Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Archive for November, 2012

Phonology Circle 11/26 - Suyeon Yun

Date: Monday, Nov. 26
Time: 5pm
Location: 32D-831
Presenter: Suyeon Yun (MIT)
Title: The Role of Acoustic Cues in Consonant Cluster Adaptation

In this talk I will argue that cross-linguistic asymmetries in nonnative cluster repairs - namely vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion - result from perceptual similarity between the clusters and their repaired forms. Expanding my survey in Yun (2012), I suggest some new typological generalizations. First, when the edge consonant is a stop, a vowel is most likely to be epenthesized after the stop. If not, the edge stop deletes, while the non-edge stop does not  (e.g., gdansk (Polish) → [dænsk] (English; Yun 2012), ‘compact’ → [khəmpɛkthɨ] (Korean; Yun 2012), ‘blanket’ → [lɛnketti] (Finnish; Karttunen 1977), ‘compact’ → [kompak] (Indonesian; Yun 2012)). Second, when the edge consonant is a sonorant, a vowel is epenthesized before the sonorant. (e.g., lbovskij (Russian) → [ylbovskij] (Kirghiz; Gouskova 2003), rubl’ (Russian) → [rubɯl] (Kirghiz; Yun 2012)). While vowel-adjacent sonorants frequently delete, word-edge sonorants do not delete; even in a language where deletion can be a repair strategy, word-edge sonorants undergo epenthesis rather than deletion (e.g., ‘Swaziland’ → [suasilaan] vs. ‘Seattle’ → [siiaatul] (Inuktitut; Pollard 2008)). In addition, I will report several interesting asymmetries concerning positions, source languages, places of articulation, and voicing in stop adaptations, which cannot be explained by standard phonological constraints. Based on the typology, I will argue that acoustic cues, such as stop release bursts and sonorant-internal cues, play a crucial role in consonant cluster adaptation and formulate them as phonetically-based faithfulness constraints. And it will be shown that interactions between  fixed rankings of the phonetically-based constraints (based on the P-map hypothesis (Steriade 2001/2008)) and markedness constraints successfully account for the comprehensive cross-linguistic patterns of the nonnative cluster repairs.

Syntax Square 11/27 - Michael (mitcho) Erlewine

Speaker: Michael (mitcho) Erlewine
Title: Right-location as deletion (Ott & De Vries)
Date/Time: 27 Nov, 1pm
Location: 32-D461

Mitcho will present Dennis Ott & Mark De Vries’ NELS talk, “Right-dislocation as deletion”. The paper is available here.

Cohen-Priva to speak at Harvard

Uriel Cohen-Priva (Brown U) will be speaking this week at Harvard, in the Language Universals and Linguistic Diversity Colloquium series.

Speaker: Uriel Cohen Priva (Brown University)
Title: Providing universal explanations for language-specific change
Date: Thurs, November 29th 3:30-5pm
Location: Boylston 105

American English often deletes /t/ word-finally, and taps /t/ in intervocalic contexts. Other varieties of English debuccalize and spirantize /t/ in similar contexts. This pattern is not unique to English. Romance languages tend to debuccalize and delete /s/, and varieties of Arabic front, voice and debuccalize /q/. What makes varieties of English repeatedly reduce the articulatory effort of pronouncing /t/ but not /s/? Is there a systematic way to predict which language would prefer to reduce which sound?

I present a new model, MULE, that traces the reasons that lead some languages to preserve sounds that other languages reduce. I show that these phenomena emerge from the balance between two functional forces: information utility and effort avoidance. Information utility is the amount of information that speakers expect a sound would provide — how useful the sound is from an information-theoretic perspective. Therefore, high information utility leads to the preservation of articulatory effort. Effort avoidance is the attempt to reduce articulatory effort, as follows from Zipf’s principle of least effort. In MULE, a sound that provides an insufficient amount of information utility with respect to the articulatory effort it requires is a likely target for an effort-reducing change.

I show theoretically and experimentally how MULE can explain language-specific tendencies to reduce different sounds. Additionally, I demonstrate how the same principles predict language-specific distributional facts, such as a cross-linguistic preference to use highly informative sounds in stressed syllables.

LFRG 11/30 - Salvador Mascarenhas

Speaker: Salvador Mascarenhas (NYU)
Title: Reasoning fallacies and treating premises as questions
Date/Time: Friday November 30, 2:10pm-3:20pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract:

The capacity to reason is central to all advanced human endeavors. It is fallible, yet pushed to its limits it makes science and philosophy possible. We propose a theory of human reasoning that provides a novel view of fallacies in na ̈ıve reasoning as well as our ability to reason competently. Default reasoning treats premises as questions and maximally strong answers to them, even though premises do not superficially look like questions or answers. As reasoners try to understand each new premise as an answer to the question at hand, they overestimate the relevance and appropriateness of these “answers,” producing fallacious conclusions. Yet, systematically asking a certain type of question as we interpret each new premise allows us to reason in a classically valid way, a result we prove formally.

Phonology Circle 11/19 - Keiichi Tajima

Speaker: Keiichi Tajima (Professor, Dept. of Psychology, Hosei University / Visiting Researcher, Speech Communication Group, Research Laboratories of Electronics, MIT)
Title: Perception of prosody in a non-native language: The case of Japanese listeners’ perception of English syllable structure.
Date/Time: Monday, Nov 19, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Learners of a second language (L2) are known to have difficulty in the production and perception of not just phonetic contrasts that are not found in their native language (L1), but also prosodic properties that diverge from their L1, such as syllable structure, rhythm, and intonation. In the present study, I report results from a series of studies that investigated the extent to which native Japanese listeners have difficulty perceiving syllables in spoken English, given the fact that English generally has more complex syllable structures than Japanese. Results show that Japanese listeners indeed have great difficulty accurately counting syllables in spoken English words. Perceptual identification training, however, significantly improves their performance. The non-native listeners’ difficulty was strongly related to phonological factors such as the syllable complexity of the English words, but it was not related to phonetic factors such as the speaking rate of the words, nor to lexical factors such as the presence or absence of loanwords in Japanese that are etymologically / semantically related to yet phonologically distinct (with divergent syllable structures) from the source words, e.g., English source word “stress” and its corresponding Japanese loanword “sutoresu”.

Syntax Square 11/20 - Ted Levin

Speaker: Theodore Frank Levin
Title: Dependent Case is Licensing
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov 20, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Baker and Vinokurova (2010) suggest that some languages (including Sakha) may utilize both configurational (i.e. Marantz 1991) and functional-head driven (i.e. Chomsky 2000, 2001) approaches to case-assignment. I have argued elsewhere that Sakha is not such a language (Levin and Preminger 2012). However, I will argue that English is such a language.

Under common assumptions regarding Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001), a probe must c-command its goal and that probe must have an uninterpretable (and hence unvalued) feature.

(1) AGREE (Chomsky 2000, 2001)
(i) An unvalued feature F (a probe) on a head H scans its c-command domain for another instance of F (a goal) with which to agree.
(ii) If the goal has a value, its value is assigned as the value of the probe.

Given this assumption, the functional-head driven account of Case assignment is unexpected: A functional head with unvalued φ-features probes its c-command domain for a nominal with valued φ-features and enters an Agree-relationship. As a consequence of this, the c-commanded nominal’s unvalued Case-feature is valued. This valuation is unexpected, as the unvalued Case-feature is not in a position to act as a probe given (1).

A number of proposals have attempted to eliminated instances of “Reverse Agree” (e.g. Boskovic 2007, Zeiljstra 2011). Boskovic (2007) suggests that if (some) probes cannot find a goal in their c-command domains, they will move successive-cyclically until they come to c-command an appropriate, valued feature. An immediate advantage of this account is that it allows us to derive the EPP. In intransitive clauses a DP base-generated in Spec-vP or Compl-V will raise to Spec-TP, because the unvalued Case-feature on the DP triggers movement. Once in Spec-TP, the DP c-commands T0, and is able to value its Case-feature.

However, there is a problem if we assume that both T0 and v0 assign Case in transitive constructions. A subject DP, base-generated in Spec-vP, should be able to value its Case-feature against v0. If this occurs, the object DP should move to Spec-TP to value its Case-feature by Agreeing with T0. Proponents of unvalued-feature driven movement have suggested that accusative case in transitive clauses may be lexically assigned by V0. While only accusative assigned in ECM constructions is assigned by v0.

I will suggest that in a hybrid approach to case-assignment, we can maintain the account of the EPP and treat ECM and transitive accusative uniformly. Specifically, nominative case is assigned under a functional-head driven approach whereby a DP must occupy Spec-TP to be valued nominative. Both ECM and transitive accusative are assigned configurationally. Under this approach accusative case is assigned to an object DP, because it is c-commanded by an as-of-yet caseless nominal. Crucially dependent case must be assigned within the narrow syntax (Baker & Vinokurova 2010; Preminger 2011) contra Marantz (1991) and Bobaljik (2008). Evidence from Case Adjacency effects in English will be utilized to argue for the proposed hybrid theory.

Syntax Square 11/13 - Marko Hladnik

Speaker: Marko Hladnik (Utrecht University)
Title: Resumption in Slavic relative clauses
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov 13, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Starting with Slovene, we explore the patterns of relative clause (RC) resumption and argue that the common alternative ways of forming a RC we find in Slavic languages share one and the same syntactic derivation, with differences arising at PF due to recoverability considerations. Furthermore, the necessity to differentiate three types of resumption is demonstrated, and we argue that apparent optionality of resumption in Serbo-Croatian and Polish has deeper syntactic causes, and is conditioned by case morphology paradigms.

Ling-Lunch 11/15 - Isa Kerem Bayirli

Speaker: Isa Kerem Bayirli
Title: Impossible Syntactic Representations = Impossible Morphological Expressions?
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32D-461

In this talk, I will argue that previous approaches to suffixhood in the inflectional domain, both in their lexicalist (Lieber, 1980 i.a. ) and syntactic (Ouhalla, 1991 i.a.) variants, fail to capture a pattern that emerges upon closer inspection. The pattern in question is this:

V-X Generalization
A morpheme that categorically selects for a verbal item is always a suffix on this verbal item.

An approach that takes suffixhood to be lexically idiosyncratic information treats this as an accident - an unsatisfying conclusion.

My second claim will be that this observation is correlated with a restriction on what kind of behavior verbal items can show:

A Restriction on the Behavior of Verbal Items
Projections headed by verbal items cannot show phrasal behavior (i.e. movement to a spec position and coordination).

The challenge posed by the English language to these claims will be argued to arise from the fact that what has been taken to be bare `VP` in English is actually a projection headed by an infinitival projection, for which independent evidence is presented.

The correlation between the generalization and the restriction given above will be formed as a causal relation, using an non-lexicalist implementation of Brody`s (2003) Mirror Theory.

All in all, we will end up having impossible morphological facts arising from an impossible syntactic representation. This adds a new dimension to debates on the exact relation between syntax and morphology.

ESSL Meeting 11/15 - Wataru Uegaki

Title: A grammatical source of the “Gettier” judgment
Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Date/Time: Thursday, November 15, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D831

In this talk, I will present the result of my joint experiment with Paul Marty on what kind of grammatical factors affect English native speakers’ truth-value judgment of sentences containing “know”. After Gettier’s (1963) famous examples, it is widely known that a sentence of the form “x knows that p” can be false even when x justifiably believes p and p is true, contra the traditional view that knowledge consists of justified true belief. In our experiment, we tested whether the grammatical form of the complement of “know” affects the truth-value judgment of a knowledge-sentence. According to the result of our experiment, participants judge a knowledge-sentence with a disjunction in the complement significantly less likely as true than a classically equivalent sentence without a disjunction, especially under a Gettier-like scenario. We will discuss theoretical consequences of this result on the semantics of “know” and associated verification strategies. Specifically, I will argue that the result is compatible with the semantics of “know” which is sensitive to the “alternative possibilities” induced by specific grammatical devices such as disjunction and indefinites whereas it calls for further explanation in the analysis where “know” is only sensitive to the classical semantic value of the complement.

MIT Linguistics to host Japanese/Korean Linguistics 23 and NECPhon in Fall 2013

We’re excited to announce that two conferences will be hosted by our department next fall.

The 23rd Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (JK23) is the longest running conference on Japanese and Korean linguistics, offering a forum for the presentation of research that contributes to our understanding of the structure and history of the two languages. Next year’s meeting is scheduled for October 11-13, 2013. The website for JK23 is at http://jk.mit.edu/.

The Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop (NECPhon) is an informal gathering of scholars working on or interested in aspects of computational phonology. The meeting date is to be determined.

Stay tuned for further information.

Phonology Circle 11/5 - Maria Giavazzi

Speaker: Maria Giavazzi (CNRS)
Title: A linguistic deficit in Huntington’s disease? Preliminary evidence from a dissociation between production and perception in a morpho-phonological task
Date/Time: Monday, Nov 5, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

There is a lively debate in the recent literature about whether the striatum holds a specific role in linguistic processing, or whether it contributes to linguistic processing indirectly, through its role in executive control, memory and attention (Ulmann 2004; Teichmann et al. 2005, 2008; Chan et al. 2012; Mestres-Missé et al. 2012).

Huntington’s Disease (HD) offers a unique model of primarily atrophy of the striatum with simultaneous decline in various cognitive functions. Although language impairment in this disease has been described in the literature (Teichmann et al., 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, Sambin et al. 2012), evidence is scattered and the specific nature of the deficit has yet to be understood.

In this talk I present data from two experiments conducted with French HD patients. The experiments tested the morphophonological knowledge of the patients, looking specifically at gender alternations within the adjectival paradigm (e.g. [petit] FEM- [peti] MASC ‘small’ ). Although patients had been previously reported to be impaired in a similar task, I show that the deficit is present in a production task, but absent in perception (grammaticality judgment task). I discuss a possible grammatical explanation for this data and try to put it in the wider context of the role of the striatum in language and other linguistic deficits observed in this disease.

Data collection was completed only very recently and its analysis is still in its early stages. I am looking forward to comments and discussion.

Syntax Square 11/6 - Hadas Kotek

Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Title: Wh-coordination in free relatives (Barbara Citko/Martina Gracanin-Yuksek, NELS43)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov 6, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Hadas will present Barbara Citko (University of Washington) and Martina Gracanin-Yuksek’s (METU) recent talk at NELS43. The abstract is available here (pdf).

Ling-Lunch 11/8 - Jonathan Barnes

Speaker: Jonathan Barnes (BU)
Title: Title:
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov 8, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Much of the recent history of research in intonational phonology could fairly be characterized as an ongoing debate between so-called “configuration-based” and “level-based” approaches to the primitive elements that comprise representations of intonation contours. Configuration-based models understand intonation in terms of dynamic elements, such as rises and falls, while level-based models deal instead in static pitch-level targets (primarily Highs and Lows). As phonological opinion has settled in favor of level-based theories, it has been tempting to see a direct instantiation of phonological tone levels in local F0 turning points (e.g., maxima and minima, hereafter TPs). The study of F0 TPs from this point of view has uncovered substantial systematicity both in how tonal movements align with the segmental skeleton of an utterance, and in how they are scaled with respect to each other in the frequency domain. However, serious problems have surfaced as well: TP-locations are often ambiguous, or even unrecoverable, from the F0 record. Worse still, evidence suggests that a host of difficult-to-quantify aspects of global contour shape influence perception of contour identity, potentially overriding TP-based evidence under the right circumstances. Listeners, in other words, attend to precisely those aspects of the signal that standard level-based models predict they should ignore. In this talk, I will present evidence from paired perception and production studies involving intonation patterns in American English, in support of a new approach to the phonetics and phonology of intonation. This model, based on the notion of Tonal Center of Gravity (TCoG), captures key insights from configuration-based approaches, without abandoning the central tenets of a level-based intonational phonology. It also makes a variety of predictions concerning tonal implementation and the structure of tone inventories that are not accessible in traditional level-based terms. One of these I explore further in the context of tonal co-occurrence patterns in Chinese languages.

MIT Linguists at BUCLD

The 37th BU Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 37) took place this past weekend at Boston University. Among the presentations were:

  • Ayaka Sugawara, Hadas Kotek, Martin Hackl and Ken Wexler: “Long vs. short QR: Evidence from the acquisition of ACD”
  • Jeremy Hartman, Yasutada Sudo and Ken Wexler: “Principle B and phonologically reduced pronouns in child English”

Linguistics Colloquium - Mark Baker - POSTPONED

Mark Baker’s colloquium for Friday has been cancelled due to the effects of Hurricane Sandy. It will be rescheduled for a later date.