Whamit!

Title: Blocking Effects Reading Group
Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 27, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Please join us for the first meeting of a short two-session reading group on morphological Blocking effects. The goal of this group is to educate ourselves about theoretical and experimental work relating to blocking effects, and discuss ideas for an ERP study on blocking effects in English. This week, Ayaka will lead the discussion of theories of blocking effects. The second session, dedicated to ERP studies of blocking effects, will be held on March 12. As always, dinner will be served.

Speaker: DaeYoung Sohn
Title: Word order restriction in a raising construction in a scrambling language.
Date/Time: Tuesday February 28, 1:00-2:00pm
Location: 32-D461

I will be discussing word order restriction in a raising, or topicalization, construction in Korean. It has been noted in the literature that scrambling is not completely free in languages like Korean and Japanese (e.g., Saito 1985; Miyagawa 1989), and Ko (2005) recently argued that some restrictions on scrambling can be explained by the theory of Cyclic Linearization (Fox and Pesetsky 2005). In the current study, I expand the empirical domain of study to the raising construction and show that a similar restriction holds there and does so more strongly than in scrambling. Specifically, I introduce two slightly different cases where word order is fixed with a raised DP: First, when a DP raises across another phrase(s) clause-internally, the word order relative to each other is fixed for good; secondly, when an embedded subject raises across a clause boundary, the relative order between the raised subject and the embedded object is fixed for good. Lastly, I show that when raising and scrambling co-occur in the same domain, they behave similarly with each other in a sense that they both lack a reconstruction effect with respect to reflexive binding. I provide a sketchy analysis for those facts in terms of Cyclic Linearization and Shortest Move (Richards 2001).

The Phonology Circle will meet on Wednesday this semester, from 5–7 (except when otherwise announced).
This week’s meeting with feature a talk by Youngah Do and Michael Kenstowicz.

Title: Kyungsang Korean Accent Patterns: Lexical Drift, Loanwords, Novel Words
Date: Feb. 29 (W)
Time: 5:00–7:00
Location: 32D831

South Kyungsang is a pitch accent language with three lexically contrastive tonal patterns for monosyllabic nouns and four patterns for di- and tri-syllables. Our Phonology Circle presentation of last fall (10/26) focused on deviations from the etymologically expected accent class based on a word’s attested accent in Middle Korean. We showed that words are attracted to the statistically more frequent class and that this lexical drift tends to affect less frequent words (a common trait of analogical change Phillips 1984). Our data also indicated that sonorant codas, syllable weight, and the presence of fortis or aspirated consonants bias a word towards a particular accent class. In this presentation we show that these factors also emerge in a novel word experiment. We also present results of elicitations from 13 speakers designed to track the correlation between the well-known T > s analogy in the infection of nouns and the substitution of the High-High tonal pattern in place of the etymologically expected High-Low. We invite suggestions on the proper statistical measures to evaluate and present our results.

Title: The English suffix -ish as a degree head
Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Thursday Mar 1, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 32-D831

In this talk, I would like to discuss the semantics of the English suffix -ish. Little theoretical work has been done on the nature of the English suffix -ish, whose suffixation is highly productive (see Morris (2009) for descriptive work). Intuitively -ish modifies the degree of the base it appends to. Contrary to this naive view, I will argue that -ish is a degree head of type ⟨⟨d, ⟨e, t⟩⟩, ⟨e, t⟩⟩ (cf. “pos” of Kennedy (2007)). I will also discuss the consequences of this analysis on the semantic theory of gradable adjectives, especially their scale structures and the semantics of their positive forms. I will focus on -ish in Adjective-ish, but would like to discuss briefly Adverb-ish (such as now-ish or ?regularly-ish) and Noun-ish (such as childish or toy-ish).

Speaker: Guillaume Thomas
Title: The role of topic times in the computation of temporal implicatures: evidence from Mbyá.
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 1, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(1) and (2) both entail that there is a time in the past of the time of utterance (TU) at which John is a teacher. However, (2) appears to entail that John is not a teacher at TU, while (1) only implicates it. In addition, (2) is infelicitous in a context in which John is dead at the time of utterance, contrary to (1).

(1) John was a teacher.

(2) John is an ex-teacher.

One might try to give a unified analysis of the past tense and ex-, but since one is a tense and the other a nominal modifier, one might as well be content with an analysis that hard-wires the additional properties of ex- in its denotation. Of course, if the past tense and ex- were synonymous, one would feel more pressure to come up with a unified analysis. As it turns out, this is the case in Guarani Mbyá, as illustrated in (3) and (4), which are interpreted as (1) and (2), respectively:

(3) Juan o-iko va’e-kue ñombo’ea.
Juan 3-be REL-PAST teacher
Juan was a teacher.

(4) Juan ñombo’ea-kue
Juan teacher-PAST
Juan is an ex-teacher.

I propose that -kue is a relative past tense in (3) and (4), and that its additional properties in (4) are due to the interaction of the past tense with independent constraints on the temporal interpretation of NPs. In this talk, I will focus on the inference that Juan is not a teacher at TU, which I argue is a scalar implicature triggered by -kue. The challenge is to explain why this implicature is obligatory in (4), while it can be blocked in (3). Doing so will lead us to a discussion of the role of discourse topics in the restriction of the domain of quantification of tenses. Time permitting, I will also give an analysis of the inference that Juan is alive at TU in (4).

Today, February 27, is the publication date for Shigeru’s new book Case, Argument Structure and Word Order, in the Leading Linguists series published by Routledge. Here is a description of the book …

Over the years, a major strand of Miyagawa’s research has been to study how syntax, case marking, and argument structure interact. In particular, Miyagawa’s work addresses the nature of the relationship between syntax and argument structure, and how case marking and other phenomena help to elucidate this relationship. In this collection of new and revised pieces, Miyagawa expands and develops new analyses for numeral quantifier stranding, ditransitive constructions, nominative/genitive alternation, “syntactic” analysis of lexical and syntactic causatives, and historical change in the accusative case marking from Old Japanese to Modern Japanese. All of these analyses demonstrate an intimate relation among case marking, argument structure, and word order.

… and here is a nice article about it from the MIT News Office (with one little reporting glitch — can you spot it?).

Congratulations, Shigeru!!

Title: The Relationship Between Back and Front Articulations in Moroccan Arabic
Speaker: Karim Shoul (CNRS)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 21, 5:30-7p
Location: 32-D831

For this study, we considered /t/ and the back counterpart /T/ in the sequences /#CVb/, /VCV/ and /bVC#/, where /C/ is /t/ or /T/, and /V/ is /a/. The bilabial stop /b/ was chosen in order to minimize possible coarticulatory effects. The different positions (initial, intervocalic and final) permit to examine their possible effects on the realisation of the target consonants (Straka, 1963). The low vowel /a/ was chosen since it shows less linguo-palatal contact than /i/ and /u/ (Marchal, 1988).

The data was examined by direct palatography and linguography. Six native speakers of Moroccan Arabic participated in the experiment and none of them suffer from any articulatory disorders (Shoul, 2007).

Palatographic results show that both /t/ and /T/ are alveolars in all three positions. These findings are in accordance with Ghazeli’s (1977) observations concerning different Arabic dialects. However, linguographic results show that /t/ is laminal whereas the back corresponding /T/ is apical. The apicality of /T/ can be explained by a concave configuration of the tongue since it is produced with a backward movement of the the back of the tongue towards the pharynx, unlike the convexe configuration which characterizes /t/. This tongue configuration for /T/ favours the contact between the palate and the tongue with the tip (Clements, personal communication).

The apicality of /T/ and the laminality of /t/ can also be explained in terms of their acoustic consequences. According to Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) laminal consonants are more often produced with more important frication noise than apical ones, and for Dart (1991) the separation of the tongue and the palate is shorter for apicals than for laminals. This seems to be supported by our data, since the laminal /t/ is produced with the participation of the blade of the tongue and then an important frication noise, whereas the apical /T/ is manifested by the contribution of the tip of the tongue and then a weak frication noise.

There will be no Experimental Syntax and Semantics lab meeting this week, due to Presidents’ Day.

Join us next Monday (2/27) at 5:30 for the first meeting of a short two-session reading group in which we will discuss theoretical and experimental (ERP-related) papers on Blocking effects. Contact Hadas if you would like to participate and get the reading list in advance.

Ling-Lunch returns this week at its usual time with a talk by Igor.

Speaker: Igor Yanovich (MIT)
Title: Modal hopes and fears: a diachronic case study
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 23, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I will show what the history of English modals in CP complements of one semantic class of attitude verbs can tell us about the mechanics of semantic change. Data for the study come from two historical corpora of English (covering the time periods of 1425-1520, and 1640-1680, respectively), each of size >350K words, drawn from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. The talk will include of brief tutorial on the use of Penn parsed corpora.

A recent New Yorker article on myths about “Brainstorming” end with a nice discussion of Building 20, and how linguistics got started at MIT. Our link will take you to the linguistics part of the article.

Nevertheless, he soon grew fond of the building, if only because he was able to tear down several room dividers. This allowed Halle to transform a field that was often hermetic, with grad students working alone in the library, into a group exercise, characterized by discussion, Socratic interrogation, and the vigorous exchange of clashing perspectives. “At Building 20, we made a big room, so that all of the students could talk to each other,” Halle remembers. “That’s how I wanted them to learn.

…there will be no Syntax Square this week. But next week, Syntax Square returns, with a presentation by DaeYoung Sohn. Watch for the announcement in the next Whamit!

The Experimental Syntax and Semantics lab is having its first lab meeting of the semester Monday at 5:30 pm, in the fourth floor seminar room, 32-D461. It will be primarily an organizational meeting and there will be pizza. All are welcome!

Phonology Circle resumes on Tuesday 2/14 at 5pm in 32D-831. (Please note the day and time!) We’ll have a brief organizational meeting in which we discuss scheduling for the remainder of the semester.

There will be a short organizational meeting for the LF Reading Group on 16 February (Thursday) at 10 am in 32-D831.

Jonah Katz (PhD 2010), currently a post-doc at CNRS and the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, writes to us that his paper “Compression effects in English” has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Phonetics. Congratulations, Jonah!

Omer Preminger gave a talk at New York University last Friday on “Agreement in Kichean and Zulu: Filtration vs. Strict Generativity”.

You heard it here first, when Irene was elected a 2012 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.  But now it’s official:

Congratulations, Irene!!

This one’s now official too. UMass Amherst may claim him with pride, but so do we!  At the LSA annual meeting in Portland, Oregon last month, Seth Cable (PhD 2007) received the LSA’s second annual Early Career Award. And here’s the (rather fuzzy) picture to prove it:

Congratulations Seth!!

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas, Austin)
Time: Friday 2/10 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141
Title: IT-constructions

Abstract:

Within the context of a broader project concerning what speakers take to be at-issue, I will present an analysis of the semantics and discourse function of a large range of constructions that I refer to as Inquiry Terminating (IT) constructions. In English, these include it-clefts and exclusives such as “only”, “just”, and “mere(ly)”. I claim that despite their many differences, such constructions cross-linguistically have much in common: they are always focus-sensitive or focus markers, they have a uniform semantics (modulo differences related to syntactic category), and as a discourse function they are always used to mark that a proposition provides a complete answer to what the speaker takes to be the current question.

The similarity of a cleft sentence of the form “It’s X that Ys” to a sentence “only X Ys”, with the exclusive “only” is easily seen: in both cases X is realized with an intonational focus, and both constructions are used when X Ys and nothing else does. Yet cleft sentences and exclusive sentences have many differences. Some of these are shown in the following minimal pairs, each of which shows a contrast in acceptability when an exclusive is replaced by a cleft.

1a) Not only did Kai laugh, but Irene laughed too.
1b) # It wasn’t Kai who laughed, but Irene laughed too.

2a) Mary ate pizza and she only ate pizza.
2b) # Mary ate pizza and it was pizza she ate. (cf. Horn 1981)

3a) Kai: Only David laughed.
Irene: # Yes, and Brady laughed too.

3b) Kai: It was David who laughed.
Irene: Yes, and Brady laughed too.

I aim to account for the main similarities and differences between the meanings of clefts and exclusives, the interaction both types of construction have with focus, and a puzzling range of further data, including evidence drawn from experiments that I’ve been conducting with colleagues on IT-constructions in English, French, German, and Hungarian. I’ll then compare with other accounts, showing e.g. that a recent proposal for the meaning of clefts due to Buring can be subsumed under the current account in all the cases where it works, but not where it doesn’t.

Michel Degraff has been named one of two delegates from the Linguistic Society of America to the Science and Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine) will be presenting a paper on “The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus” at Linguistic Evidence 2012 in Tübingen this week.

Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, and student editors Michelle Fullwood and Ryo Masuda.

We look forward to receiving items for inclusion in Whamit! throughout the semester. To submit items for inclusion please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 4pm before the next Whamit! appears.

The Phonology Circle will resume its weekly meetings next Tuesday, 2/14 at 5pm, in 32-D831, with a brief planning meeting. (Please note the new time!)

Both Hadas Kotek and Omer Preminger gave talks over the break at the Jerusalem/Tel Aviv Syntax-Semantics Reading Group.  Hadas’s talk was entitled “What Hebrew multiple questions can teach us about interrogative probing, and how”, and Omer’s talk a few weeks earlier was entitled “Against ‘crashes’: Evidence from Kichean and Zulu” (with an encore presentation at Ben Gurion University on on Dec. 27).

Hadas also gave a talk on “Many readings of Most” at the Hebrew University’s Logic, Language and Cognition Center, based on joint work in experimental semantics with Yasutada Sudo and Martin Hackl.

Graduate students Rafael Nonato, Guillaume Thomas and Sam al-Khatib spent January 12-19 teaching at EVELIN (Escola de VErão de LINguística Formal / Summer School in Formal Linguistics) at UNICAMP (the University of Campinas) in Brazil. Rafael taught Syntax 1 and Field Methods 1 and 2; Guillaume Semantics 1 and Sam Semantics 2.

Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009), who has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute Jean Nicod and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, has won a very fancy Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship, which will permit him to carry out further post-doctoral research on computational phonology with René Kager, at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands).  Congratulations, Giorgio!

At the Ninth Old World Conference on Phonology (OCP9), 4th-year grad student Sasha Podobryaev presented a paper on “Rhyming in echo-reduplication”, and Edward Flemming gave a plenary talk entitled “Violations are ranked, not constraints: A revised model of constraint interaction in phonetics and phonology”.

Our recent alum Maria Giavazzi (PhD 2010), now at the Ecole Normale Superieure (DEC-NPI), also spoke on “Assibilation in Standard Finnish: a case of stress-conditioned contrast neutralization”, and presented a poster on how “Vowel quality affects the identification of TSM codas” jointly authored with her classmate Hyesun Cho (PhD 2010, now at Seoul National University).

Another classmate, Jonah Katz (PhD 2010), also at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Institute Jean Nicod, presented a paper on ‘Spanish consonant clusters and the phonology of timing’ at hte Berlin Conference.

Grad students Iain Giblin, Coppe van Urk, Claire Halpert, Hadas Kotek, mitcho Erlewine, recently-a-grad-student Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011), and a trio consisting of Kai von Fintel/Danny Fox/Sabine Iatridou, have all had abstracts accepted for the upcoming GLOW (Generative Linguistics in the Old World) conference in Potsdam this March (along with many alums etc.),

Congratulations all! More as the date approaches.

Wayne O’Neil will present a paper at AAAS-2012 (17-20 February, Vancouver BC): “Two linguists, a teacher, and some middle-school students walk into a room”. Wayne’s paper is part of a three-paper symposium: “Teaching science through language” chaired by Anne Lobeck (Western Washington University).

A paper by 5th year dissertating student Peter Graff with Harvard grad student Gregory Scontras and Noah Goodman of Stanford has just been accepted for publication in Cognition. Meanwhile, you can read the paper, entitled Comparing Pluralities, here.