Whamit!

Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 30, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461

In my LFRG talk I proposed a new experiment on ACD acquisition. In this talk, I would like to discuss pilot results of the experiment. Examples of the target sentences we have are as follows.

(1) Dora wants to be at the same place that Lisa is.
(2) Dora hopes to be on the same mountain that Lisa does.

As opposed to Syrett & Lidz (2011) reporting that 4 year olds can do long distance QR, our results show that children do poorly on long distance QR while they do well on short distance QR.

LFRG will meet twice this week. Please note the unusual date/time and location for this meeting:

Speaker: Anastasia Smirnova (Tufts University)
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 1, 10-11:30 am
Location: 56-180
Title: Evidentiality in Bulgarian: epistemic modality and temporal relations

Bulgarian has a designated morphological paradigm that expresses evidentiality, a linguistic category that encodes the source of information (Aikhenvald 2004). In this talk, I discuss the properties of the Bulgarian evidential system from a cross-linguistic perspective and present a formal semantic analysis of the Bulgarian evidential construction. The analysis is motivated by a number of facts that went unnoticed in the literature on evidentiality in Bulgarian and that cannot be explained by the previous analyses (Izvorski 1997; Sauerland and Schenner 2007; Koev 2011). First, I show that the same evidential construction in Bulgarian can express direct, reportative, and inferential information sources. These data not only challenge the current analysis of the Bulgarian evidential as indirect (Izvorski 1997), but also argue against the assumption that evidential systems cross-linguistically distinguish between direct and indirect information sources (Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). Second, I show that the Bulgarian evidential expresses temporal meaning: it functions as a relative tense. Finally, while I retain the insights of Izvorski’s modal analysis, I substantially change the modal component to account for reports of false information in reportative contexts (I analyze them as reports de dicto). Ultimately, I argue that the evidential construction in Bulgarian has a tripartite meaning: it encodes information source, temporality and epistemic modality. This paper addresses the question about the ontological status of evidentiality in relation to epistemic modality and contributes to the understanding of the semantics of evidentials cross-linguistically (cf. Faller 2002, McCready and Ogata 2007, Matthewson et al. 2007) by showing how the interaction of the modal and the temporal components affects the distribution and meaning of evidentials in discourse.

Speaker: Mitcho Erlewine
Title: Kaqchikel Agent Focus and the syntax of extraction
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 1, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Agent Focus (AF) in Mayan languages is a morphological change to transitive verbs which is traditionally described as obligatory whenever a subject is A’-extracted. In this talk I present evidence from my ongoing fieldwork on Kaqchikel that AF morphology does not simply appear when the subject of a transitive verb is A’-extracted. Rather, AF morphology occurs when the subject of a transitive verb moves to a particular, immediately preverbal position. This can be shown by a careful look at sentences involving multiple A’-extractions to the same verbal periphery. I will discuss what this might tell us about the nature of AF and argue against recent Case-based approaches to AF (Coon, Mateo Pedro, Preminger, ms; Assmann et al, 2012) for Kaqchikel.

The data also features some fun scope judgments… semanticists also welcome!

Speaker: Rory Turnbull (Ohio State University)
Date/Time: Wednesday, May 2, 5p
Location: 32-D831

Title/Abstract TBA

Speakers: Natalia Ivlieva & Sam Alxatib
Date/Time: 5/3 (Thu) 10 am-11:30 am
Location: 32-D831

Abstract:

In this talk, we will discuss several puzzles related to the superlative modifiers ‘at least’ and ‘at most’.

a) Superlative modifiers trigger obligatory ignorance inferences, as shown in (1):

(1) John read at least 5 books. #More precisely, he read 7.

b) Under universal quantifiers these ignorance inferences can disappear, as shown in (2):

(2) To pass the exam, you are required to read at least 5 books.

c) Under existential modals, ‘at most’ and ‘at least’ behave differently - ‘at most’ can lead to the disappearance of ignorance inferences, whereas ‘at least’ cannot:

(3) Your paper is allowed to be at most 15 pages.
(4) *Your paper is allowed to be at least 15 pages.

We will discuss Schwarz’s approach to superlative modifiers based on his handout from the “Indefinites and Beyond” workshop and see how well the approach can handle the puzzles described above.

Speaker: Maziar Toosarvandani (MIT)
Title: Temporal interpretation and discourse structure in Northern Paiute
Date/Time: Thursday, May 3, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available (pdf).

5th-year student Jeremy Hartman has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst.  His duties at UMass will include teaching and research in both syntax and language acquisition. Congratulations, Jeremy!!

Speaker: Hagit Borer (Queen Mary University of London and USC)
Date/Time: 5/4 (Friday), 3.30 pm
Location: 32-141
Title: The Domain of Content

Abstract:

An investigation of the properties of derived nominals reveals a number of rather surprising facts. First, derived nominals with non-compositional Content (or Sense) cannot be Argument Structure nominals (Complex Event Nominals in the sense of Grimshaw, 1990), contrasting, as such, with identical morpho-phonological forms which do happen to have compositional Content (e.g. transformation in its technical linguistic sense vs. transformation as transparently composed from transform). Second, Argument Structure nominals, but not necessarily others, must embed a constituent that is otherwise a possible independent verb, thereby making e.g. aviation, fiction andpetulance perfectly licit derived nominals, but not with an embedded event structure. The contrasts, as it turns out, cannot be accounted for by a lexicalist theory of word formation, nor can they be explained by appealing to any model in which roots are allowed to select arguments. The contrasts, however, can be derived within a wholly syntactic approach to argument structure and to the formation of complex words, in which the domain of non-compositional Content (atomic Content) is defined on the basis of structurally delimited, phonologically realized, syntactic constituents, and is crucially accessible by phase. The argumentation and the conclusions will thus point towards a system of complex word construction which must be syntactic. It will further points towards the need to revise at least some aspects of our understanding concerning the interaction between sound, and specifically phonological realization, and meaning, the latter specifically as in Content.

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 23, 5:30p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I will discuss some prospects for a new project investigating the realtime construction of alternatives used in the interpretation of “only”. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, Kim et al. (2008) observe that subjects fixate their eye-movement to a real-world image of the focus-associate of “only” in the auditory stimulus faster when the context mentions the target item than when it mentions a semantically unrelated item. We interprete this result as arising from the varied accessibility of the different strategies to construct alternatives for the interpretation of “only”. More specifically, a structure-based algorithm as proposed by Fox and Katzir (2011) would be more easily accessible than online inference of Question under Discussion. We will present an experimental design to test this hypothesis building on Kim et al’s experiments.

Speakers: Junya Nomura and Daeyoung Sohn
Tile: First conjunct agreement in Kaqchikel
Location: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday, Apr 24, 1-2p

The full abstract is available here (pdf).

Speaker: Uli Sauerland
Date/Time: Tuesday 4/24, 5 pm
Location: 32-D831
Title: Modeling Syncretism Distribution (joint work with Jonathan Bobaljik)

Abstract:

Does the fact that English “you” is both singular and plural, show that there’s an abstract feature “2nd Person”? While many generative analysis accept such an argument, they also need to accept cases of accidental homophony — two morphemes that aren’t related through an abstract feature, but nevertheless sound the same. But, why then not also assume that “you” in the singular and “you” in the plural accidentally sound the same with no need for an abstract feature. The distinction between accidental and systematic (i.e. derived from pieces of generative apparatus) homophony is a conundrum, generative morphologists haven’t overcome. The starting point of our talk is the new hypothesis that accidental homophony should be random — i.e. randomly distributed across languages and across cells of a paradigm. This provides the basis for a statistical approach to paradigm patterns. In the talk, we present two results: 1) The general statistical framework for the analysis of paradigm pattern frequencies. 2) A preliminary application of the framework to Cysouw’s (2003, OUP) data on person marking to argue that a generative analysis accounts for the data rather well.

Speaker: Sameer ud Dowla Khan (Brown University)
Date/Time: 4/25 (Wed), 5 pm
Location: 32-D831
Title: What echo reduplication reveals about correspondence and similarity

Abstract:

Unlike canonical reduplication, echo reduplication involves obligatory differences between the base and reduplicant, either in the form of subtraction or fixed segmentism, e.g. Bengali /goli/ > /oli goli/ ‘alleys, etc.’ and /kashi/ > /kashi tashi/ ‘cough, etc.’, respectively. I show that the unique properties of echo reduplication primarily stem from the multiple competing (anti-)correspondence relations at work, including IO-, BR- and IR-correspondence constraints, an anticorrespondence constraint, and morphemic constraints, all of which can be ranked relative to markedness constraints.Echo reduplication is also investigated as a productive alternation sensitive to phonological similarity. Results of a production experiment on Bengali reveal that BR-homophony avoidance is gradient as opposed to categorical. Bases that begin with consonants more similar to the /t/ are less likely to be echo-reduplicated with the default fixed segment /t/, and more likely to prefer one of the backup labial segments /m, f, p, u/. This homophony avoidance requires a gradient notion of phonological similarity, which can be closely modeled using a probabilistic metric that assigns different weights to different phonological features of the consonants being compared. Possible sources for feature weights are discussed, and will lead to future extensions of the current study.

Speaker: Nadine Bade (Harvard, Tübingen)
Date/Time: 4/26 (Thu) 10-11.30 am
Location: 32-D831
Title: Obligatory Presuppositions and Exhaustive Interpretation

Abstract:

I will provide an analysis for the obligatory occurrence of some presupposition triggers in certain contexts which is based on formal non-Gricean approaches to implicatures (Chierchia (2004), Fox & Hackl (2006), Fox (2007), Chierchia, Fox & Spector (2011)). Presupposition triggers are obligatory in contexts in which it is clear that their presupposition is met. Examples of the phenomenon are given below.

(1) John came to the store.
(a) # Bill came to the store.
(b) Bill came to the store, too.

(2) Yesterday Jenna went ice skating.
(a) #She went ice skating today.
(b) She went ice skating today, again.

(3)
(a) The sun is shining.
(b) # A sun is shining.

(4) It is raining.
(a) #John believes it.
(b) John knows it.

Usually these facts are explained by exploiting a principle “Maximize Presupposition” (Heim (1991), Schlenker (2006), Sauerland (2008b), Percus (2006), Chemla (2008), Singh (2011)). Most of these proposals assume that lexical items or sentences are ordered on a scale with regard to their presuppositional strength. They predict that the sentence or item that is presuppositionally weaker will lead to a specific inference called “antipresupposition” or “implicated presupposition”. I argue that the obligatory insertion of a presupposition trigger follows from the fact that people have to interpret exhaustively in certain contexts. I assume that the trigger is inserted to avoid a contradiction that arises due to the implicature that is the result of this exhaustive interpretation. The present account is hence based on an independently needed mechanism and does not need to assume lexical scales of presuppositional strength or inferences with special status. Moreover, it provides an explanation for the fact that most triggers are not obligatory under negation which “Maximize Presupposition” fails to account for.

Speaker: Kevin Ryan (Harvard)
Title: Statistical onset weight effects in stress and meter
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 26, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

A traditional observation regarding syllable weight is that it can be determined only by properties of the rime, while onsets are universally ignored. Apparently onset-sensitive weight criteria have received renewed attention in recent years (e.g. Gordon 2005, Topintzi 2010), but such cases remain uncommon. This talk presents a new kind of evidence for onset-sensitivity in syllable weight, arguing that its effects are more pervasive across languages and phenomena than previously acknowledged. In particular, I examine weight-sensitive systems exhibiting gradience/variation. Gradient syllable weight can be found in stress, poetic meter, word order (heavy shift), textsetting, and rhythmic centering or synchronization. In all of these systems, onsets not only matter, but matter in ways that are both highly consistent with each other and with the typology of categorical onset-sensitive criteria.

I focus on stress and meter, the two most discussed weight systems in phonology. First, in complex, less than fully deterministic stress systems such as those of English and Russian, onset size is a significant predictor of stress/accent placement in roots both in the lexicon and in wugs (e.g. a nonword like “brontoon” is more likely to be initially stressed than one like “bontoon”; see also Kelly 2004). I argue that this behavior cannot be attributed to analogy alone, but reflects grammatical generalization. Second, in metrics, syllables with longer onsets are avoided in preferentially light positions and overrepresented in preferentially strong ones, even while controlling for various confounds (rime structure, word shape, etc., as in Ryan 2011). A theory of syllable (or Steriadean interval) weight based on the (stochastic) perceptual downbeat of the syllable rather than the (fixed) onset-rime boundary correctly predicts both the emergence of onset effects in statistical systems as well as its rarity under small n-ary categorization (effectively, the priority of the coda).

Speaker: Uli Sauerland, ZAS (Berlin)
Date/Time: Friday 4/27, 3:30 pm
Location: 32-141
Title: Attitudes and Embedding

Abstract:

The question I investigate is whether sentence embedding is universally used for the linguistic expression of propositional attitudes (cf. Cristofaro 2003, Oxford UP). Recently, it’s been claimed that in some languages (at least Old Babylonian, Teiwa, Pirahã, Matses, Kobon) propositional attitudes are never expressed by embedding but only by other means: quotation, structures akin to coordination or even independent sentences. I present results mostly from fieldwork investigations of three of these languages (Matses, Pirahã, and Teiwa). My results provide evidence for syntactic embedding in all three languages. They also show some novel variation concerning embedding, namely total indexical shift in Matses and clause-like complementizers in Teiwa.

Phonetician and musicolinguist Jonah Katz (PhD 2010) has been awarded a 2-year Mellon Fellowship at UC Berkeley. Jonah has been a post-doc at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, and will move to Berkeley this summer. Paris, Berkeley, it’s a rough life …

Congratulations Jonah!!

Remember those WCCFL practice talks we announced last week by Coppe van Urk and Hadas Kotek. Last weekend was the real thing, and by all accounts both WCCFL 30 at Santa Cruz and the talks by Coppe (joint with UCLA’s Laura Kalin) and Hadas were great successes.

Speaker: Giorgio Magri (Jean Nicod)
Date/Time: 4/18 (Wed) 5 pm
Location: 32D-831
Title: The OT error-driven ranking model of the acquisition of phonotactics: some computational results

Abstract:

Nine-month-old infants already react differently to licit vs illicit sound combinations, thus displaying knowledge of the target adult phonotactics. Children must thus rely on a remarkably efficient phonotactics learning strategy. What could it look like? According to the error-driven learning model, the learner maintains a current hypothesis of the target adult phonotactics and keeps slightly updating its current hypothesis whenever it makes a mistake on the incoming stream of data from the adult language. This learning model has been endorsed by the Optimality Theoretic (OT) acquisition literature because of its cognitive plausibility: it models the observed acquisition gradualness, as it describes a stepwise progression towards the target adult grammar; it relies on surface phonology without requiring any knowledge of morphology, that plausibly develops later than phonotactics; and it does not impose unrealistic memory requirements, as it only looks at a piece of data at the time without keeping track of previously seen data. Bridging cognitive plausibility with computational soundness, my current project defends the hypothesis that OT error-driven learning provides a proper model of the child acquisition of phonotactics. The project is articulated around five core issues. The first issue concerns convergence: does the model eventually stop making mistakes and settle on a final grammar? The second issue concerns correctness: does the final grammar entertained by the model at convergence indeed capture the target phonotactics? The third issue concerns modeling adequacy: do the learning sequences formally predicted by the model match attested child acquisition paths? The fourth issue concerns robustness and variation: how does the model behave in the presence of noise and how can it make sense of the pervasive phenomenon of child variation? The fifth issue concerns framework selection: how can the choice of the OT framework be justified from a learning theoretic perspective? This talk will provide an overview of the project, with a focus on some recent results concerning the first two issues of convergence and correctness.

Speaker: Ben George
Location:32-D831
Date/Time: 4/19 (Thu) 10 am
Title: Question Embedding: Varieties of Reducibility and Non-Reducibility

Abstract:

In this talk is an effort to collect some of my recent concerns about question embedding under predicates, like ‘know’, that have both a propositional (1) and a question-oriented (2) use.

1. Anne knows that Maggie destroyed the records.

2. Anne knows who destroyed the records.

A usual assumption, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, is that the truth of sentences like (2) is to be evaluated in terms of the facts reported by sentences like (1). That is, most theories of question embedding employ some version of the reducibility assumption in (3).

3. The truth of a sentence like (2) is determined entirely by which answers to the embedded question (‘who destroyed the records?’) are known by the subject (Anne).

In this talk, I briefly introduce some of the (quasi-)formalizations and weakenings of (3) that I and others have suggested, and then introduce three groups of descriptive claims that challenge some or all formulations of (3), with an emphasis on moving beyond the ‘mention some’ cases that I considered before, and engaging with ‘exhaustive’ examples (4, after an example from Lahiri and an observation of Kratzer) and examples involving ‘agree’ (5, after a claim from Beck and Rullmann).

4. The witnesses know which conspirators were present at the secret meeting.
(Truth depends not only on witnesses’ knowledge, but on whether they have any relevant false beliefs.)

5. Robin and Rupert agree on which of their colleagues are spies.
(Truth depends not only on which answers Robin and Rupert agree to, but on which answers they are opinionated about.)

I do not reach any firm conclusions, but attempt to get a sense of the scope of the problem, and suggest a preliminary taxonomy of problem cases.

At the Modality workshop at University of Ottawa this coming weekend, MIT will be represented by invited speaker Sabine Iatridou (an invited speaker); Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011) and Claire Halpert (In an imperfect world: deriving the typology of counterfactual marking), and Igor Yanovich (Modal hopes and fears: a diachronic case study).  Alumna Bridget Copley(PhD 2002, CNRS & Paris 8) will also be presenting a paper at the conference (Wanting good cheese and acting to get it: Anankastic conditionals and intent).

Speaker: Leon Bergen (Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT)
Title: That’s what she (could have) said: How alternative utterances affect language use
Time: Thursday, Apr 19, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Noah Goodman and Roger Levy)

We investigate the effects of alternative utterances on pragmatic interpretation of language. We focus on two specific cases: specificity implicatures (less specific utterances imply the negation of more specific utterances) and Horn implicatures (more complex utterances are assigned to less likely meanings). We present models of these phenomena in terms of recursive social reasoning. Our most sophisticated model is not only able to handle specificity implicature but is also the first formal account of Horn implicatures that correctly predicts human behavior in signaling games with no prior conventions, without appeal to specialized equilibrium selection criteria. Two experiments provide evidence that these implicatures are generated in the absence of prior linguistic conventions or language evolution. Taken together, our modeling and experimental results suggest that the pragmatic effects of alternative utterances can be driven by cooperative social reasoning.

Just a reminder that Monday and Tuesday of this week are holidays at MIT, and no classes will be held (unless otherwise specified). Monday is Patriots’ Day, which commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord. Tuesday, of course, commemorates the day after the battles of Lexington and Concord. In theory, Wednesday should celebrate the day after Tuesday, but holidays lack the property of recursion.

Syntax Square will meet on Monday this week due to the meeting with the Visiting Committee. The presenters will be giving WCCFL practice talks.

Date/Time: Monday, Apr 9, 12-1p (Note special date/time)
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: Aspect-based agreement reversal in Neo-Aramaic

In this talk, we discuss an unusual aspect split in dialects of Neo-Aramaic, in which the function of subject and object agreement markers switches completely between aspects. We propose that agreement reversal is driven by the fact that imperfective aspect introduces an additional phi-probe. This account provides support for the hypothesis, developed in recent work on split ergativity (Laka 2006; Coon 2010; Coon & Preminger 2011), that aspect splits arise because nonperfective aspects may be associated with additional prepositional structure (Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2000; Coon 2010), since this hypothesis allows for the apparently disparate patterns of agreement reversal and split ergativity to be given a unified treatment.

Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Title: WH-Fronting in a Two-Probe System

The study of wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English and German. This talk extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are presently discussed in the literature. It will show that Hebrew distinguishes between two kinds of interrogative phrases: those that are headed by a wh-word (wh-headed phrases: what, who, [DP which X], where, how …) and those that contain a wh-word but are headed by some other element (wh-containing phrases: [NP N of wh], [PP P wh]). We observe the special status of wh-headed phrases when one occurs structurally lower in a question than a wh-containing phrase. In that case, the wh-headed phrase can be targeted by an Agree/Attract operation that ignores the presence of the c-commanding wh-containing phrase.

The talk develops an account of the sensitivity of interrogative probing operations to the head of the interrogative phrase within Q-particle theory. It proposes that the Hebrew Q has an EPP feature which can trigger head-movement of wh to Q and that a wh-probe exists alongside the more familiar Q-probe, and shows how these two modifications to the theory can account for the intricate data that emerge from the paper. The emerging picture is one in which interrogative probing does not occur wholesale but rather can be sensitive to particular interrogative features on potential goals.

Speakers: Yasutada Sudo and Jeremy Hartman
Title: Principle B and Phonologically Reduced Pronouns in Child English
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 9, 5:30-7p
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available (PDF).

Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Date/Time: 11 April (Wed), 5 pm
Location: 32D-831
Title: Epenthesis Positioning in Loan Adaptation: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology

In loan adaptation, vowel epenthesis frequently occurs as a repair, when a cluster of a source language is phonotactically illegal in the borrowing language. The most notable previous finding has been that the position of epenthetic vowels differs depending on the type of cluster; sonority- rising clusters, especially stop-sonorant (TR), are more likely to be split by an epenthetic vowel than sonority-falling clusters, especially sibilant-stop (ST), e.g., ‘plastic’ > [bilastik] (internal epenthesis) vs. ‘study’ > [istadi] (external epenthesis) (Egyptian Arabic; Broselow 1992).

This study investigates epenthesis patterns in all possible types of clusters, both in word-initial and in word-final positions, from a cross-linguistic survey of loanwords. From the results, I propose new generalizations about the preferred site of epenthesis: (i) if a cluster contains an obstruent, a vowel is epenthesized after the obstruent, e.g., ‘camp’ > [k^hɛmp^hɨ] (Korean); (ii) if a cluster contains a sonorant, a vowel is epenthesized before the sonorant, e.g., rubl (Russian) > [rubɯl] (Kirgiz).

By focusing only on initial clusters (Gouskova 2003, Steriade 2006) or on ST and TR clusters (Broselow 1992, Fleischhacker 2001, 2005), previous work has failed to identify the current broad generalizations and cannot uniformly explain the cases where the epenthesis patterns are different word-initially and word-finally, e.g., mnemonicheskij (Russ.) > [ymnemonicheskij] ‘mnemonic’ (Kirghiz) with external epenthesis vs. gimn (Russian) > [gimun] ‘hymn’ (Kirghiz) with internal epenthesis. My hypothesis is that the typology results from perceptual similarity between a consonant and its epenthesized form. Specifically, an obstruent is perceptually more similar to an obstruent-vowel sequence than to a vowel-obstruent, and a sonorant is perceptually more similar to a vowel-sonorant sequence than to a sonorant-vowel. I will show relevant phonetic bases and experimental results supporting this hypothesis. Based on this, the typology will be analyzed based on the P-map hypothesis (Steriade 2001/2009).

Speaker: Igor Yanovich
Date/Time: Thursday April 12, 10 am
Location: 32-D831
Title: Modal hopes and fears: A diachronic study

Abstract:

In Modern English, may and might are generally modals of epistemic possibility and permission. That, however, cannot explain its uses in sentences like (1) or (2) (from BNC).

(1) The contrast illustrates that music moves on, the NME moves on, grudges don’t last forever, and I hope this may be so for at least another 40 years.
(2) Omar learnt that he was related to the Sultan, and we hoped that we might persuade him to provide us with a guide to Aussa.

One possible explanation of such facts is to say that may/might in such examples is a mood indicator rather than a full-fledged modal, cf. Portner 1997. But, as Portner notes, the mood-indicating may is not productive in the present-day English. If the mood analysis is correct, then it should be possible to explain the present-day distribution of may in historical terms.

In this talk, I will discuss how may/might first started to appear in the complements of verbs hope and fear, and what consequences that has for our understanding of modal meaning development in general, and of the ‘mood hypothesis’ concerning today’s distribution in particular.

Speaker: Meghan Sumner (Stanford)
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 12, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Phonetic variation in speech is often considered a barrier to understanding spoken words. In this talk, I present data that phonetic variation is necessary and beneficial to understanding accented speech. Within the perceptual learning paradigm, listeners are exposed to p- initial words in English produced by a native speaker of French. Critically, listeners are either trained on these words with an invariant VOT based on the speaker’s mean VOT, or with variant VOTs including native English-like to native French-like examples. While a gross boundary shift is made for participants exposed to the variable VOTs, no such shift is observed for the invariant stimuli. These data run counter to models that predict consistent exposure to an invariant stimulus should ultimately result in perceptual learning, and suggest that when adjusting to accented speech, invariance is an obstacle.

Omer Preminger, PhD 2011, has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at Syracuse University. Omer is spending the current academic year as a a Post-Doctoral Teaching Associate in our department, and as Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Polinsky Language Sciences Lab at Harvard. As we reported in 2010, Omer won the Levitan Teaching Award awarded by the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT for “outstanding success in teaching undergraduate and graduate students” - so Syracuse linguistics is in for a treat.

Congratulations Omer!

Speaker: Meghan Sumner, Stanford University
Date/Time: Friday 4/13, 3:30 PM
Location: 32-141
Title: Effects of indexical variation on the perception and recognition of spoken words within and across accents

Abstract:

As listeners, we face a speech signal that is riddled with variation. We are exposed to words, but a single word is produced differently each time it is uttered. These words stream by listeners at a rate of about 5 – 7 syllables per second, further complicating the listeners’ task. How listeners map a speech signal onto meaning despite massive variation is an issue central to linguistic theory. One problem we currently face is that the vast majority of these different realizations of words are understood equally well by listeners.

While speech is variable, it is also informative. In any window of speech, listeners are presented with cues to sounds, sound patterns, words, speakers and their intentions, emotions, accents and other social characteristics. In this talk, I suggest that in order to understand how listeners take all the individual parts of a word that often vary drastically and understand them as quickly and adeptly as they do, we must understand the influence of these different types of information in speech perception.

In this talk, I begin with an assumption that listeners, by default, use these ever-present cues together. I examine the perception of phonological variants sensitive to typically co-present phonetic and social cues. First, I present data from phoneme categorization tasks designed to examine the effects of different phonological variants across different modes of speech (careful vs. casual). Rather than comparing the responses to words with a frequent phonological variant (e.g., tap) to those with a less frequent member of a variant pair (e.g., [t]) embedded in controlled word-frame, I examine the perception of these variants in phonetic and social contexts in which they are typically heard by listeners. Second, I present data from priming tasks designed to examine the recognition of words with different phonological variants across accents. In this case, I show that an out-of-accent variant results in different behavioral responses dependent on the accent of the speaker. From these data, I argue that many effects attributed to phonological variants are illusory and that the emphasis on the variants hides important patterns linking acoustic variation and social representations.

I suggest that the data from these experiments support a view in which cued social attributes influence perception and recognition at a low-level. This work helps explain effects of phonological variants that are oftentimes conflicting, highlights the effects of social factors independent of the rich lexicon, and has implications for how linguistic units are stored and recalled by listeners.

There will be no Experimental Syntax/Semantics Lab meeting this week.

Speaker: Sverre Stausland
Title: Vowel Weakening in Old West Saxon
Date: April 2 (Monday—note the special date and time!)
Time: 5:30
Location: 32D-831

The predecessor of the Modern English weak verbs with a past tense in -ed is the Old English second weak conjugation. In West Saxon, the main dialect of Old English, the past tense forms of these verbs exhibit both the vowel ‘a’ and ‘o’: ‘andswarade ~ andswarode, wundad ~ wundod’, corresponding to Modern English ‘answered’ and ‘wounded’. The explanation given in the grammars of Old English is that the ‘o’, which goes back to an older ‘u’, stems from the verb forms where an original *u followed in the ending. I raise an alternative hypothesis by which the ‘o’ (< ‘u’) originated in medial syllables through vowel reduction. A statistical analysis of the verb forms in the largest Old West Saxon manuscript shows that ‘o’ is significantly more common in medial syllables than in final syllables, but that there is no correlation between the distribution of ‘a’ and ‘o’ and where an original *u followed in the ending. The explanation in the grammars is therefore not supported. I suggest that the vowel has been reduced in medial syllables because vowels in medial syllables are shorter than in final syllables.

Remaining Schedule
April
11 Suyeon Yun
18 Giorgio Magri
25 Sameer ud Dowla Khan, Brown U

May
2 Rory Turnbull, Ohio State University
9 Manchester Phonology Meeting Practice Talks
16 Manchester Phonology Meeting Practice Talks

Speakers: Norvin Richards and Coppe van Urk
Title: Dinka Bor and the signature of successive-cyclic movement
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 3, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, we outline our initial findings with regards to the syntax of extraction in Dinka Bor. In particular, we will focus on a number of ways in which extraction affects Dinka clauses, including (a) certain positions having to be empty, (b) blocking of subject agreement, and (c) the appearance of various forms of special agreement/clitics. We show that these effects differentiate between different types of extraction and discuss the theoretical ramifications of these patterns.

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Japanese alternative questions are matrix disjunctions of Q-marked clauses
Date/Time: Thursday April 5, 10 am
Location: 32-D831

Abstract:

Authors in the previous literature disagree on whether ellipsis is involved in alternative questions and (if it is) how large the elided material is (e.g., Han & Romero 2004, Beck & Kim 2006, Pruitt & Roelofsen 2011). In this talk, I present my ongoing analysis of Japanese alternative questions, and argue that they are best analyzed as disjunctions of Q-marked clauses with ellipsis in the first disjunct. The argument is based on the restricted syntactic distribution of alternative questions in Japanese: DP disjunction under the Q morpheme “ka” does not induce alternative question reading (i.e. yes/no-question reading is obligatory) while VP disjunction under “ka” allows (in fact strongly prefers) alternative question reading, as exemplified in (i) below.

(i)

a. watashi-wa [Mary-ga [John ka Sue]-o yonda-ka] shitteiru
     1sg-Top Mary-Nom John Disj Sue-Acc called-Q know
     *’I know whether it is John or Sue that Mary called.’ (*alt Q)
     ‘I know whether or not Mary called [John or Sue].’ (Y/N Q)

b. watashi-wa [Mary-ga [John-o yonda ka Sue-o yonda]-ka] shitteiru
     1sg-Top Mary-Nom John-Acc called Disj/Q Sue-Acc called-Q know
     ‘I know whether it is John or Sue that Mary called.’ (alt Q)
     ? ‘I know whether or not Mary called [John or Sue].’ (? Y/N Q)

I show that this fact straightforwardly falls out as a consequence of a restriction on the deletion operation in the first disjunct, given a unified semantic analysis of the disjunction marker “ka” and the Q-particle “ka” as a polyadic operator that creates alternative possibilities (cf., e.g., Zimmermann 2000, Alonso-Ovalle 2006). If time allows, I would also like to talk about possible sources of cross-linguistic variation in the distribution of alternative questions.

Speaker: Adam Szczegielniak (Harvard)
Title: Relativizing two types of degrees
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 5, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

This talk will propose an alternative to Carlson (1977) and Grosu and Landman (1998) derivation of (1) and (2) that combines a raising analysis of DegP and a matching analysis of NP. Support for this claim will come from head noun reconstruction facts, as well as scope contrasts between degree relatives and comparatives. DegP will be argued to have its denotation built via subsequent overt raising within CP, where it undergoes Maximization and then moves out of CP to a position modifying the external NP. Differences between (1) and (2) will be attributed to differences in the type of DegP (based on work in Szczegielniak 2012). Following Neelman, Koot & Doetjes (2004), I will argue that there are two DegP’s: one that projects, and the other that merges in Spec-XP.

In what time remains, I will examine the impact of the above analysis for other types of relative clauses, especially restrictive relatives and argue that we should revisit the intuition developed in Quine (1960) that they are clausal adjectives.

(1) It would take us all year to drink the champagne that you spilled at the party
      A. the amount of champagne
      #B. the actual champagne

(2) John took the books that there were on the table

Speaker: Benjamin Spector — Institut Jean Nicod, ENS
Date/Time: 3:30 PM, Friday 04/06
Location: 32-141
Title: Generalized Scope Economy (Joint work with Clemens Mayr, ZAS Berlin)

Abstract:

It is a well-known fact that the relative scopes of several operators in a sentence do not always correspond to their relative surface positions. In order to account for such cases, covert scope shifting operations (CSSOs) such as QR and reconstruction have been assumed to apply, resulting in hierarchical structures that deliver the correct interpretation. Such operations, however, are not completely free to apply. One type of restriction on the application of CSSOs has been extensively studied, namely, locality constraints that prevent a CSSO from covertly moving an operator out of a so-called scope-island. There is, however, a second type of restriction that has not been studied to the same extent. In many cases, a CSSO seems to be able to shift the scope of a certain expression x in a sentence S but cannot affect the scope of some other expression – call it y – in a structurally parallel sentence where x has been replaced with y.

Consider for instance the following pair:

(1) Every student did not attend the talk
> Inverse-scope possible: Not every student attended the talk
(2) More than two students did not attend the talk
> Inverse-scope marginal: ??? No more than two students attended the talk.

In other words, the possibility of applying a CSSO seems to depend in part on the nature of the expressions that it targets. As far as we know, the only attempt to account for these types of restrictions in a general way is due to Beghelli & Stowell (1997). These authors propose to account for all the observed restrictions in terms of a cartographic analysis. They assume that CSSOs such as QR or reconstruction target different landing sites depending on the surface position and the nature of the item that undergoes the operation. Although this proposal has broad empirical coverage, it is not really explanatory, since it does not provide a principled account of why the hierarchy of landing sites is the way it is. We develop an alternative approach whose goal is to account for the observed restrictions in a unified way. We propose a new licensing constraint on CSSOs, which is itself a generalization of Fox’s 2000 Scope Economy. In short, we argue that a CSSO can only apply if the resulting interpretation is not logically stronger than or equivalent to the surface-scope interpretation. We will show that such a principle makes correct predictions for a broad range of structures, discuss how exactly it should be implemented, and address apparent counterexamples.

Wayne O’Neil is spending three weeks in China (Mar 28-Apr 18), lecturing on linguistic theory and second-language acquisition, at Shandong University in Jinan for the most part, but also at Beijing Foreign Languages University.

Wayne taught at Shandong University fall term 1982-1983, and since June 1984, he has been an honorary professor of linguistics there. So this trip is a sort of homecoming or reunion.

Our very own Shigeru Miyagawa has won MIT’s President’s Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence (ACE) “for his contributions to the global OpenCourseWare and Open Education movements.” More here. Congratulations Shigeru!!

The 22nd Colloquium on Generative Grammar was held in Barcelona on March 21-23. Donca Steriade was an invited speaker (The cycle without containment), and talks were given by graduate student Yusuke Imanishi (A Non-Uniform Merge of Argument WH: A Case Study in Kaqchikel) and recent alum Maria Giavazzi (PhD 2010; “Assibilation in Standard Finnish: a case of stress-conditioned contrast neutralization”). The conference also included a poster by Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009; “No need for a theory of the distribution of readings of English bare plurals”).

Next month, a sizable group of current and recent members of our department will be at the 20th anniversary of the Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm20, May 24-26). As part of the anniversary, invited speakers will discuss unsolved problems in phonology. Among the speakers are faculty member Donca Steriade, on segment sequencing, and recent visitor Nina Topintzi (Universitaet Leipzig), on compensatory lengthening. Additionally, the following abstracts were accepted:

Talks:

Adam Albright: “Shared neutralizations without shared representations”
Sam Alxatib: “The stress-epenthesis opacity in Palestinian Arabic”
Tara McAllister Byun (PhD 2009, Montclair State University), Sharon Inkelas, and Yvan Rose: “Transient phonology, CON and child phonological processes”
Laura McPherson (Visiting student 2011, UCLA) and Bruce Hayes: “Relating application frequency to morphological structure: the case of Tommo So vowel harmony”
Kevin Tang and Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005, UCL): “Learning from mistakes: computational modelling of slips of the ear”

Posters:

Gretchen Kern: “Perceptual similarity in sonority contours: evidence from Early Irish rhyming patterns”
Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009, University of Paris 7): “The stochastic error-driven ranking model of child variation”
Sam Steddy: “How palatalisation in Italian verbs is a regular process”
Suyeon Yun: “A typology of epenthesis positioning in loanword adaptation: A perceptual account”

Congratulations to all!