Whamit!

Speaker: Young Ah Do (MIT)
Title: Foreignness, Word Structure and Lexical Stratum
Time: Monday 10/25, 5pm, 32-D831

In many languages, loanwords undergo a different set of phonological rules from native items: loanwords sometimes allow a subset of the structures present in native phonology (Kenstowicz 2005), they might allow a superset (Inkelas, Orgun, and Zoll 1997) or two can be disjunctive (Jurgec 2009). All such phenomena could be due to (a) unfamiliarity of loanwords or (b) formal marking as a member of distinctive lexical stratum.

I support hypothesis (b), showing a Korean case in which phonological behavior of loanwords and native items with similar frequency behave differently: loanwords are more resistant to alternations. Interestingly, a lexical strata effect is found only from morphologically complex words: foreign compounds resist native alternations, but lexicalized monomorphemic items don’t (e.g. ‘sun light’ ? [s?n lait] vs. ‘lonely’ ? [lolli]). To analyze this result, I separate indexed Faithfulness constraints (Itô and Mester 1995, Pater 2000) into two components—Input-Output and Output-Output correspondence constraints.

In some cases, however, compounds participate in native alternations; (1) when native inflectional suffix is added (e.g. ‘sun light-i(nom)’ ? s?l lais-i) and (2) when a native morpheme is at the right edge of compound (e.g. back madang ‘yard’ ? ba? mada? vs. c?k ‘red’ napkin ? c?k nap?kin). Assuming that (1) an inflectional suffix is head of the word and (2) Korean posits head of compound at the right edge of the word, I argue the head is always relevant in determining the stratal behavior. Notably, the only constraints where head makes a difference are OO-F constraints, so processes are free to apply within foreign monomorphemic words.

Upcoming talks:
Nov 1: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)
Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)
Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks
Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT)
Title: Constraints on Possible Meanings
Time: Tues 10/26, 12pm
Location: 46-3189

The meanings of natural language determiners can be understood as relations between sets (Barwise and Cooper, 1981). It has since been noted that natural language determiners are crucially constrained in the set relations they can express. One influential formalization of this typological pattern is Conservativity (Keenan and Stavi, 1986), a constraint taken to universally hold for all denotations of natural language determiners. In this talk we propose a second universal generalization over possible denotations in natural language, which we term Myopia. We show that this constraint not only excludes many denotations of natural language determiners previously excluded by Conservativity, but also generalizes to predicates of all other lexical categories, including nouns, verbs, adpositions and adjectives. We go on to present evidence from an on-line artificial determiner learning study (N=217), showing that both Conservativity and Myopia are active in determiner learning. Conservative determiners are easier to acquire than non-conservative myopic determiners, which in turn are easier to acquire than non-conservative non-myopic determiners providing further evidence that absolute typological universals may have different relative impact on language learning.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week. Patrick Grosz will be leading a discussion on the link between the syntax of utterances (specifically focusing on their left periphery) and their use in conversation. This discussion will touch on the work of Rizzi (1997, 2001), Haegeman (2003, 2006, 2010) and Coniglio (2009).

Speaker: Patrick Grosz
Title: Where is the Force?
Time: Tuesday, October 26, 1-2PM
Place: 32-D461

mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) recently presented “On the scope and position of Mandarin sentence-final éry?” at the first Rencontres d’Automne de Linguistique Formelle at the University of Paris 8. The talk is similar to his previous talks on the Mandarin “only” word, but with a slightly different scope and position.

MIT linguists will be out in force at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL VII), held at USC this weekend, October 29th-31st. The following students are on the program:

• Alya Asarina and Jeremy Hartman: ‘Null nouns and the locus of agreement in Uyghur subordinate clauses’

• Yusuke Imanishi: ‘Another Missing Link – A View from Right Dislocation in Japanese’

• Junya Nomura: ‘Adpositional comparatives in Japanese’

• Alya Asarina: ‘Case and meaning in Uyghur nominalized clauses’ (alternate)

Speakers: Filomena Sandalo & Charlotte Galves, UNICAMP (Brazil)
Title: Grammaticalization of enclisis in the history of Portuguese
Time: Thursday, October 28, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

In the history of European Portuguese, from the 16th to the 19th century, clitic-placement underwent significant changes with respect to the environments where enclisis obligatorily occurs. In this paper, we argue that the architecture of grammar proposed in Distributed Morphology (Embick and Noyer, 2001, 2006) can shed a light on this change. We analyze enclisis as the result of post-syntactic rules and we argue that the change involved a shift in the operation which displaces the clitic from Prosodic Inversion to Lowering, accounting for the different environments where enclisis obligatorily occurs across time. Moreover, the employment of such a view of the architecture of grammar allows us to interpret this shift as a case of grammaticalization, thus broadening the treatment of this concept in the framework of Generative Grammar. The traditional schema of grammaticalization includes two different moments (cf. the discussion in Askedaal, 2008). The first one has to do with the change in categorization accompanied by semantic bleaching. The second one consists of further steps of phonological dependency and reduction. Roberts and Roussou (2003) propose a generative account of the first moment in terms of the emergence of new functional words out of lexical words. In their approach, grammaticalization is associated with structural simplification, which they argue is a natural mechanism of change. Here we consider the next step. We show that the framework of Distributed Morphology, which proposes a view of Grammar Architecture that models up the articulation between Syntax, Morphology and Phonology, allows us to define a path of grammaticalization in terms of whether the rules responsible for the movement of morphemes access syntactic structures or not.

Join us for this week’s Phonology Circle Presentation:

Speaker: Ari Goldberg (Tufts University)
Title: Gradient effects of consonant similarity and morphological boundaries
Time: Monday 10/18, 5pm, 32-D831

Functionalist accounts of the OCP propose that the dispreference for similar and repeated items originates in the limitations of the production and perception systems. The difficulty processing repeated elements in sequence (Berg, 1998; Frish, 2004) and the biomechanical effort needed to articulate homorganic consonants (Walter, 2007) are hypothesized to over time lead to an underrepresentation of words with repeated/similar consonants. I argue that an important prediction of any functionalist account of the OCP is that the severity of the effect should decrease across morpheme boundaries. Psycholinguistic theories hold that morphemes are processed relatively independently of each other (e.g., Dell, 1986) and it has been shown that articulatory gestures are less tightly coupled across morpheme boundaries (Cho, 2001). This means that sequences that are dispreferred on serial order or articulatory grounds within morphemes may be easier to process when present across morphemes. I report oral reading reaction time data from the English Lexicon Project that support this claim. Significant inhibitory effects of consonant similarity are found both tautomorphemically and heteromorphemically, with a weaker effect across morpheme boundaries than within. Within multimorphemic words, the effect is modulated by the likelihood that the word is processed via whole-word vs. compositional routes (Hay, 2003). Suffixed words that are more “multimorphemic” show weaker effects of consonant similarity than suffixed words that are more “monomorphemic”. The implications of these findings for typological patterns in heteromorphemic and tautomorphemic environments will be discussed.

Upcoming talks:
Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)
Nov 1: Sverre Stausland Johnsen (Harvard)
Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)
Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks
Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square: NELS Edition! Bronwyn Bjorkman and Alya Asarina will both be giving practice talks for their upcoming NELS presentations. Abstracts can be found here.

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman
Title: A Syntactic Correlate of Semantic Asymmetries in Clausal Coordination

Speaker: Alya Asarina
Title: Neutrality vs. Ambiguity in Resolution by Syncretism: Experimental Evidence and Consequences

Time: Tuesday, October 19, 1-2PM
Place: 32-D461

WHO: Luka Crnic
WHAT: Pragmatic enrichment and concessive scalarity
WHEN: October 20, 1:30PM-3:00PM
WHERE: 32-D831

I am going to present an analysis of “concessive even” that avoids some of the issues that have plagued previous proposals. The account derives the appropriate meanings and explains “concessive even“‘s distribution. A tentative gesture is made towards understanding the distribution of some other scalar particles. Some questions are left open. The talk will be 20 min.

Rachel Walker, University of Southern California
Title: “Target scope in harmony processes.”
Thursday, October 21 at 4:00pm
Location: TBA
Abstract: click here

Omer Preminger recently gave an invited talk at the Yale Syntax Colloquium, titled “The Origins of Obligatoriness: Evidence from Agreement Failures”.

Youngah Do recently presented a talk at JK20 (20th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference) at Oxford University, with the title “When focal cues are conflicting: Focus perception in Korean”

In addition, Igor Yanovich presented a talk entitled “Making Smarter Contenders?” last weekend at NECPhon 4 (the Northeast Computational Phonology Circle) at UMass Amherst.

Please remember to send announcements about upcoming and recent presentations to whamit@mit.edu for inclusion in future editions!

Speaker: Rachel Walker (University of Southern California)
Title: Locality, Scope, and Sour Grapes Effects in Vowel Harmony
Date: Friday, October 22, 2010
Time: 3:30-5:00PM
Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE NEW ROOM)

Harmony that operates only when it reaches a specific destination, such as a word boundary or other landmark, presents a “sour grapes” effect (Padgett 1995). Unbounded harmony does not show this characteristic, because it can be partial in the domain in which it operates (Wilson 2003). This property of unbounded harmony presents an important test for theories of harmony in different frameworks. Wilson has characterized unbounded harmony as, in effect, local iterative spreading, a phenomenon that is challenging to replicate in the classic version of Optimality Theory but straightforward to generate using autosegmental rules.

This paper investigates the apparent benefits of local iterative spreading through an exploration of systems with nonlocal target scope: an unbounded round harmony in Baiyinna Orochen and a bounded height harmony in the central Veneto dialect. These patterns each show nonlocal target scope but harmony proceeds locally, that is, the operation of harmony between adjacent syllables can depend on information about vowels in nonadjacent syllables. These patterns point to a need to distinguish locality of assimilation from locality for target scope, a separation that presents difficulty for local iterative spreading rules as well as for any constraint that enforces harmony only over adjacent trigger-target pairs. These phenomena call for harmony constraints with nonlocal scope, readily implemented using the global evaluation that is intrinsic to OT.

The bounded pattern of central Veneto, which singles out a stressed target, also bears on a serial version of OT. In this system, unstressed vowels on the path to a stressed vowel undergo harmony as incidental participants but not otherwise. This suggests a need for a fell-swoop derivation, where a stressed vowel target and an intervening unstressed vowel undergo harmony at once rather than in successive steps. However, a derivation of this kind is not generated in the standard theory of Harmonic Serialism (e.g. McCarthy 2008a,b, 2009).

In conclusion, the harmony systems under study highlight empirical advantages of global evaluation and harmony-driving constraints with nonlocal scope rather than a local iterative procedure for harmony. Although harmony-driving constraints with global scope predict certain unattested systems, approaches with only local scope are too restrictive, signaling the need for a fresh look at issues of typological overgeneration.

MIT is well represented at NELS 41, held this weekend (10/23-24) at the University of Pennsylvania. Noam Chomsky will deliver the keynote address, entitled “Should we study Language? If so, how?” The following students and recent alumni will be giving talks:

• Alya Asarina: Neutrality vs. Ambiguity in Resolution by Syncretism: Experimental Evidence and Consequences
  
• Bronwyn Bjorkman: A Syntactic Correlate of Semantic Asymmetries in Clausal Coordination
  
• Seth Cable (UMass): The Optionality of EPP in Dholuo
  
• Jessica Coon (Harvard) and Omer Preminger: Transitivity in Chol: A New Argument for the Split-VP Hypothesis
  
• Luka Crnic: Pragmatic Enrichment and Concessive Scalarity
  
• Maria Giavazzi (ENS): Getting Rid of Positional Faithfulness in Stressed Positions: The Phonetic Underpinnings of Prosodic Conditioning
  

Speaker: Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: Constraint Interactions derive Morphomic Identity
Time: Thursday 10/21, 12:30—1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Morphological paradigms sometimes display systematic identity (or syncretism) between cells that share no syntactic properties. Such phenomena are widespread enough to have generated new descriptive technologies: e.g. the rule of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 2001), the morphome (Aronoff 1992) and the thematic space (Bonami and Boyer 2001, for stem syncretism). All these devices were proposed in the belief that any pair of paradigm cells is as likely as any other to have identical exponents.

I show that syncretism is frequently predictable when phonology is factored in: cells that are on the surface strictly identical, without syntactic reason, are the ones that whose underlying representations single them out as being very similar, in some local respect. Familiar data showing this is the obligatory identity between English past tense and past participles when both end in t or d (sat/sat; rid/rid; built/built; burnt/burnt; said/said). There is variation, but no paradigm internal contrast between forms like burnt~burned or lit~lighted. Pairs not ending in t/d tend to be distinct in strong verbs (wrote/written; swelled/swollen; dove/dived) showing that it’s the local similarity between final alveolar stops that triggers syncretism. What we need then is a mechanism that generates global identity between forms that are underlyingly distinct but similar, i.e. hypothetical inputs like burnt/burned.

Most of this talk is about the Latin syncretism that inspired the morphome (Aronoff 1994; Matthews 1974) and the related hypothesis of an autonomous morphological component. The stem of many Latin deverbal derivatives (e.g. agent nouns like laudator ‘praiser’) is always identical to that of the passive-perfect participle (laudatus ‘praised’). I show that local similarity is the critical factor here too, in ways reminiscent of the English case. The Latin pattern is more revealing because stem syncretism violates here an otherwise general condition linking the referent of a deverbal derivative to the argument structure of verb forms containing the same stem as the derivative: if the latter are passive, the former must refer to a passive subject. The full picture suggests exactly the opposite of Aronoff’s conclusions: syncretism is not arbitrary, and cannot be analyzed in an autonomous component. Rather, it involves an interaction of phonological constraints seeking identity of similar forms with conflicting preferences on the proper exponence of syntactic structures.

Speaker: Jessica Coon (Harvard) & Omer Preminger (MIT)
Title: Transitivity in Chol: A New Argument for the Split VP Hypothesis
Time: Thursday 10/14, 12:30—1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

In this paper we provide a new argument for the Split VP Hypothesis (Bowers 1993, Kratzer 1996, i.a.), the idea that external arguments are base-generated outside the syntactic projection of the stem, in vP. The new evidence comes from the different behavior of stems with and without complements in the Mayan language Chol. While our argument shares certain similarities with Kratzer 1996, the data we examine show a clearer correlation between the following properties: (i) projecting an external argument; (ii) assigning Case to the object; (iii) determining the categorical status of the stem as verb.

There is no Phonology Circle this week, due to the Columbus Day holiday. We’ll resume next week, with a talk by Ari Goldberg, from Tufts University.

Upcoming talks:
Oct 18: Ari Goldberg (Tufts)
Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)
Nov 1: Sverre Stauland (Harvard)
Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)
Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks
Dec 6: Suyeon Yun (MIT)

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

BCS SPECIAL LANGUAGE SEMINAR
TUESDAY, OCT. 12, 10:00 AM, 46-4062
Vera Demberg, University of Edinburgh
A Broad-Coverage Model of Prediction in Human Sentence Processing
Host: Ted Gibson

Recent psycholinguistic experiments have provided evidence for prediction in human language comprehension. However, none of the current sentence processing theories provide explicit mechanisms for the modeling the prediction process. Furthermore, two previous theories of sentence processing, Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) and Surprisal, have been argued to capture different aspects of processing difficulty. In this talk, I propose a new theory of sentence processing which incorporates a mechanism for modeling the prediction and verification processes in human language understanding, and which integrates aspects from Surprisal and DLT integration cost into a unified framework.

The theory is implemented based on a Psycholinguistically motivated Tree Adjoining Grammar (PLTAG), a variant of TAG that allows for strictly incremental parsing. I will briefly talk about the design of PLTAG and the algorithm for the incremental parser.

I evaluate the validity of the sentence processing theory in its PLTAG implementation on a range of specific psycholinguistic phenomena and show that it captures aspects of processing difficulty which previous sentence processing theories could not capture simultaneously. A theory of language processing in humans should however not only work in an experimentally designed environment, but should also have explanatory power for naturally occurring language. I therefore also evaluate the sentence processing theory on the eye-tracking records of newspaper texts, and show that it can explain a significant amount of the variance in the eye-movement data, and that it does so better than either Surprisal or DLT integration cost.

Speaker: Tue Trinh
Title: Luis Vicente: “The syntax of heads and phrases - A study of verb (phrase) fronting.”
Time: Tuesday, 10/12, 1-2PM
Place: 32-D461

Date: Friday, October 15, 2010
Time: 3:30-5:00PM
Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE NEW ROOM)
Speaker: Vera Gribanova (Stanford University)
Title: On diagnosing ellipsis and argument drop: the view from Russian

Investigations of constructions that are the result of putative ellipsis commonly face a trying analytical obstacle: the pronounced surface string can be the result of more than one logically possible derivation. These alternative derivations might involve a different underlying structure, and may not involve genuine ellipsis at all (see, for example, Kizu 1997 and Merchant 1998 on sluicing vs. pseudosluicing). The question of whether ellipsis is genuinely at work has famously been a problem in the analysis of structures that strand a finite verb, leaving its internal arguments and adjuncts unpronounced. One analytical possibility involves Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VVPE), in which the inflected verb escapes an ellipsis site and is pronounced, while its internal arguments and adjuncts remain in the VP and are elided. The alternative - and arguably simpler - analysis of VVPE-like structures involves argument drop of the internal arguments of the verb.

Two properties of the controversy about VVPE-like structures in argument drop languages are i) that the evidence distinguishing the two alternatives is delicate and subtle (Otani and Whitman, 1991; Hoji, 1998; Kim, 1999; Doron, 1991; Goldberg, 2005a) , and ii) that the resulting picture sometimes involves the claim that both strategies are available for the derivation of one surface string in one language (Goldberg, 2005a,b). In this talk I examine similar constructions in Russian (1), of which both these observations hold.

1. Eto daže esli ja vody v rot naberu?
   that even if I water.GEN in mouth collect.1SG.FUT
   ‘Is that even if I fill my mouth with water?’
   
   Daže esli i naberete. Da ved’ ne naberete, ne naberete že!
   even if and collect.2SG yes but NEG collect.2SG NEG collect.2SG EMPH
   ‘Even if you fill (it with water). But you won’t fill (it with water), you won’t fill (it with water)!’ (Ju. O. Dombrovskij. Fakul’tet nenužnyx veščej, čast’ 2, 1978)
   

I argue that argument drop and VVPE are both available as strategies for deriving (1), and draw on evidence from a judgment questionnaire to demonstrate that object drop is not acceptable inside islands in Russian (whereas VVPE is). Distinguishing the two possibilities in this manner has the beneficial consequence of shedding light on a constellation of heretofore unanalyzed and unknown facts about Russian argument drop, such as:

• that Russian subject and object drop have asymmetric syntactic licensing conditions;
• that the possibility of A-bar extraction parallels the possibility of object drop across a series of syntactic constructions in Russian.

The investigation concludes with a discussion of evidence from verb (mis-)matching in Russian VVPE-like constructions, arguing that this evidence is not a reliable diagnostic for genuine ellipsis in such cases.

References
Doron, Edit. 1991. V-movement and VP ellipsis. Unpublished ms.
Goldberg, Lotus. 2005a. Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis: A Cross-Linguistic Study. PhD thesis, McGill University.
Goldberg, Lotus. 2005b. On the verbal identity requirement in VP ellipsis. Unpublished ms., Presented at the Identity in Ellipsis workshop at UC Berkeley.
Hoji, Hajime. 1998. Null objects and sloppy identity in Japanese. Linguistic Inquiry 28:127—152.
Kim, Soowon. 1999. Sloppy/strict identity, empty objects, and NP ellipsis. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 8:255—284.
Kizu, Mika. 1997. Sluicing in Wh-in-situ languages. In K. Singer, R. Eggert, and G. Anderson (Eds.), Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 33, 231—244.
Merchant, Jason. 1998. ‘Pseudosluicing’: Elliptical clefts in Japanese and English. In A. Alexiadou, N. Fuhrhop, P. Law, and U. Kleinhenz (Eds.), ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 88—112. Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft.
Otani, Kazuyo, and John Whitman. 1991. V-raising and VP-ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 22:345—358.

Join us on 10/4 for a presentation by Kirill Shklovsky on his recent work on Tseltal intonation.

Speaker: Kirill Shklovsky (MIT)
Title: Tseltal Prosody: Un Primer Acercamiento
Time: Monday 10/4, 5pm, 32-D831

In this talk I will present (in English) some beginnings of an analysis of Tseltal (Mayan) prosody. In particular I will argue that intonational phrases in unmarked declarative sentences are marked by high (or rising) boundary tones, and that pre-verbal DPs in this verb-initial language project an intonational phrase boundary. I will consider some possible algorithms for assigning tones to syllables, and time permitting, we will discuss the prosody of wh- and yes/no questions in this language.

Upcoming talks:
Oct 18: Ari Goldberg (Tufts)
Oct 25: Youngah Do (MIT)
Nov 1: Sverre Stauland (Harvard)
Nov 8: Natalie Boll-Avetisyan (Potsdam)
Nov 15: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Nov 29: RUMMIT Practice talks

You can view the current, up-to-date version of the schedule here (click ‘agenda’ to see the schedule as a list), or subscribe via iCal here.

Please join us for Syntax Square this week:

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: Adjunct Infinitives and Parasitic Gaps in Dutch
Time: Tuesday, 10/5, 1-2PM
Place: 32-D461

This talk attempts to illustrate the value of using a more extensive classification of different adjunct types, drawing on Huettner’s (1989) survey of English infinitival adjuncts. To achieve this, a puzzle in the distribution of parasitic gaps in Dutch across adjunct types is presented. On the basis of independent properties of different adjuncts, it is argued that adjunct infinitives occupy at least three distinct positions in the Dutch clause. Under standard assumptions about parasitic gaps, this proposal is shown to derive the right distributional pattern. The relationship between this analysis and the analysis of Dutch object scrambling is then briefly discussed.

If you are interested in presenting in Syntax Square this semester, please contact Claire Halpert (halpert@mit.edu) or Natasha Ivlieva (ivlieva@mit.edu).

Speaker: Peter Graff (MIT)
Title: A Cross-linguistic Investigation of the OCP-Place
Time: Thursday 10/7, 12:30—1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

We expand the seminal work of Frisch et al. (2004) by presenting a large scale investigation of place-driven consonant co-occurrence restrictions (OCP-Place) in Arabic, Amharic, Aymara, Ch’ol, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Javanese, Muna, Quechua, Tagalog, Turkish and Zulu utilizing the framework of the Generalized Linear Model. We propose a constraint set that successfully accounts for OCP-Place and identity effects in all languages. A markedness-based account of the cross-linguistic dispreference for co-occurring similar consonants sharing place features and preference for co-occurring identical consonants is presented. Concretely, it will be shown that OCP-Place typology can be accounted for by a set of probabilistic constraints that penalize featural co-occurrence of similar consonant pairs according to the Similarity Metric of Natural Classes (Frisch et al., 2004) weighted depending on the major place feature they share (Similarity-LAB, Similarity-COR, Similarity-DOR; contra FBP, who propose that the relative similarity of consonants sharing different major place features follows from the organization of the consonant inventory of the language). We also show that identity effects are best accounted for by postulating a violable markedness constraint penalizing non-identical pairs of consonants (Identity; cf BeIdentical; MacEachern, 1997) but note that the domain of this constraint must crucially be restricted to the first and second position of a consonant template.

Jessie Little Doe Baird (SM, MIT Linguistics 2000), of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, has received a MacArthur “genius grant”. Background info on Baird appears in a 2008 article in the Technology Review. There is a nice video prepared by the MacArthur Foundation, a Boston Globe article, a couple of paragraphs in an MIT News item, which includes quotes from Norvin Richards, who continues Ken Hale’s work with the project: http://web.mit.edu/norvin/www/wopanaak.html. Here are Norvin’s remarks in full:

This award recognizes many years of enormously hard work in pursuit of a dream. It’s hard to imagine a better person to receive this grant! I joined the project in 1999 when I joined the faculty here; at that point, joining the project meant meeting regularly with Jessie and Ken in Ken’s office, poring over 17th-century Wôpanâak texts to try to understand what they could teach us about the grammar and vocabulary of the language. I am honored to still be part of the project today, working together with Jessie on a dictionary, a textbook, and a variety of other educational materials. Today, the project offers language classes at a variety of levels, staffed by Jessie and by her former language students, culminating in a summer Immersion Camp at which only Wôpanâak is spoken. Children are beginning to acquire the language as well, including Jessie’s own daughter Mae Alice Baird, raised by Jessie and her husband Jason entirely in Wôpanâak.

The world is currently in the middle of a massive wave of language extinction. Some linguists estimate that 90% of the world’s languages will vanish in the coming century. The indigenous languages of America are particularly hard hit. Against that backdrop, the success of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project is a rare piece of good news. If Jessie succeeds, she will have shown that for languages, ‘death’ is not permanent; with enough dedication and hard work, as long as a language is sufficiently well documented, we can hope to bring it back to life.