Whamit!

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.