Whamit!

Speaker: Jongho Jun (Seoul National University)
Title: Speakers’ knowledge of alternation is uni-directional: evidence from Seoul Korean verb paradigms
Time: Tuesday 4/26, 5-6pm, 32-D831

In this talk, I will address the issue of whether and how speakers internalize lexical statistical patterns. I have investigated speakers’ responses when they are faced with unpredictability in allomorph selection by conducting a wug test on Seoul Korean verb paradigms. The test was performed in two directions. In forward formation test, the pre-vocalic base and pre-consonantal non-base forms were the stimulus and response respectively whereas in back formation test, the stimulus-response relation was switched.

The results show patterns approximating statistical patterns in Seoul Korean verb lexicon, thus confirming the lexical frequency matching reported in many previous studies. However, it seems that speakers do not internalize lexical patterns in the way suggested in most previous studies. It has been argued or assumed that different lexical statistics are usually active in forward and back formations since different sets of (non)alternation classes compete in different directions. This assumption has been adopted by mainstream phonological theories, whether rule or constraint-based, positing underlying representations to explain alternation.

Contrary to these conventional arguments and assumptions, the present study shows that lexical frequencies relevant to the forward formation are relatively consistent with the results of both forward and back formation tests. Lexical frequencies which have been considered active in back formation play almost no role in explaining test results. This observation can be understood only under the single base hypothesis (Albright 2002, 2005, 2008) in which only forward, not back, formation rules are in principle available to speakers.

Upcoming talks:
May 3: Nina Topintzi
May 5 11am-12pm Shin Ishihara ***** NOTE SPECIAL TIME (location TBA)
May 10: 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.

Speaker: Sarah Ouwayda
Time: Thursday, April 28, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461
Title: Systematic Optional Non-Agreement in Lebanese Arabic

Abstract:

I look at two cases of optional non-agreement in Lebanese Arabic (LA), an otherwise agreement-rich language. First, I look at optional non-agreement in number marking on adjectives, verbs, and pronouns, following cardinals and quantifiers in LA as well as in Armenian and Basque. In the presence of multiple agreeing elements, this optionality is restricted. I look at these restrictions and compare two syntactic accounts: one which assumes a traditional undivided DP structure, and explains the (non-)agreement facts by proposing an optional pluralizing functional node which triggers agreement and contributes semantic plurality; and another account which assumes a split DP (cf. Sportiche 2005), such that NP is in SpecV and raises to merge with the quantifier in D/Q somewhere higher in the clause. Assuming a split DP, the noun can theoretically compose with the verb either (i) before moving to the quantifier, resulting in non-agreement (and distributivity), or (ii) after moving to the quantifier, resulting in plural agreement. I also look at another case of optional non-agreement, this time in VSO word order. I argue that the two cases of non-agreement are different: in the former, the subject is known, and the agreement patterns depend on its properties, whereas in the latter, the subject may either be the apparent subject or an expletive subject.

WHO: Eva Csipak
WHAT: Drink doch a drop! German minimizer NPIs
WHEN: April 29, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D461 (note the change of room!)

ABSTRACT:

NPI licensing has puzzled several generations of linguists. While some of the data is now accounted for, I will present German minimizer data (e.g. einen Tropfen trinken ‘drink a drop’ that challenge the mainstream accounts. I will argue that there are contexts (such as in the scope of stressed Doch and some conditionals) where minimizers are only licensed if their compositional meaning is taken into account.

UPCOMING MEETINGS:

5/06 Alan Bale
5/13 Ciro Greco

On Saturday, April 30th at 2:15 pm, the Brattle Theater will be showing “We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân”. It’s a film about the revival of the Wampanoag language, featuring Macarthur-award-winning alumna Jessie Littledoe Baird, as well as Norvin and Noam.

[Norvin adds: “Several people have reminded me that the day the Wampanoag film is showing at the Brattle is precisely the day we’re having our open house. So, please come to the open house instead of going to the film…I’m now talking with the filmmaker about having a showing at MIT sometime.”]

As part of its 150th birthday celebration, MIT will be holding an Open House called Under the Dome on April 30, from 11:00am to 4:00pm. Even though MIT Linguistics is not located under a dome, strictly speaking - but instead resides in a multi-colored oddly-shaped Gehry-designed thingamajig, we are proud to be an important part of this great event!

Our contribution is called “Language and the Human Mind”. From 1:00pm-4:00pm, we will be welcoming the public to our department (32-D850) for a variety of language-themed activities. Here’s the description:

We will showcase a variety of examples of research on language and the human mind. Experts on some very interesting languages (such as the Mayan languages of Central America, and the Wampanoag language of the native inhabitants of Massachusetts) will be available to answer your questions about these languages and explain how they differ and do not differ from English.

You can also watch and learn about some experiments which were designed to reveal the unconscious mechanisms by which people generalize from examples when they learn a language, and by which fluent speakers produce and interpret speech and text.

We look forward to seeing you, your friends, your friends’ friends, and their families at our Open House!

On Tuesday, April 19, 4:30-6:30pm, Joan Maling (NSF) will be at Harvard speaking about sponsored research, grant proposals, and general issues of funding. She will give a presentation and will then take questions from the audience. Everyone is welcome. The meeting will be in Boylston Hall 303.

Speaker: Pritty Patel
Title: Complex Reflexives and the Principle A Problem
Time: Thursday, April 21, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

The abstract of the talk is available here (pdf).

WHO: Sarah Ouwayda
WHAT: Cardinals Without Plurality
WHEN: April 22, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Abstract:

Lebanese Arabic nouns display the singular-plural distinction morphologically, and adjectives and verbs typically show number agreement. Following cardinals larger than 10 in Lebanese Arabic, nouns are never plural-marked, and verbs and adjectives are optionally plural-marked. Notably, the presence vs. absence of plural marking on verbs and adjectives in this context is reflected semantically: When a verb is plural-marked, both a collective and a distributive reading are available, when it is not plural-marked, the collective reading is unavailable. Moreover, unmarked adjectives can modify only predicates of atomic individuals, and plural-marked ones can modify only predicates of pluralities. I take the absence of collective readings in unmarked cases to mean that, in this context, not just adjectives but verbs can compose semantically with the (non-plural) noun despite the presence of a cardinal, and that while a semantic plurality in this context may be dependent on the presence of some morpheme associated with plurality (e.g. cardinal or plural marking) the converse is not true for cardinals: the presence of a cardinal does not entail the presence of a semantic plurality. In other words, in Lebanese Arabic, not only do cardinals not compose with pluralities, but a noun phrase containing a cardinal, as a whole, is not necessarily semantically plural when composing with the verb. Based on these semantic effects, I argue that, if one assumes the noun phrase is an indivisible constituent, cardinals (at least cardinals larger than 10 in Lebanese Arabic) are best treated as being of type n (Zabbal 2005), rather than as modifiers (Ionin & Matushansky), determiners (e.g. Montague 1974), or predicates (Partee 1986).

Date: Friday, April 22, 2011
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141
Speaker: Junko Ito, University of California, Santa Cruz
Title: On the sources of (un)accentedness

ABSTRACT

Recent work on the distribution of unaccentedness in the lexicon of Tokyo Japanese has found a concentration of unaccented words in very specific areas, which are to a large extent defined in prosodic terms. Thus 4-mora words are in their majority unaccented in both native words and loans. On the other hand, 1-2 mora words and 5-mora words are in the majority accented in both native words and loans. For 3-mora words we find a split: They are in the majority unaccented in native words, but accented in loans. What is relatively clear is that unaccentedness is some kind of default for words of these specific shapes. What is less clear is the prosodic rationale of the particular distribution of (un)accentedness. The goal of the talk is to investigate the underlying structural reason, and to develop a formal account in optimality-theoretic phonology.

The regular pitch accent pattern of Tokyo Japanese (i.e., the pattern that is not lexically marked on a morpheme-by-morpheme basis, but emerges, e.g., in loanwords) is characterized by two constraints widely seen at work in other languages: Rightmostness (if the word has an accent, it should fall on the last foot in the word) and Nonfinality (the accent should not fall on a subconstituent that is final in the word). There is a clear tension between these two constraints, which is in many languages resolved by priority ranking (Nonfinality beats Rightmostness in cases of conflict). Seen in this light, unaccentedness is another way of dealing with the conflict: By not assigning an accent, the conflict disappears.

More precisely, the guiding idea is the following: For words of specific prosodic profiles (such as LLLL), unaccentedness is a default because it fulfills both Nonfinality and Rightmostness (no accent means no violation of either constraint). For other shapes, such as LLL and LLLLL, both constraints can be fulfilled even by accented words, so unaccentedness brings no prosodic benefit and is avoided since it violates the ?-Accent constraint requiring words to be accented. For short (one- to two-mora) words, a constraint calling for the construction of the “perfect prosodic word” (a word coextensive with a single foot) plays an important role. Other cases of perfect word effects to be presented include Serbian and Danish.

Several MIT-affiliated linguists presented at the 21st Colloquium on Generative Grammar, held April 7-9 in Seville, Spain.

• Pilar Barbosa: invited speaker, Partial pro-drop as null NP-anaphora
• Shigeru Miyagawa: invited speaker, Minimal Parametric Variation
• Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues: “Autonomous” Morphemes are Underlearned in Romance

Please join us for a special session of Syntax Square at 3pm this Tuesday with practice talks and practice posters for WCCFL. The preliminary schedule is as follows:

3.00pm-3.40pm (talk): Claire Halpert. Case, agreement, EPP and information structure: A quadruple-dissociation in Zulu.
3.40pm-4.00pm (poster): Alya Asarina. Constraints on Quantifier Lowering.
4.00pm-4.40pm (talk): Claire Halpert and Hadil Karawani. Aspect in counterfactuals from A(rabic) to Z(ulu).
4.40pm-5.00pm (poster): Bronwyn M. Bjorkman. The Crosslinguistic Defaultness of BE.
5.00pm-5.40pm (talk): Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine. Share to Compare: the Mandarin b? Comparative.
5.40pm-6.00pm (poster): Coppe van Urk. Visser’s Generalization: A Window into the Syntax of Control.

Date: Tuesday, April 19
Location: 32-D461

Peter Graff’s research on speech in the reality TV show Big Brother (with University of Chicago students Max Bane and Morgan Sonderegger) is covered in an article in Tableau, the magazine of the Division of the Humanities at UChicago.

Speaker: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (University of Manchester)
Title: Emergent Cyclicity?
Time: Tuesday 4/12, 5-6pm, 32-D831

Upcoming talks:
Apr 26: Jongho Jun
May 3: Nina Topintzi
May 10: 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 note the special time for a supernumerary meeting of the Phonology Circle on Wednesday this week!

Speaker: Young Ah Do
Title: Learning Alternations without Bias (WCCFL Practice Talk)
Time: Tuesday 4/13, 2-3pm, 32-D831

The abstract is here

Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Prosody and Phonological Phrasing in Chimwiini
Time: Wed 4/13, 5-7pm, Location TBA

In this paper we explore the fundamentals of the prosody and phrasing of sentences in Chimwiini, a Bantu language closely related to Swahili. We look first at the pattern of vowel length alternations at the word level, a system that Selkirk (1986) analyzed in terms of an abstract system of stress that features the Latin Stress Rule plus a principle that shortens unstressed vowels. Then we look at the system of accent which, in the default case assigns penult accent (H tone), but final accent in certain mostly morphosyntactic environements.

It turns out that both the stress system and the accent are phrasal in nature and work in exactly the same phrasal units. After demonstrating this point, we summarize the main principles that define the phrasing of a Chimwiini sentence: Align-XP R (align the right edge of a lexical maximal projection with the right edge of a phonological phrase) and Align-Foc R (align the right edge of a focused element with the right edge of a phonological phrase). We discusss briefly some phenomena that may be subcases of Align-Foc R or related to it in terms of the pattern of behavior.

The final portion of the paper explores how final accent is realized in Chimwiini sentences and suggests that the essential principle is this: final accent is located on the final syllable of any phonological phrase that contains the trigger of final accent. To make this principle succeed, it turns out that we need a third phrasing principle: Wrap-XP (all the elements in an XP must appear inside a single phonological phrase) plus recursive phrasing.

Speaker: Charles W. Kisseberth (Emeritus, University of Illinois and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Focus, Phrasing, and Prosody in Chimwiini
Time: Thursday, April 14, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

It has been known for forty years that sentences in Chimwiini (a Bantu language closely related to Swahili spoken originally in the town of Brava in southern Somalia, but now distributed over a diaspora that includes Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States) are exhaustively parsed into a sequence of phonological phrases. The evidence for this claim originally derived solely from the complicated pattern of vowel length alternations in the language. In brief, only one long vowel can occur in a phrase and it must be located in either the penult or the antepenult syllable of the phrase. An expected long vowel in any other syllable in the phrase must shorten. However, it is not necessary for a phrase to have a long vowel.

It has been known since Selkirk’s 1986 analysis that phrases in Chimwiini are formed in considerable part on the basis of syntactic structure, specifically by the principle that we shall label Align-XP R: the right edge of a lexical maximal projection is located at the right edge of a Phonological Phrase.

In 2001 it was discovered that “accent” (High tone) is a second, independent source of evidence for phrasing. The Chimwiini accentual system is simple, but with some complexity in how it plays itself out. There is one accent/H tone per phrase, and it resides on the last prosodic word of the phrase. Accent is on the penult syllable in the default case, but on the final syllable in the presence of a small number of final-accent triggers.

The accentual evidence also led to the discovery of a critical role for focus (or more generally emphasis) in phrasing. Specifically, the presence of focus on a word requires that this word be at the right edge of a phonological phrase (indeed, in some cases the requirement is stronger: the focused word must be final in any phonological phrase that contains it). A careful examination of the focus evidence (as well as certain phenomena that seem to have parallels to focus in terms of their behavior) provides quite subtle evidence about the issue of whether phrasing in Chimwiini is recursive or not. The focus evidence also turns out to have interesting ramifications for the intonation of yes-no questions in Chimwiini, a matter that we will look at briefly, time permitting.

The program for the 21st annual meeting of the conference “Semantics and Linguistic Theory” (SALT 21) — to be held at Rutgers May 20 - May 22, 2011 — was announced last week. Here are the speakers with MIT connections:

• Guillaume Thomas: Another and the Meaning of Measure Phrases
• Igor Yanovich: The Problem of Counterfactual de re Attitudes
• Micha Y. Breakstone, Alexandre Cremers, Danny Fox and Martin Hackl: Processing Degree Operator Movement: Implications for Semantics of Differentials
• Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo and Jesse Snedeker: An Experimental Investigation of Presupposition Projection in Conditional Sentences
• Peter Graff & Jeremy Hartman: Constraints on Predication [alternate; poster session]
• Patrick Grosz: A Uniform Analysis for Concessive “at least” and Optative “at least” [alternate]
• Luka Crni?: Evaluativity and Polarity [poster session]
• Hadas Kotek, Yasutada Sudo, Edwin Howard & Martin Hackl: Is Most More Than Half? [poster session]
• Ezra Keshet (PhD 2008): Contrastive Focus and Paycheck Pronouns [poster session]
• Pranav Anand (Phd 2006), Caroline Andrews, Donka Farkas, Kevin Reschke & Matthew Wagers: Quantification-triggered Inclusivization in Plural Interpretation [poster session]
• Luis Alonso-Ovalle & Paula Menendez-Benito (former visiting professors): Two Types of Epistemic Indefinites: Private Ignorance vs. Public Indifference [poster session]

This is a great showing at the most selective conference in the field.

WHO: Igor Yanovich
WHAT: On counterfactual de re attitudes
WHEN: April 15, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Descriptivist approaches to de re attitudes (Kaplan, Lewis, and numerous linguistic accounts) analyze a de re belief as involving a vivid description which 1) is true of the res in the actual world, and 2) uniquely identifies some object corresponding to the res in the epistemic alternatives of the believer.

This works fine for de re belief, but as Ninan 2010 points out, does not quite work for counterfactual attitudes. If Janell imagines the man she sees sneaking around (that is, Ortcutt) flying a kite in the Alpes, the description selecting Ortcutt in the actual world (namely, smth. like “the man Janell sees sneaking around”) will not be true of the man Janell imagines in her imagination worlds: he cannot be sneaking around and flying the kite at the same time, yet this is what simplistic descriptivist analysis predicts. Ninan himself tries to solve the problem, but his account does not quite succeed.

In the talk, I will give another account of counterfactual de re. The main idea is that the selection of the correspondent of the res in counterfactual attitude worlds is parasitic on the beliefs of the attitude holder.

UPCOMING TALKS:

4/22 Sarah Ouwayda
4/29 Eva Csipak
5/06 Alan Bale
5/11 Ciro Greco

First-year students Michelle Fullwood and Isaac Gould have been awarded NSF Graduate Fellowships. Congratulations, Michelle and Isaac!

Speaker: Rafael Nonato
Time: Monday, April 4, 11:30am-12:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Please join us for Syntax Square this coming Monday at 11:30am. Rafael Nonato is going to present the following paper:

Ritter, E. & Wiltschko, M. (2009) Varieties of INFL: TENSE, LOCATION, and PERSON. In: H. Broekhuis., J. Craenenbroeck, H. van Riemsdijk (eds.) Alternatives to Cartography. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

The paper is available here (pdf).

Speaker: Anne-Michelle Tessier (University of Alberta)
Title: Learning Restrictively in Harmonic Serialism
Time: Tuesday 4/5, 5-6pm, 32-D831

This talk provides an initial attempt at a theory of restrictive error-driven learning for Harmonic Serialism grammars (as originally proposed in Prince and Smolensky 1993, but more so McCarthy 2000, 2008ab, Pruitt 2010 and others.) Harmonic Serialism (HS) is a derivational variant of OT with some compelling advantages for capturing phonological typology — but if HS is going to be a good theory of phonology, it requires a good theory of HS learning. In the talk, I will present a view of how existing OT ranking algorithms (Prince and Tesar 2004, Hayes 2004) can be adapted fairly simply to learn HS grammars, including those rankings that are ‘hidden’ from the learner and arise crucially from the workings of HS. I also point out that to successfully learn hidden rankings, the HS learner must be guided to learn unfaithful URs in a particular way, providing an interesting and unresolved challenge.

Upcoming talks:
Apr 12: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero
Apr 13: WCCFL Practice Talks ***Time TBA
Apr 26: Jongho Jun
May 3: Nina Topintzi
May 10: 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.

This week, we have two LFRG meetings: one on Wednesday at 4pm, another one at the usual 2pm on Friday.

WHO: Alya Alsarina
WHAT: Constraints on Quantifier Lowering
WHEN: April 6, 4:00PM-5:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHO: Guillaume Thomas
WHAT: “Another” and the meaning of measure phrases
WHEN: April 8, 2:00PM-3:15PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Speaker: Edward Gibson
Title: The communicative basis of word order
Time: Thursday, April 7, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Some recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers of SOV languages, but also for speakers of SVO languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008) and Italian (Langus & Nespor, 2010). The gesture-production task therefore plausibly reflects default word order independent of native language. However, this leaves open the question of why there are so many SVO languages (41.2% of languages; Dryer, 2005). We propose that the high percentage of SVO languages cross-linguistically is due to communication pressures over a noisy channel (Jelinek, 1975; Brill & Moore, 2000; Levy et al. 2009). In particular, we propose that people understand that the subject will tend to be produced before the object (a near universal cross-linguistically; Greenberg, 1963). Given this bias, people will produce SOV word order – the word order that Goldin-Meadow et al. show is the default – when there are cues in the input that tell the comprehender who the subject and the object are. But when the roles of the event participants are not disambiguated by the verb, then the noisy channel model predicts either (i) a shift to the SVO word order, in order to minimize the confusion between SOV and OSV, which are minimally different (just one local swap apart); or (ii) the invention of case marking, which can also disambiguate the roles of the event participants. We test the predictions of this hypothesis and provide support for it using gesture experiments in English, Japanese and Korean. We also provide evidence for the noisy channel model in language understanding.

April is a busy month for MIT Linguistics: In addition to CLS, mentioned last week, a number of students, faculty, and alumni of the department will also be at the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics at the University of Arizona, April 22-24. Faculty member Norvin Richards and alumnus Tom Bever (PhD 1967) will be giving plenary talks, and the program includes talks and posters by:

• Alya Asarina: “Constraints on Quantifier Lowering” (poster)
• Bronwyn M. Bjorkman: “The Crosslinguistic Defaultness of BE” (poster)
• Micha Breakstone (current visitor), Alexandre Cremers (former visitor), Danny Fox, and Martin Hackl: “Processing Degree Operator Movement: Implications for the Analysis of Differentials”
• Jessica Coon (PhD 2010) and Omer Preminger: “Towards a Unification of Person Splits”
• Luka Crni?: “How to get ‘even’ with imperatives”
• Young Ah Do: “Learning alternations without bias”
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine: “Share to Compare: the Mandarin b? Comparative”
• Claire Halpert: “Case, agreement, EPP and information structure: a quadruple-dissociation in Zulu”
• Claire Halpert and Hadil Karawani (former visitor): “Aspect in counterfactuals from A(rabic) to Z(ulu)”
• Natalia Ivlieva: “Agreement with Disjunction” (poster)
• Hadas Kotek, Yasutada Sudo, Edwin Howard, and Martin Hackl: “A superlative reading for most_prop”
• Mikko Kupula (current visitor): “The role of Spec,vP in clitic doubling” (poster)
• Giorgi Magri (PhD 2009): “HG has no computational advantages over OT: towards a new approach to computational OT”
• Ana Arregui, Maria Luisa Rivero, and Andres Pablo Salanova (PhD 2007): “The construction of imperfectivity in Mebengokre” (poster)
• Erik Schoorlemmer (current visitor) and Tanja Temmerman: “Head Movement as a PF?phenomenon: evidence from identity under ellipsis”
• Shoichi Takahashi (PhD 2006): “Anatomy of tough movement”
• Coppe van Urk: “Visser’s Generalization: A Window Into the Syntax of Control” (poster)
• Susanne Wurmbrand (PhD 1998): “The syntax of valuation in auxiliary-participle constructions” (poster)

Thank you to David Pesetsky for compiling this information.

Speaker: Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University)
Time: Friday, April 8, 2011, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)
Title: Superlative modifiers and modality

Abstract:

In the literature on the semantics of “at least” and similarly superlative modifiers, there has been much attention to the interaction of such modifiers with modality. In this talk, I will focus on two observations that are central to this interaction: (I) sentences like (a) give rise to ignorance implicatures, in the sense that (a) implies that the speaker does not know how many cards John picked; and (II) such implicatures disappear in modal environments: (b) has a reading that is simply a statement of minimum requirement, with no implicature about the speaker’s knowledge.

(a) John picked at least 3 cards.
(b) John is required to pick at least 3 cards.

In this talk, I will compare two strategies to account for these observations: (I) ignorance implicatures are due to the requirement that the modifiers operate on a scalar argument; (II) the ignorance implicatures triggered by “at least” are the ignorance implicatures triggered by disjunctions. I will compare these approaches with respect to a larger data set that includes the behaviour of ordinary superlatives, adjectives like “minimal” and “maximal” and definite descriptions that refer to scalar end-points, like “the earliest John should arrive”.

The program for SNEWS (Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) is now available.

Fourth-year student Claire Halpert is off to the Berlin Bantu Conference where she will present a paper this Saturday on “The Syntactic Licensing of Zulu NPIs”.