Whamit!

Speaker: Sam Steddy
Title: Palatalisation and the Role of Morphological Bases Across the Italian Lexicon
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 18, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

I propose that a palatalisation rule in Italian misapplies because of base-to-derivative correspondence effects. In previous work I showed that the rule misapplies in verbal morphology because verbs stand in a stress-dependent correspondence relationship with the base from of their paradigm: under- or overpalatalisation result when the stressed syllable of their infinitive contains a [±strident] segment. I now propose a means of unifying this work with Giavazzi’s (2012) account of the rule’s application in nouns and adjectives, wherein post-stress segments avoid neutralisation. Derivational verbs may underpalatalise as their suffixes reassign stress: when stress is reassigned to a syllable containing a relevant stem-final, the segment will not palatalise. The reason that stress does not prevent palatalisation in relevant underived verbs appears to be diachronic, but I will nonetheless suggest that a synchronic constraint targeting forms without a derivational base will shed further light on palatalisation in the contemporary language. In particular, and in line with phonetic theory, it will show that the contemporary neutralisation has become less aggressive, now targeting only the most front vowel /i/. This fact accounts for the as-yet unexplained failure of the fem.pl suffix /-e/ to trigger the rule.

What: ESSL Turkshop project presentations
When: Monday 18 March, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Where: 32-D831

Please note the special meeting place and date/time!

Aron Hirsch, Lilla Magyar and Mia Nussbaum will present their Turkshop projects.

Speaker: Yusuke Imanishi
Title: When ergative is default: Ergativity in Kaqchikel and Q’anjob’al (and Mayan)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 19, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

In this preliminary talk, I will explore the possibility that ergative is assigned as a default Case only when a nominal lacks a structural Case. I will begin with an investigation of the contrastive alignment between the ergative and grammatical functions in ergative splits of Kaqchikel and Q’anjob’al. I will also show that this analysis has a consequence for syntactic ergativity (e.g. a ban on A-bar extraction of the ergative subject) in the two languages (and possibly other ergative languages both within and outside Mayan). Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the proposed analysis can capture a novel generalization on the correlation between non-verbal predicates and ergative alignment patterns in some Mayan ergative splits (Imanishi 2012).

Speaker: Noah Constant (UMass Amherst)
Title: “Deriving the Diversity of Contrastive Topic Realizations”
Day/Time: Wednesday, March 20, 3:30-5:00pm
Location: 32-D461

Information structural notions like topic/focus, given/new and contrastive/non-contrastive have a diverse range of effects on sentence structure and pronunciation. In this talk, I look at Contrastive Topic (CT) constructions, and present a novel account of their meaning and structure that can make sense of the range of CT marking strategies attested in the world’s languages. I will cover languages that mark CT prosodically (e.g. English), those that employ a discourse particle (e.g. Mandarin), and those that have a dedicated CT position in the syntax (e.g. Czech).

A typical example of contrastive topic is given in (1). The object is pronounced with falling prosody, marking ‘the beans’ as the answer to the question of what Fred ate. The subject, on the other hand, bears a distinct rising contour, marking ‘Fred’ as a contrastive topic. The effect is to imply additional questions about what other people ate.

(1) (What about FRED? What did HE eat?)
     FRED … ate the BEANS.

I review Büring’s (2003) account of CT and point out several challenges for it—for example, it doesn’t extend to CT questions (attested in Japanese) and it fails to account for effects of CT marking on word order and prosodic phrasing. In its place, I introduce a new model of contrastive topic that posits a Topic Abstraction operator in the left periphery, and defines CT as the focus associate of this operator. In English, the abstraction operator is lexicalized as a tonal clitic to an intonational phrase. The influence of information structure on phrasing is captured via a scope-prosody correspondence constraint requiring the operator and its associate to be realized within a single prosodic domain.

The topic abstraction account is supported by a range of typologically diverse data. For one, it provides a simple way of understanding the possibility of dedicated CT positions in the syntax. Additionally, the account predicts the existence of CT morphemes that occur at a distance from the topic phrase itself, which are attested in Mandarin and Paraguayan Guaraní.

Speaker: Martin Rohrmeier (MIT, Intelligence initiative Fellow)
Title: Introduction to musical syntax
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 21, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In recent years, the cognitive link between music and language has been subject to various debates across disciplines ranging from linguistics, music, psychology, computer science, up to evolution and anthropology (e.g. Patel, 2008; Rebuschat, Rohrmeier, Cross & Hawkins, 2011; Katz & Pesetsky, submitted). One particular domain, in which an overlap between music and language has been frequently discussed, is syntax. Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1983) have specified a theory of tonal (Western) music which postulates nested, recursive dependency relationships that are modeled in analogy to linguistic syntax. However, a number of features of generative musical rules is not sufficiently specified in their theory. This point is addressed by a novel approach to describe musical syntax, which specifies an exact, general set of recursive generative rules and casts empirical predictions (Rohrmeier, 2011). In my presentation I will give an introduction into musical syntax and what it means to *hear* musical dependency and tree structures. I will compare these predictions with recent converging experimental evidence from cognitive and computational work.

All relevant musical concepts will be introduced and no particular music theoretical knowledge is required.

Katz, J. & Pesetsky, D. (submitted). The Identity Thesis for Language and Music, lingBuzz/000959 (2009).
Lerdahl, F. & Jackendoff, R. (1983). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA.
Patel, A.D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. Oxford University Press, New York.
Rebuschat, P., Rohrmeier, M., Cross, I., Hawkins (2011) Eds. Language and Music as Cognitive Systems. Oxford University Press.
Rohrmeier, M. (2011). Towards a generative syntax of tonal harmony. Journal of Mathematics and Music, 5 (1), pp. 35-53.

A summary of Miyagawa, Berwick, and Okanoya’s Frontiers in Psychology article, “The emergence of hierarchical structure in human language,” appeared in Science (March 8, 1132-1133). The brief piece was based on the news article Science carried on their news website.

Undergraduate linguistics major Rebecca Reed (‘14) has been selected as one of 32 students to MIT’s Burchard Scholars program for 2013.  Quoting the official announcement: “the award recognizes sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated outstanding abilities and academic excellence in some aspect of the humanities, arts, and social sciences, as well as in science and engineering.”  Congratulations, Rebecca — we are all very proud!!

There will be no LFRG this week or next since people will be out of town for spring break. However, we’d like to draw your attention to our schedule for next month.

April 5: Paolo Santorio (University of Leeds) “Exhaustified Counterfactuals”
April 12: Wataru Uegaki “Question-answer congruence and (non-)exhaustivity”
April 19: TBA
April 26: Edwin Howard “Superlative Degree Clauses: evidence from NPI licensing” Practice talk for SALT 23

As you can see, April 19 is still available, and so is all of May. If you have an idea, a paper or some work you’d like to share with us, please get in touch with Mia or Edwin.

Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Title: Positional restrictions on prenasalized stops: a perceptual account
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 11, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Previous studies on prenasalized stops have focused mainly on issues of derivation and classification, but little is known about their distributional properties. The current study is an attempt to fill this gap. I present results of two surveys documenting positional restrictions on NCs, and show that there are predictable and systematic constraints on their distribution. The major finding is that NCs are optimally licensed in contexts where they are perceptually distinct from plain oral and plain nasal stops. I propose an analysis referencing auditory factors, and show that a perceptual account explains all attested patterns.

Coppe van Urk will be reporting on a paper from ACAL 44.

Title: On Object Marking in Kikuria
Original Presenters: Rodrigo Ranero, Michael Diercks, and Rebekah Cramerus (Pomona College)
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 12th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

The talk presents data regarding object marking in Kikuria and an interesting pattern of interaction between cliticization and clitic-doubling.

Speakers: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Hadas Kotek
Title: Blocking in English causatives
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 14, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

There is much work on the two causative constructions in Japanese: *lexical* causatives, which are monoclausal constructions with listed, unproductive morphological forms; and *analytic* causatives, which are biclausal and utilize a productive causative suffix -(s)ase. In particular, Japanese causatives exhibit a *blocking effect*, where for verbs which have a listed, lexical causative form, this lexical causative can “block” the use of the more general analytic causative. In this talk we present new data on causatives in English and argue that “make” causatives and lexical causatives in English are the same as (or at least strikingly similar to) the two causatives in Japanese, in terms of syntactic structure, semantics, and also the blocking of “make” causatives by corresponding lexical causatives. However, in English this “blocking” is often not apparent, because the causee can intervene between “make” and the verb. This data provides evidence for certain spellout processes (such as fusion, in DM terms) being sensitive to linear adjacency, and also is an argument for post-syntactic construction of derivational morphology as in DM and contra the Lexicalist Hypothesis.

First-year students Ruth Brillman and Juliet Stanton have been awarded Linguistic Society of America Fellowships to attend the 2013 LSA Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Michigan.  Congratulations Ruth and Juliet!!

Norvin Richards and 3rd-year student Coppe van Urk were in our nation’s sequestered capital this weekend to present a joint paper on “Dinka and the Syntax of Successive-Cyclic Movement” at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 44), hosted by Georgetown University.  Also presenting at ACAL was our very recent alum Claire Halpert (PhD 2012), now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.  Her talk was entitled “Revisiting the Zulu Conjoint/Disjoint Alternation: Mismatches in Prosody/Syntax Mapping”.

What: Turk workshop, part 3
When: Thursday, March 14, 5:30-7
Where: 32-D461

This week will be the third part of the Turkshop. Our goal for this session is to cover the technical details of everything you need to know in order to set up your own experiment: creating an items file, randomizing using the Turkolizer, creating an HTML template, approving and rejecting subjects on Turk. Please remember to install Python 2.7.3 on your computer; you can download Python here. Materials and slides from the Turkshop can be found here.

Norvin Richards’ paper “Lardil ‘Case Stacking’ and the Timing of Case Assignment” has appeared in the latest issue of Syntax.  Highly recommended to everyone interested in case or the grammar of Lardil (Tangkic, Australia)!

Speaker: Amanda Swenson and Paul Marty
Title: Local Agreement without local binding: What the syntax and prosody of Malayalam taan teach us
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 5, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Jayaseelan (1997) among others has described the Malayalam anti-local form taan ‘self’ as a subject oriented, bound variable that requires a 3rd person antecedent. In this talk, we provide new data from the first systematic exploration of a second reading taan can have, namely an addressee (ADR) reading. We provide a detailed description of the syntactic and prosodic conditions under which 3rd person and ADR readings occur and argue for a unified account of these readings (contra Asher & Kumari 1997). We provide novel data that suggest the so-called Blocking Effects described in the literature are not an intervention phenomenon but rather the result of the morphosyntactic properties of taan. Contra recent radical revisions of Binding Theory (Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2011, Reuland 2011), we argue that local Agreement (i) always occurs between the nearest subject nominal and taan, but (ii) never results in local binding because of the anti-local nature of taan.

Speaker: Igor Yanovich
Title: Variable-force modality on the British Isles
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 7, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Recent semantic fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest uncovered modals which may render sometimes English necessity modals, other times English possibility ones without being ambiguous (Rullmann et al. 2008, Peterson 2010, Deal 2011). The analyses for those modals either attribute the peculiar behavior to a radical difference from the “European standard” in the semantics of the modal (Rullmann, Matthewson and Davis), or in the shape of the overall modal system (Deal). In this talk, I add to the typology of variable-force modality the Old English *motan (>modern must), which is analyzed in the earlier literature as a possibility modals with perhaps marginal necessity uses. Only by the end of the 15th century did the modal become a normal necessity modal it is now.

I show that in Old English ‘Alfredian’ prose *motan was an unambiguous modal carrying a presupposition of determined future which explains the peculiarities of the modal’s distribution, and creates a variable-force effect. Then I turn to the semantics of the modal in the AB dialect of Early Middle English (a literary variety written in the West Midlands in the first half of 13th century, remarkably focussed for the period of overall decline in English text production). I show that in Early Middle English, *moten (<*motan) was truly ambiguous between necessity and possibility. We can thus observe in the history of English a change from a true non-ambiguous variable-force modal, into a modal ambiguous between possibility and necessity, into a normal necessity modal.

What: Turk workshop, part 2
When: Thursday, March 7, 5:30-7
Where: 32-D461 (note the unusual location!)

This week will be the second part of the Turkshop. mitcho will teach a tutorial on regular expressions (a useful tool for life!) and then we will discuss individual participants’ ideas and designs for their own experiments. If you are a participant, we remind you that you should come with a question in mind that you would like to explore during the Turkshop and (as much as you can) also with some idea for a design. Materials from the Turkshop can be found here.

Speaker: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)
Date/Time: Friday 8 March, 3:30 - 5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Current relevance meets inchoativity: On what makes a perfect aspect

Abstract:

Here are some big questions: Why do viewpoint aspects (like perfective, imperfective, or perfect) recur in language after language with similar, but not identical, semantics? What if any universal properties are shared by the language-specific instantiations of each aspect? How much variation is permitted, and what do the differences follow from?

In this talk I address a sub-part of the big questions; my goal is to isolate the common properties shared by present perfects cross-linguistically. I concentrate mainly on Niuean (Polynesian), with brief looks at Japanese, St’át’imcets, Russian, Blackfoot, Mandarin and Saanich. Pushing Portner’s (2003) analysis of English to its logical limits, I propose that the present perfect is purely a pragmatic phenomenon, consisting only of a current relevance presupposition. Following Portner, I assume that the other salient property of the present perfect – that it places events within the Perfect Time Span – is derivable from other parts of the grammar.

The claim that perfects contribute only current relevance predicts that current relevance does not have to be associated solely with viewpoint aspect. I show that this prediction is confirmed by Niuean. The Niuean perfect displays current relevance effects and places events within the Perfect Time Span, yet differs from the English perfect in the readings obtained with each Aktionsart. In Niuean, perfect activities or stage-level states can receive a simple present-tense interpretation, perfect individual-level states receive an inchoative interpretation, and there are no universal perfect readings. I argue that all the properties of the Niuean perfect fall out from an analysis of it as an inchoativizer; it adds an initial change-of-state to any predicate. This shows that current relevance can be associated with a process operating at the level of event structure. The analysis of Niuean may also extend to Japanese teiru, as well as several other puzzling aspects cross-linguistically.

On September 20-21, 2013, MIT Linguistics will host a Conference on Metrical Structure: Text-setting and Stress. The conference marks a number of new developments in these fields as well as a number of 90th anniversaries: among them, the publication of Roman Jakobson’s O češkom stixe (1923), the first typological study of meter and stress, hailed as the beginning of Prague School phonology; Eduard Hermann’s Silbenbildung im Griechischen und in den andern indogermanischen Sprachen (1923), the first typological study of syllable weight as applied to quantitative meter; and other 1923 events of significance for the theory of metrical structure. The abbreviated name of the conference is M@90.

We are soliciting abstracts for two poster sessions: one on the role of metrical structure in stress and the other on the role of metrical structure in poetics. The abstracts should be limited to two pages including references and data and submitted in pdf format. Abstract deadline is April 30 2013. Accepted poster presenters will be notified by May 20, 2013. The address to which abstracts should be sent is stressmeter [æt] mit [dɑt] edu.

Fourth-year graduate student Hadas Kotek has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant by the National Science Foundation that will allow her to conduct linguistic experimental work on the real-time processing of multiple wh-questions in English.  Her project, entitled “Experimental Investigations of Multiple Wh-Questions”  will test the differing predictions of two prominent approaches to the syntax and semantics of these questions — focusing on so-called intervention effects, which have been central to current debates about the syntax and semantics of multiple wh-questions.   The research will be carried out at our Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab. (Martin Hackl and David Pesetsky are the faculty co-investigators on the grant.)

Congratulations, Hadas!!