Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Archive for December, 2011

Morris and Noam in Technology Review

In the latest issue of Technology Review/MIT News Magazine, Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky are featured in “The Office Next Door” by Peter Dizikes, about long working relationships among MIT faculty members.

Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky at Ling50. Photo by Kai von Fintel.
At Ling50@MIT, Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky holding a 1988 picture of them holding a picture of them in 1953. Photo credit: Kai von Fintel.

MIT Linguists in Luxembourg

As far as we know, there will be no MIT linguists in Luxembourg.

Final Whamit! for 2011

This is the last regular Whamit! issue for this semester and for 2011. We may publish a special edition or two to let you know about events in the department during January. We will return to our weekly schedule on Registration Day, February 6, 2012. Have a wonderful winter break!

MIT Linguists in Brussels

Omer Preminger is off to Brussels, where he is one of three invited speakers at the 6th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics at the beginning of this week, devoted to the topic “Configurations of Agreement”.  Omer’s talk is entitled “Filters vs. Triggers: Deriving the obligatoriness of agreement “.  

Also presenting at the same conference will be postdoc Erik Schoorlemmer and former visiting faculty member Hedde Zeijlstra (who just flew home after joining us for Ling50 last week).

MIT Linguists in Amsterdam

The 18th Amsterdam Colloquium is being held this week at the University of Amsterdam.

  • Irene Heim is an invited speaker, giving a talk entitled “Interpreting reconstruction in interrogative clauses.”
  • Natasha Ivlieva will speak about “Obligatory implicatures and grammaticality”
  • Wataru Uegaki is presenting his paper “Inquisitive knowledge attribution and the Gettier problem” as part of the Workshop on Inquisitiveness.
  • Yasutada Sudo, Jacopo Romoli, Martin Hackl and Danny Fox are presenting “Variation of Presupposition Projection in Quantified Sentences” in the poster session.

Amsterdamming alums include:

  • Invited speaker Philippe Schlenker, discussing “The Semantics of Pronouns: Insights and Problems from Sign Language”
  • Friederike Moltmann: “Tropes, Intensional Relative Clauses and the Notion of a Variable Object”
  • Marta Abrusan: “Focus, Evidentiality and Soft triggers”

MIT Linguists at the LSA

A healthy contingent of our graduate students (and recently minted PhDs) will be presenting papers at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Portland, Oregon:

  • Alya Asarina (PhD 2011): “Against the activity condition: An argument from Uyghur
  • Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011): “Auxiliary verb constructions and the morphosyntax of verbal inflection
  • Peter Graff: “Languages favor perceptible contrasts in distinguishing words: Evidence from minimal pairs
  • Peter Graff, with a large group from Masha Polinsky’s lab at Harvard (including Jessica Coon, PhD 2010): “Processing ergative languages: Methodology and preliminary results
  • Peter Graff, with a million people from the University of Chicago: “Coronal stop deletion on reality TV”
  • Claire Halpert: “Nominals are case-licensed, even in Bantu: Evidence from Zulu
  • Jeremy Hartman: “Experiencer intervention in English
  • Patrick Jones: “Intermediate contour tones derive non-iterative tone shift in Kinande
  • Marie-Christine Meyer, with Evelina Fedorenko and Edward Gibson: “Contrastive topic intonation: An empirical evaluation
  • Jennifer Michaels: “Caught in-between: Neutralizing indistinct surface contrasts
  • Kirill Shklovsky: “A binding account of possessor raising
  • Kirill Shklovsky: “Split infinitives in Tseltal

Other MIT events at the LSA: ACLS New Faculty Fellow Maziar Toosarvandani will also give a talk on ”Temporal interpretation and discourse structure in Northern Paiute”, Ted Gibson and various collaborators will present several papers at the conference, and … Irene Heim will be inducted into the 2012 class of LSA Fellows, as previously announced here!

Ling50@MIT: The briefest of reports

As you know, last weekend our department hosted a remarkable event: 50 years of Linguistics at MIT: a scientific reunion, which Paul Kiparsky characterized in his talk as “an emotionally and intellectually charged couple of days.”

It sure was. Well more than 200 people were in attendance. Rather than talk at length about three days of wonderful talks by our alumni, current and former faculty, an excellent poster session or the hallway reunions of old friends (who in some cases had not met for years) — not to mention all the new acquaintainces made at Ling 50 — we just want to let you know that (as we’ve come to expect in the 21st century) the event was well-documented:

Photos: There are several great photo collections already available on the Facebook pages of various eminent linguists. (Some have been shared on our own Facebook page.) Very soon we will post to the Ling 50 website a large collection of our own photos (many of them by official Ling 50 paparazzi Mitcho Erlewine and Hrayr Khanjian).  [Update:  They are available at https://www.facebook.com/MITLinguistics?sk=photos.]

Handouts and posters:We will also be uploading handouts and posters to the Ling 50 website very soon. [Update (January 18): They have all been posted!]

Videos: The talks and lengthy discussion sections from Ling50@MIT are being posted on Youtube. At the moment, all but the welcoming remarks and first two sessions are available. We hope to have a complete collection in the next few days. [Update:  All the sessions plus the welcoming remarks are now available.]

Where is Whamit?

You may have heard about our little shindig over the weekend. A full report is forthcoming once the editors of Whamit! recover from three days of inspirational talks and emotional reunions.

Syntax Square 12/6 - Liuda Nikolaeva

Speaker: Liuda Nikolaeva
Title: The Case for Wholesale Late Merger
Date/Time: Tuesday, Dec 6, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

The syntactic literature has traditionally distinguished two types of phrasal movement, A-movement and A’-movement. Left-Periphery Fronting (LPF hereafter), usually referred to as “scrambling”, in Russian and other languages poses a challenge to this traditional dichotomy, because it exhibits a mix of common diagnostic properties. In this paper, I offer a unified account of Russian LPF, based on Takahashi and Hulsey’s (2009) theory of Wholesale Late Merger (WLM). On the account I propose, LPF is A-movement, but crucially it is A-movement from a cased position, which accounts for the properties that it shares with A’-movement. In addition to providing an empirically satisfactory account of the Russian phenomena, my proposal provides new support for Takahashi and Hulsey’s original theory.

Ling-Lunch 12/8 - Ian Roberts

Speaker: Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge)
Title: Parametric Hierarchies
Date/Time: Thursday, Dec 8, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

This work presents a new approach to comparative syntax, developing the notion of parameter hierarchy originated in Baker (2001). Hierarchies define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories may act in concert; this creates macroparametric effects from the combined action of many microparameters. The highest position in a hierarchy defines a macroparameter, a major typological property, lower positions define successively more local properties. Parameter-setting in language acquisition starts at the highest position as this is the simplest choice; acquirers will “move down the hierarchy” when confronted with primary linguistic data incompatible with a higher setting. In this way, the hierarchies simultaneously learning paths and typological variation.

The idea will be illustrated by five hierarchies: those determining word-order, null arguments, word structure, discourse-configurationality and case/agreement alignment. These five hierarchies, although not exhaustive, combine to give a typological footprint of many languages, as well as providing the basis for the study of the interaction of micro- and macroparameters. In this way, the criticism that formal comparative syntax has little to offer typological studies can potentially be answered. Finally, we show that the nature of the hierarchies is determined, not directly by UG, but by UG interacting with domain-general principles of learning and optimisation: parametric variation is an emergent property of the learning device, UG and primary linguistic data, reflecting the three factors in language design.

Where whas WHAMIT? (episode 2)

As you may have noticed, Whamit! missed its Monday deadline once again, due to server problems. But as of Sunday night, Whamit! has now been migrated to a new server (thank you Chris!) hosted by the venerable MIT Student Information Processing Board, an organization so venerable that it’s actually still called an “Information Processing Board”. (Its acronym SIPB is pronounced [sɪpi:].) Our old URL still works, but it now refers you to our new address: http://whamit.mit.edu. You might want to alter your browser bookmarks accordingly.

We are fairly confident that these changes will solve our ongoing problems, and allow us to bring you Whamit! each week with the reliability that you have every right to expect from a publication … called … Whamit!.

Omer Preminger in NLLT

A new paper has just appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory by Omer Preminger (PhD 2011, postdoctoral fellow with Masha Polinsky at Harvard and a visiting faculty member here). It is called “Asymmetries between person and number in syntax: a commentary on Baker’s SCOPA”. The abstract describes its contribution as follows: “In this commentary, I explore Basque data that counter-exemplifies SCOPA, as well as a handful of other empirical patterns that SCOPA fails to address, but which I believe should be treated as part of the same empirical landscape. But far from condemning SCOPA, I believe these additional patterns may provide us with hints regarding how SCOPA (with its considerable empirical coverage), as well as its exceptions, are to be derived.”

Congratulations, Omer!!

This week! 50 years of Linguistics at MIT: a scientific reunion

Date/Time: Friday, December 9 to Sunday, December 11, 2011
Location: Friday 10:00-1:05, Koch 76-156 A&B; thereafter in Stata 32-123
Website: http://ling50.mit.edu

50 years ago, in the fall of 1960, Jerome Wiesner, director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and William N. Locke, head of the Department of Modern Languages, proposed to MIT the formation of a graduate program in linguistics whose faculty was to include Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. The rest, as they say is history.

building 20

This week, more than two hundred alumni, former visitors and faculty, along with current students, faculty, visitors and other MIT linguists will meet for three days of talks, discussion, posters, photographs, meals and reminiscences — as we celebrate a half-century of linguistics in our department with 50 years of Linguistics at MIT: a scientific reunion.

The schedule of talks can be found here and a schedule of posters by alumni, present and former visitors and current students can be found here. The program has been designed to allow lengthy (and no doubt heated) discussion, of the sort for which our group is famous, and topics have been chosen that reflect the wide range of linguistic issues that have been explored at MIT over the past fifty years. Saturday features a talk by Noam Chomsky, and the reunion ends on Sunday with a talk by Morris Halle.

Noam & Morris