Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Archive for September, 2011

Phonology Circle 9/26 - Gillian Gallagher

Date: Monday Sept 26
Time: 4 pm (please note the unusual time!)
Location: 36-112 (please note the change of venue!)
Presenter: Gillian Gallagher, NYU
Title: Speaker awareness of non-local phonotactics in Quechua

I present evidence that speakers of Cochabamba Quechua are aware of non-local restrictions on laryngeal features in their language. A repetition task was run to investigate the synchronic status of two of the laryngeal restrictions in Quechua: the cooccurrence restriction on ejectives, which prohibits roots with two ejectives (e.g., *[k’ap’i]), and the ordering restriction on ejectives, which prohibits roots with an initial plain stop and a medial ejective (e.g., *[kap’i]). Medial ejectives are generally attested in the language, but only occur in roots with an initial fricative or sonorant e.g., [mat’i] ‘forehead’. Native Quechua speakers from the Cochabamba area of Bolivia were asked to repeat a mixture of real and nonsense words with medial ejectives, where the nonsense words were either phonotactically legal but unattested roots or phonotactically illegal roots that violated either the cooccurrence restriction or the ordering restriction. Medial ejectives are accurately repeated significantly more often in nonce roots where the medial ejective is phonotactically legal than when it is illegal. Moreover, there is no significant difference in error rate between attested and unattested but legal roots, nor any signficant difference in error rate between roots that violate the cooccurrence restriction and those that violate the ordering restriction. These results show that both restrictions are synchronically active. Additionally, there is variation in how roots that violate the ordering restriction are repaired, both deletion of medial ejection, e.g., target [kap’i] produced as [kapi], and movement of ejection, e.g., target [kap’i] produced as [k’api] are common. This variation in repair strategy has implications for the formal analysis of the restriction, which must predict all well-attested repairs.

Syntax Square 9/27 - John Berman

Please join us Tuesday, when John Berman (one of our ling majors) will be presenting his work on Chol.

Speaker: John Berman
Location: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday, Sept. 27, 1-2p

In Chol Mayan, there are a variety of nominalizing suffixes in –Vl. One such suffix, –el, appears throughout the language in four apparently unrelated places – imperfectives of unaccusatives, derivations of unergatives and antipassives, and derivations of inalienable nouns. While –el is traditionally analyzed as a nominalizer in Mayan (Kaufman calls it a gerund), there have been no proposals to link its four Chol meanings together, nor have there been any explanations for its comparatively widespread distribution in Chol relative to other Mayan languages. I hope to answer these questions by providing a unified analysis of Chol –el as a little nº head used to nominalize nouns and verbs which take internal arguments. This proposal will draw upon and support claims that inalienable possessors are generated as internal arguments to their nouns.

Ling-Lunch 9/29 - Peter Graff

Speaker: Peter Graff
Title: Perceptual Dispersion in the Lexicon
Time: Thursday, Sept. 29, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

We explore the hypothesis that the global organization of the lexicon maximizes the perceptual distinctness of words, by preferentially relying on highly perceptible contrasts, even when the phonotactics of the language permit less perceptible ones. We predict that distinctions among words will predominantly rely either on few highly perceptible contrasts (e.g. /t?n/ vs. /k?n/ with a place contrast in prevocalic position) or on many globally distributed contrasts, with multiple differences keeping the words apart (e.g. /s?ts/ vs. /??ks/ with a postvocalic place contrast further disambiguated by other differences). We present evidence for this hypothesis from a study investigating the typology of minimal pairs in 58 languages and a study relating the frequency of English minimal pairs to patterns of perceptual confusion. These results evidence a link between distinctness of words in the lexicon and the perception of speech as indicated by the significant effect of perceptibility beyond the phonotactic control variables. They suggest that the lexicon preferentially assigns minimal pairs for any feature to contexts where that feature is better perceived. We discuss implications of these findings for competing theories of the relation between perceptual distinctiveness and phonological patterns (e.g. Ohala 1981, Steriade 2001, Blevins 2004, Hayes and Steriade 2004).

LFRG 9/30 - Igor Yanovich

WHO: Igor Yanovich
WHAT: Embedded epistemic claims in the light of the recent epistemics debate
WHEN: Sept 30, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:

Rather than give a formal talk, I plan to introduce a certain current debate in the literature, and discuss some thoughts about new data bearing on it. This is very much work in progress - I have just started to think about those issues. But I do hope I’ll convince you that at the very least the issues are fun.

There is currently a big debate between epistemic relativists (e.g., MacFarlane) and “cloudy contextualists” (von Fintel and Gillies) about what is going on in the scenarios like this:

(1) a. Sarah: The keys might be in the car.
    b1. Mary: Yeah, that’s right. Let me check. / b2. Mary: No, I’ve checked there an hour ago.
    c. Sarah, after (b2): OK, then I guess I was wrong.

Suppose that the epistemic claim in (1a) is relative to a modal base representing the speaker’s, Sarah’s, knowledge. Then (1a) is only about the private knowledge, and it is mysterious why Mary can reject that claim, why she can act as if Sarah’s claim was about their common knowledge, and why Sarah may want to retract her earlier claim - even though at the time she made it, she may have been fully right in doing that.

Relativism and cloudy contextualism are two families of approaches which aim to explain puzzles like (1). Both have put forward a lot of evidence in their favor, and despite serious disagreements, converge on many important points. It is hard to evaluate all the arguments, and I will not try to do that on Friday, though I will try to give you their flavor.

Instead, I want to look more closely into an area which has not yet been subject to much scrutiny during the debate: epistemic claims embedded under attitude verbs. The key observation is that in some circumstances, such embedded epistemic claims may behave just as matrix epistemic claims - even though Hacquard (2010) has shown that they have to be dependent on a different source of knowledge than matrix epistemics. As they stand, I think neither relativist nor cloudy contextualist theories can explain the data.

There is a quick fix which seems to favor cloudy contextualism. However, I believe that once we look more carefully at the evidence coming from the functioning of embedded claims in discourse, a more complex and interesting picture emerges. It is that picture which I’d like to talk about on Friday. Rather than a quick fix, it seems to call for a more thorough analysis of how different sorts of attitude verbs work.

Linguistics Colloquium 9/30 - Kie Zuraw

Speaker: Kie Zuraw (UCLA)
Title: Korean sai-siot: phonological and non-phonological factors
Date: Friday, 9/30
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141

Some Korean compounds are pronounced as though /s/ were inserted, followed by various automatic rules of the language. A following lenis obstruent becomes tensified (/twi+s+pa?/ ? [twip’a?] ‘back room’), and a following nasal becomes lengthened (/p?+s+nol?/ ? [p?nno??] ‘sailors’ song’). This phenomenon is known as sai-siot ‘middle s’. Much literature has debated the nature of the sai-siot morpheme, rule, or constraint (/s/-insertion, mora insertion, etc.), but this talk focuses on sai-siot’s distribution.

This talk uses corpus data to investigate phonological and other predictors of sai-siot that have been noted in previous literature, as well as some new ones. These include the branching structure of compounds, their etymology (Sino-Korean vs. native Korean), frequency of the whole compound and its members, syllable counts of compound members, sonority of the segments surrounding the compound boundary, and presence of an underlying tense consonant.

A recurring finding is that most of these factors interact quantitatively rather than in a strict hierarchy. For example, it’s not the case that compounds can be divided, based on their branching structure, into those that can’t undergo sai-siot and those that may, depending on other factors. Rather, branching structure and other factors all contribute to the probability that a compound will undergo sai-siot. This suggests that phonological and certain non-phonological factors can interact directly, rather than belonging to completely separate modules.

Phonology Circle 9/19 - Mafuyu Kitahara

Speaker: Mafuyu Kitahara
Date: Sept 19 (Monday)
Time: 5 pm
Location: 32-D831
Title: Alignment and scaling of pitch accent in Japanese Infant-Directed and Adult-Directed Speech
Authors: Mafuyu Kitahara, Ken’ya Nishikawa, Yousuke Igarashi, and Reiko Mazuka


Abstract:

The present study examined F0 contour in Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and Adult-Directed Speech (ADS). It has been pointed out that the timing of F0 fall in Japanese sometimes occurs later than the lexically accented syllable (Sugito, 1982). As reported earlier, the amount of delay is larger in IDS than in ADS (Kitahara et al., 2008). Their analysis was based solely on the highest point of F0, however. The present study gives a more detailed analysis of the F0 contour of the whole accentual phrase by fitting a three-piece linear regression (Cho, 2010) for the rising part and the falling part separately.

The acoustic data were taken from Riken Japanese Mother-Infant Conversation Corpus (R-JMICC) and a list-reading corpus spoken by the same group of mothers as R-JMICC. A preliminary analysis of the data showed that the delayed-fall tokens tend to have a delayed-rise as well. It was also found that the timing of the lower and the upper elbows in the F0 contours have a systematic difference in IDS than in ADS. Theoretical implications for autosegmental/metrical phonology based on these results will be discussed.

Genetics of Language presentation on Wednesday

Simon FisherSimon Fisher, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, will give a short presentation for linguists on the genetics of language:

Date: Sept 21 (Wednesday)
Time: 11am-12pm
Location: 32-D461

Dr. Simon’s presentation will include an informal introduction to genetics and how language and genetics can be studied together and will leave time for questions and discussion. His presentation to our group will be followed at 4:00 by a more formal talk in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

How I spent my summer (installment 2)

Degraff-children-in-the-classroom-300x199Michel DeGraff writes, “The greater part of my work this Summer was spent in the mountain village of Matènwa in La Gonave, Haiti, working on my NSF-funded project on ‘Kreyòl-based and technology-enhanced learning of math, science, reading and writing.’ (La Gonave is an island off the Haitian mainland.) Much of my time there was spent playing with primary-school kids and helping develop and test computer-based games in Kreyòl to enhance the understanding and practice of elementary mathematics. I also worked on promoting an MIT initiative to help improve higher education in Haiti.”

Some of this work was reported in the international news media this summer, including articles in the Boston Globe, BBC News, Education Portal, and the Voices from Haiti site. A Kreyòl version of that interview can be found halfway down the page at http://www.voicesfromhaiti.com/kreyol.

Syntax Square 9/20 - Ted Levin

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Sakha’s One Modality of Case Assignment
Location: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday, Sept 20, 1-2pm

Baker and Vinokurova (2010) adopt a Chomskyan theory of case assignment to account for the realization of case in Sakha. They suggest that case is assigned within the narrow syntax, and that the Case Filter (Chomsky and Lasnik 1977) is real. However, they must also propose that a configurational wrinkle be added to the theory of Chomsyan case assignment to accurately account for the distribution of accusative and dative case. Specifically, accusative and most instances of dative are dependent cases. They are realized on an NP given the relative position of another NP, meeting certain requirements, within an appropriate domain. Their configurational rule is given in (1).

(1)a.   If there are two distinct NPs in the same VP-phase such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP1 as dative unless NP2 has already been marked for case.
b.   If there are two distinct NPs in the same phase such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP2 as accusative unless NP1 has already been marked for case.

In (1), functional heads determine the appropriate domain, and thus only play an indirect role in assigning these case markers. Conversely, the realization of nominative and genitive case is directly determined by functional heads as is expected. Baker and Vinokurova note that nominative case is only assigned when subject agreement is realized on the verb. The co-occurrence of agreement and case morphology prompts the rule for nominative and genitive assignment given in (2).

(2)   If a functional head F C {T, D} has unvalued phi-features and an NP X has an unvalued case feature (and certain locality conditions hold), then agreement happens between F and X, resulting in the phi-features of X being assigned to F and the case associated with F (nominative or genitive) being assigned to X.

While the hybrid system advocated by Baker and Vinokurova captures the facts of case in Sakha, it is my goal to sketch the beginnings of a strictly Marantzian account of the data. As we shall see, such an exercise requires some alterations to Marantz’s original theory. I incorporate a version of (1) into the disjunctive hierarchy of morphological case assignment to treat both dative and accusative cases as dependent, and I adopt a unique view of what items are assigned case. Specifically, an NP which undergoes movement is assigned case more than once. Each trace (or copy) of the moved item is assigned case according to the case disjunctive hierarchy. Which case(s) is pronounced is subject to cross-linguistic parametric variation. This second modification has been shown to be effective in accounting for other complex case phenomena (Levin 2010). Further, a purely Marantzian account must follow Bobaljik (2008) in treating agreement as a post-syntactic operation which follows case assignment. In this way, I suggest that it is not the presence of agreement morphology which indicates the presence of nominative morphology, but that the presence of nominative case conditions the presence of agreement morphology.

mitcho at EACL 7

Last week mitcho (Michael Erlewine) presented “Mandarin háishi and the analysis of alternative question disjunction” at the 7th meeting of the European Association of Chinese Linguistics.

Phonology Circle resumes 9/12

The first meeting of the Phonology Circle for the fall semester will be Monday, 9/12, at 5pm in 32-D831. We will have an organizational meeting to discuss the schedule for the rest of the semester. If you cannot come to the meeting but would like to reserve a date, please contact Michael Kenstowicz

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Syntax Square 9/13 - Shigeru Miyagawa

Syntax Square, the department’s informal discussion group for syntax, will be starting back up this week with a talk by Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa. The talks will be held on Tuesdays, 1-2pm in 32-D461.

467px-Five_Squared

The organizers are Coppe van Urk and Ted Levin. Please send them an e-mail if you have ongoing or completed syntactic work that you would like to present or if there is a recent article or book you would like to discuss. Keep in mind that Syntax Square is there for work in various states of disarray. Feel free to use it to present an interesting problem or a theory you are developing.

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa
Title: Minimal Parametric Variation
Time: Tuesday, Sept 13, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

A linguistic theory should minimally tell us the following:
  • How are natural languages the same?
  • In what ways can they be different?

GB theory had a straightforward answer to these questions. All languages contain the same set of principles such as subjacency; where languages differ is in the setting of the parameter built into many of the principles. In MP, there are no principles like those in GB, and obviously no parameters based on such principles. Chomsky suggests the following.

Uniformity Principle (Chomsky 2001: 2) In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, assume languages to be uniform, with variety restricted to easily detectable properties of utterances.

The first part is clear, but the second portion that speaks to how the languages may differ needs clarification. I will attempt to provide a concrete instantiation of both portions of the Uniformity Principle (UP) by extending the proposal in Miyagawa (2010), in order to understand both the content of the universal statement and the precise nature of the variation being described in the UP. In so doing, I will look at the variations in the way agreements arise, particularly paying attention to languages that do not evidence any overt agreement such as Chinese and Japanese.

Ling-Lunch 9/15 - Aya Meltzer-Asscher

Speaker: Aya Meltzer-Asscher (Northwestern University)
Title: Training verb argument structure production in agrammatic aphasia: Behavioral and neural recovery patterns
Time: Thursday, Sept. 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Many individuals with agrammatic aphasia have difficulty producing verbs. However, relatively little is known about the effects of treatment for this deficit, with most research in the area examining semantic or phonological cueing approaches, adopted from object naming treatments. Interestingly, although such treatments generally improve production of trained verbs, they result in little to no generalization to untrained verbs.

The current study examines the effects of treatment focused on argument mapping in sentence contexts. Based on previous studies showing a complexity effect in treatment, three-argument verbs were trained, and generalization to two- and one-argument verbs was tested, in both action naming and sentence production. In addition, the study addressed the neural substrates of treatment effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during verb naming pre- and post-treatment.

In the behavioral portion of the study, we found successful learning of three-argument verbs, as well as generalization to untrained verbs with simpler argument structures, in all participants who received treatment. Significant differences between treated and control participants were found in both constrained verb production and sentence production. Treated participants also showed improved verb production in spontaneous speech. As for the neural activation patterns associated with recovery, post- compared to pre-treatment fMRI scans revealed upregulation in cortical regions implicated for verb and argument structure processing in healthy controls.

We conclude that treatment for verb deficits incorporating thematic role mapping is effective for improving both verb and sentence production and results in recruitment of brain regions engaged for verb and argument structure processing in healthy individuals. Further, the finding that training verbs with complex argument structure results in generalization to verbs of lesser complexity reinforces the tenet that treatment of more complex language structures promotes generalization to less complex, linguistically related, structures (Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003).

Linguistics Colloquium 9/16 - Line Mikkelsen

Speaker: Line Mikkelsen - University of California, Berkeley
Title: Verb-second structures: Evidence from Danish VP anaphora
Date: Friday, 9/16
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141

Abstract:

Most work on verb-second order in Germanic languages assumes that the choice of initial constituent in declarative verb-second clauses is a matter of textual organization which falls outside the domain of syntax. In this talk I give evidence that in at least one Germanic language there are intrasential syntactic principles that restrict what may occupy initial position in declarative verb-second clauses. I further show how these principles bear on one of the central disagreements in the generative literature on Germanic clause structure, namely whether subject-initial verb-second clauses have the same structure as non-subject-initial verb-second clauses. The proposed analysis uses dedicated wh and information-structural features to drive A-bar movement and thereby offers a theoretical counterpoint to recent work arguing against the existence of such features and their involvement in A-bar movement, including Fanselow and Lenertová (2011) and Chomsky (2008).

Summer student news round-up

mitcho (Michael Erlewine) stayed mostly in Boston this summer, presenting “The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus” at the International Society for the Linguistics of English at BU and “Focus Interpretation and Covert Movement: the Dake Blocking Effect” at the GLOW in Asia Workshop for Young Scholars in Japan.

Claire Halpert was awarded an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant for her project on Zulu syntax, Agreement and Argument Structure, which supported seven weeks of fieldwork in South Africa this summer. Claire has been living in Umlazi, a Zulu-speaking township in Durban, and commuting several days a week to the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where she is a visiting scholar. She has been working closely with students and faculty in the department, and has given two talks on her research during her stay. In July, Claire taught Syntactic Field Methods at the African Linguistics School (ALS 2011) in Porto Novo, Benin. This second meeting of the ALS brought together students from all over Africa to study linguistic theory, with a focus on African languages. Her class focused on the syntax of Tofingbe, an undescribed and threatened member of the Gbe cluster spoken in the Porto Novo region. Efforts are currently underway by Claire and members of the class to continue research on the language!

One of our undergraduate majors, John Berman, reports:

I spent most of June near Palenque, Mexico, where I stayed with a Ch’ol family and did research on the Ch’ol language. Ch’ol is a native American language of the Mayan family spoken by about 150,000 in the Mexican states of Chiapas and Tabasco. I will present some of my findings this October at UT Austin’s Center for the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA) conference.

MIT Linguistics at Sinn und Bedeutung 16

MIT students, visitors and alumni contributed 8 talks to Sinn und Bedeutung 16, which took place from September 6-8 in Utrecht. They are:

New time for Syntax and Semantics of Iranian

Maziar Toosarvandani’s class Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Iranian (24.943), described in last week’s WHAMIT, has been moved to Tuesdays 5-8 and will meet in 32-D461.

Faculty summer news

“How I spent my summer vacation” - faculty version:

  • Norvin Richards spent a week in the foothills of the Himalayas, teaching a mini-seminar on the syntax-phonology interface at the 5th LISSIM (Linguistics Summer School in the Indian Mountains).
  • Sabine Iatridou had an Eastern European summer vacation, co-teaching a week-long seminar on “3 Puzzles in Syntax and Semantics” at the New York-St. Petersburg Institute founded by John Bailyn, then moving to the Czech Republic, where she taught two classes at the famous EGG School: a solo class on Binding Theory and a joint class on negation with Hedde Zeijlstra, who we remember fondly as a visiting faculty member here in 2008-2009.
  • Jay Keyser’s book Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows was published by MIT Press.
  • Wayne O’Neil spent July co-teaching a language acquisition course at the Navajo Language Academy workshop. He writes: “This summer workshop, founded by Ken Hale, meets annually on or near the Navajo reservation, bringing together thirty or so Navajo linguists and educators. This summer we were on the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff AZ, suffering through college dormitory life and cafeteria food, but the work was good, and the workshop, as usual, produced a fine T-shirt.”

Meet Ling-11

And last but certainly not the least, there are six incoming graduate students this year.

Tingchun Chen, who goes by T.C., grew up in Taiwan and received a B.A. in linguistics from McGill University. “My main areas of interest are syntax and syntax/semantics interface. I work on Atayal, an indigenous (Austronesian) language of Taiwan and spent the past two summers doing fieldwork in a small Atayal tribe. Besides linguistics, I also enjoy tennis, hiking and the company of cats.”

Snejana Iovtcheva reports: “I am originally from Bulgaria, but I grew up in Germany and I have my first MA degree in Political Science and German Philology from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. I then discovered my affinity for linguistics and received my second MA degree from Syracuse University. In my MA thesis I investigate the syntactic structure of the Bulgarian wh-questions, especially the interaction between [topic]-, [focus]-, and [wh]-fronting. I am further interested in grammatical gender, clitics, pro-drop constructions, and left-dislocated subjects. If I am not in the library, then you will most probably meet me at the playground with my toddler.”

Paul Marty

Miriam Nussbaum, who likes to go by ‘Mia’, is from Ithaca, New York. In May 2011, she graduated from Cornell, where she majored in music in addition to linguistics. Her current list of favorite topics to study in linguistics mostly consists of things that have to do with syntax and/or semantics (passive/impersonal constructions, information structure, and de se semantics, to name a few); outside of linguistics, she enjoys playing the flute, composing music, and reading novels in various languages.

Despina Oikonomou writes: “I grew up in Greece, in a small seaside village. I received my BA in Balkan, Slavic & Oriental Studies from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. I recently completed my MA in Linguistics at the University of Crete. I am particularly interested in syntax/semantics interface, pragmatics and language acquisition. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy classic literature and comics.”

Amanda Swenson grew up in a small town in Wisconsin near St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN. She writes: “I received my B.A. in Language and Linguistics from Baylor University in Waco, TX. My main interest in linguistics is syntax. I am also interested in the syntax-semantics interface, 1st language acquisition and language evolution. My research to date has focused on long-distance binding across a large cross section of languages. As far as languages go, I am particularly interested in working on Greek and Dravidian languages. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy sports and cooking.”

Linguistics Colloquium Schedule, 2011-2012

The MIT Linguistics Colloquium schedule for this academic year is below. All talks are on Fridays, 3:30-5:00 p.m. in room 32-141 unless otherwise noted. For further information, please contact Sam Al Khatib or Natalia Ivlieva. This schedule is subject to change, especially for Spring 2012.

Fall 2011

September 16: Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley)
September 30: Kie Zuraw (UCLA)
October 7: Ivan Sag (Stanford)
October 14: Anders Holmberg (Newcastle)
November 18: Maria Aloni (Amsterdam)

Spring 2012

February 10: David Beaver (UT Austin)
March 9: Yosef Grodzinsky (McGill)
March 16: Sun-Ah Jun (UCLA)
April 6: Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS-ENS–EHESS)
April 13: Meghan Sumner (Stanford)
April 27: Uli Sauerland (ZAS)
May 4: Hagit Borer (USC)
May 11: Milan Rezac (University of the Basque Country) [rescheduled from Spring 2011]

Update, Sept. 7: Anders Holmberg’s talk will be on Oct. 14, and David Beaver’s talk will be on Feb. 10.

The latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry

…contains two papers authored and coauthored by current graduate students. Congratulations!

The Semantic Uniformity of Traces: Evidence from Ellipsis Parallelism” by Jeremy Hartman

On the Ungrammaticality of Remnant Movement in the Derivation of Greenberg’s Universal 20” by Sam Steddy and Vieri Samek-Lodovici

A summer’s worth of dissertations!

Over the summer, six students defended their dissertations! In order of defense date, they are…

Patrick Grosz - On the Grammar of Optative Constructions
Omer Preminger - Agreement as a Fallible Operation
Tue Trinh - Edges and Linearization
Luka Crnic - Getting Even
Alya Asarina - Case in Uyghur and Beyond
Bronwyn Bjorkman - BE-ing Default: The Morphosyntax of Auxiliaries

Congratulations to all six for their splendid achievements!!

Meet our new visiting faculty

We have four visiting faculty members in linguistics this Fall

Benjamin R. George has just completed his Ph.D. in semantics at UCLA. He writes that his interests include “question semantics, presupposition, logic, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and mathematical methods in semantic theory”.

Rick Nouwen will be visiting us only for the Fall semester. As his website tells us: “I’m a linguist interested in semantics and pragmatics. My research focuses in particular on (i) scalar phenomena in natural language; (ii) multi-dimensionality and projection phenomena in semantics; (iii) pronominal reference; (iv) the overlap between analytical philosophy, logic and linguistics.”

Maziar Toosarvandani joins us as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow. He writes: “I received my PhD from Berkeley in 2010 where I wrote my dissertation on association with focus. More generally, I am interested in formal patterns that arise from the interaction of sentences in discourse and what these patterns tell us about speakers’ competence about syntax as well as their competence about discourse structure. Currently, I am working on a project to understand why the so-called corrective use of the coordinator “but” (as in “Max didn’t find an apartment in Cambridge but in Somerville”) requires the presence of a negative element in its first conjunct. I also do documentary fieldwork on Northern Paiute (a severely endangered Uto-Aztecan language of the western US), which feeds into my theoretical interests. I have recently been exploring how in Northern Paiute, a language that practically lacks syntactic subordinators, speakers combine lexical, syntactic, and world knowledge with knowledge about discourse structure to convey temporal, causal, and other typically “subordinating” relations.”

Omer Preminger received his PhD here at MIT just this summer, and will be splitting his time between our department and Masha Polinsky’s lab at Harvard. He describes his interests as including “syntax, morphology, and everything in between, including but not limited to: agreement, case, ergativity, argument-structure, and wh-movement”. He will be teaching 24.960 (Syntactic Models, graduate) in the fall, and 24.900 (Intro to Linguistics, undergrad) in the spring.

Welcome to the Fall Semester!

Today, Tuesday 9/6, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter appears every Monday during the semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Michelle Fullwood, Ryo Masuda, and David Pesetsky.

To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit! appears. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what members of the department did during the summer break.

Visiting Scholars and Students

We extend our warmest welcome to the new (and returning) visiting scholars and students to the department:

New Visiting Scholars

  • Khaled Al-Asbahi: Sana’a University.
  • Toni Borowsky: Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney.
    Toni’s research interests are in phonology and phonetics. She is working on language games, and syllable structure related matters.
  • Barbara Citko: Assistant Professor, University of Washington-Seattle.
    Barbara’s research interests are: syntactic theory, syntax of relative clauses, wh-questions, multidominance, syntax of Slavic languages (Polish in particular).
  • Young-Sun Kim: Hanshin University.

New Visiting Students

  • Laura McPherson: 3rd year PhD student at UCLA.
    Her primary research interests are phonology and morphology, particularly grammatical tone and other areas of phonology-syntax interface. She is currently working on a reference grammar of Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali.
  • Jeffrey Watumull: PhD student at the University of Cambridge.
    Jeffrey’s research interests are “in general, mathematical biolinguistics—a research program to discover the mathematical properties universal to human syntax and their possible homologues/analogues in nonhuman animals; in particular, revamping the Chomsky Hierarchy in terms of strong generative capacity and formulating optimal decision procedures for traversing parameter hierarchies.”

Course announcements, Fall 2011

24.943: Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Iranian
Maziar Toosarvandani
M10-1, 32-D461

The Iranian languages are among the least studied in the Indo-European language family. In this class, we will explore the structure of the Iranian languages with an eye towards understanding them both from the outside and from the inside. Since the extant theoretical literature focuses almost entirely on either Persian (a national language of Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan) or Pashto (a national language of Afghanistan), we will start by reading about several of these two languages’ more unusual properties—including light verb constructions, ezafe, scrambling, ergative agreement, and second-position clitics—with the goal of understanding how preexisting analyses fit into a crosslinguistically-informed theory of syntax and semantics. We will then turn our attention to some of the other, eighty or so Iranian languages, for which various levels of description exist, extending and developing our accounts from the two better-studied languages. In the end, we will have a more sophisticated understanding of the Iranian languages and of what they tell us about language more generally.

24.960: Syntactic Models
Omer Preminger
M2–5, 32-D461

The course has two main goals —

  1. Cross-framework “literacy”

    We will familiarize ourselves with two frameworks that compete with what we might call the Government & Binding / Principles & Parameters / Minimalist Program framework of syntactic analysis: HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar).

    The idea is to become comfortable enough with the notations and machinery that we can easily pick up an HPSG or LFG paper and understand it.

  2. What is at stake? Where do these frameworks crucially differ from one another (and where don’t they)? And what is the historical development that has led us here?

    Here, we will deal with some of the “bigger questions”; we want to understand how frameworks rise and fall in general, and how they have in fact risen and fallen in the history of modern syntax; we will ask ourselves questions like “what can framework X can do that framework Y cannot?”, as well as “what can they both do equally well?”

    In other words, we want to understand which differences between the various frameworks are notational choices, and which lead to actual differences in expressive power and empirical coverage.

We will examine these questions both synchronically (for example, comparing GB/P&P/MP vs. HPSG vs. LFG) and diachronically (e.g. why did the “Aspects” framework give way to GB? why was “Generative Semantics” abandoned in the ’70s, and effectively resurrected in the late ’90s?)

24.964: Topics in Phonology
Edward Flemming
F12-3, 32-D461

24.964 this semester is intended to be ‘Phonology III’ or ‘More Advanced Phonology’ rather than a seminar on a single research topic. The course will be organized around four main topics, all of which feature in recent research at MIT (details below). We will cover more or less of each topic depending on time and interest.

  1. The Dispersion Theory of Contrast

    There is good evidence for constraints against perceptually indistinct contrasts in phonology, but many issues surrounding the formalization of these constraints remain open. We will look at applications of these constraints in recent work from MIT, and explore issues of implementation.

    • Applications: Laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions (Gallagher 2010), stress-conditioned segmental phonology (Giavazzi 2010).
    • Issues of implementation:
      • The formulation of distinctiveness constraints (cf. Gallagher 2010 vs. Flemming 2004).
      • The comparison set for evaluation of distinctiveness constraints.
      • The nature of underlying representations (Flemming 2008).
  2. Phonetic grammars

    It has long been known that the grammars of languages must regulate relatively fine details of phonetic realization, but relatively little is known about the form of the relevant component of grammar. We will study a model based on weighted constraints (Flemming 2001) that has been applied in recent research from our department, and investigate interactions between phonetics and phonology in light of this model.

    • Applications: tone timing (Cho 2010), segment duration (Katz 2010).
    • Working with weighted constraints.
    • Interactions between phonetics and phonology
    • Phonetic detail in phonological analyses (e.g. Flemming 2008).
    • Phonetic constraints in phonological analyses (e.g. Katz 2010).
    • Effects of phonological structure on phonetic realization.
  3. Morphology-phonology interactions: what are the roles of morphology and phonology in accounting for allomorphic variation in paradigms?

    Case study: The distribution of stem allomorphs in Italian verb paradigms (Pirrelli and Battista 2000). Pirrelli & Battista argue for complex and arbitrary mappings from morphosyntactic specifications to the phonological forms of verb stems in Italian. However, they only consider phonological analyses of variation in stem form if they can be formulated in terms of exceptionless phonological processes. There is evidence that phonological constraints and constraints on the relationship between phonology and morphology can yield many patterns in which phonological processes show morphological conditioning (e.g. derived environment effects, inflection dependence etc). Do we arrive at a different view of allomorphy in Italian (and elsewhere) if we reanalyze the data in light of these phenomena?

    • Varieties of phonology-morphology interactions, e.g.
      • Derived-Environment Effects (Kiparsky 1973 etc)
      • Inflection dependence (Steriade 2008)
      • Phonological selection of listed allomorphs (e.g. Kager 1996)
      • Morphological contrast constraints (Löfstedt 2010)
  4. Do speakers’ grammars contain phonetically-based constraints?

    Phonological typology has been shown to reflect a variety of phonetically-based constraints, but it remains controversial whether these constraints play a role in individual grammars or whether they are external to grammar, applying only through processes of sound change (e.g. Blevins 2004). We will try to clarify the empirical claims that are at issue here and examine experimental evidence that bears on those claims.

24.979: Topics in Semantics
Rick Nouwen
T2-5, 32-D461

The main focus will be the semantic representation of gradability/degree and comparison in natural language. In particular, we will review the semantic structures and mechanisms that play a role in various degree phenomena as well as the logical form of degree constructions. We will cover both core issues and phenomena in degree semantics, such as the comparative, as well as more peripheral aspects of the expression of degree. The first weeks are geared to gaining a deep understanding of the foundations of the main analyses on the market, such as the various kinds of degree-based theories and the increasingly more prominent (and in some sense degree-less) delineation proposals. The rest of the seminar is meant to cover a broad range of empirical data, gradually moving away from the usual suspects in the degree literature.

Topics include: the comparative, the positive form, the absolute/relative distinction, degree approaches to degree versus delineation approaches to degree, degree operators and scope, interadjective comparison and incommensurability, intensifiers, exclamatives, gradability of nouns, degree phenomena in numeral quantification, and more. We will use a reading list of recent as well as not so recent articles on degree semantics.