica!

This Monday’s Phonology Circle presentation will be by Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade.

Speaker: Igor Yanovich and Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: Base priority effects in inflectional subparadigms: evidence from Ukrainian
Time: Monday 5/3, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

We present an analysis of stress in Ukrainian nouns that relies on two hypotheses about inflectional paradigms:

1. Paradigms have articulated internal structure: in the present case, the plural of Ukrainian nouns forms a distinct subparadigm from the singular. It is separately evaluated by paradigm uniformity constraints (e.g. McCarthy 2005). It also functions as a distinct unit with respect to paradigm contrast constraints (Kenstowicz 2005).
2. Relations between subparadigms are directional: some subparadigms have priority relative to others in a way that is comparable to the base priority effect obtaining between bases and their derivatives.

In derivational paradigms, base priority refers to the observation that the identity between bases and derivatives is obtained by adjusting the derivative’s shape, while keeping base properties constant (cf. Benua 1999). In a comparable way, we observe that when stress is computed in the inflectional paradigms of Ukrainian nouns, the entire singular subparadigm has priority: stress in the plural forms is adjusted to satisfy conditions of stem identity (within the set of plural forms) and stem distinctness (between the singular and the plural). By contrast, stress in the singular forms is computed as if the plural doesn’t exist. We suggest that the entire set of singular forms functions as a collective base for the plural subparadigm (see also Albright 2005 for related proposals).

Upcoming talks:

• 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

Please join us for the penultimate meeting of Syntax Square this semester. Kirill Shklovsky will lead the discussion with a report from GLOW on “Switch Reference as an Interface Conspiracy,” by Stefan Keine (Leipzig).

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

Gillian Gallagher will have a public dissertation defense this Friday, May 7, at 11 am in 32-155. The defense will begin with a presentation, which will be under an hour. There will be cherry scones and juice. Please come!

Title: The perceptual basis of laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions
Time: Friday, May 7, 11AM
Place: 32-155

The two main arguments in this dissertation are 1. That laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions are restrictions on the perceptual strength of contrasts between roots, as opposed to restrictions on laryngeal configurations in isolated roots, and 2. That laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions are restrictions on auditory, as opposed to articulatory, features.

Both long-distance laryngeal dissimilation, where roots may have one but not two laryngeally marked stops (MacEachern 1999), and assimilation, where stops in a root must agree in laryngeal features (Hansson 2001; Rose and Walker 2004) are given a unified account based on a grammatical pressure to neutralize indistinct contrasts. The contrast based analysis is supported by the empirical finding that certain non-adjacent sounds interact with one another in perception. Specifically, the perception of a contrast in ejection or aspiration is degraded in roots with another ejective or aspirate as compared to roots with another plain stop (e.g. the pair k’ap’i-kap’i is more confusable than the pair k’api-kapi). Roots that are minimally distinguished by having one vs. two laryngeally marked stops are confusable with one another (e.g. k’ap’i is confusable with kap’i), and thus languages may avoid having both types of forms. The analysis integrates long-distance phonological neutralizations with analyses of local neutralizations based on phonetic cues and contrast strength (Flemming 1995, 2004, 2006; Steriade 1997), showing that both local and non-local phenomena are driven by grammatical constraints against perceptually indistinct contrasts.

The interaction between ejectives and aspirates in Quechua provides evidence for auditory features. These two articulatorily disparate sounds pattern together in the cooccurrence restrictions of Quechua, showing that some feature must pick them out as a class. It is argued that ejectives and aspirates may pattern together because they share long voice onset time. It is shown that defining laryngeally marked stops based on their language specific auditory properties correctly accounts both for ejective-aspirate interactions in Quechua and also for the interaction between ejectives and implosives in Hausa and Tz’utujil. The results of a perception experiment further support the status of long VOT as a property to which the grammar refers.

Speaker: Danny Fox (MIT)
Time: Friday, May 7, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (Stata Center)
Title: Negative Islands and Maximization Failure

The goal of this talk is to discuss various questions that arise in the context of attempts to reduce a class of weak islands to Maximization Failure (Fox and Hackl 2006, Fox 2007, Abrusan 2007, in press, Nouwen 2008, Abrusan and Spector 2008, in press, Shimoyama and Schwarz 2010). The basic idea that guides these attempts is that the the relevant islands arise from a maximality requirement that cannot be met on semantic/logical grounds.

The questions we will discuss pertain to the possible sources of this Maximization Failure (MF). According to Fox and Hackl, the source in certain degree constructions is the density of degree domains. However, in later work, it was pointed out that some of the results could be derived if alternative sources of MF are postulated, and Abrusan and Spector (A&S) present arguments for one specific alternative that I will be focusing on (quantification over degree intervals).

The more specific goals of this talk are the following: (a) to argue that density is necessary despite various observations made by A&S that seem to argue for intervals, and (b) to argue that there is yet another source for MF beyond those identified in recent literature and that this source for MF is responsible for another weak island observed in Spector (2008), and could also account for A&S’s observations.

MIT will be represented at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 41), held in Toronto May 6-8, by two students. Claire Halpert will present a paper entitled “Zulu counterfactuals in and out of conditionals” and Patrick Jones will present “Glide formation does not neutralize an ATR contrast in Kinande.”