Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Archive for May, 2013

Phonology Circle 5/20 - Michelle Fullwood

Speaker: Michelle Fullwood
Title: The perceptual dimensions of sonority-driven epenthesis
Time/Date: Monday, May 20, 2pm (Note special time)
Location: 32-D831

Vowel epenthesis often appears to preferentially target consonant clusters with rising sonority. One explanation for this tendency is perceptual faithfulness (Fleischhacker 2002, Steriade 2006): rising sonority clusters are more susceptible to epenthesis because the perceptual distance between the underlying /C1 C2/ sequence and its correspondent output sequence [C1 V C2] is small, thus incurring a smaller faithfulness cost.

This raises the question of how to compute the perceptual distance between two sonority contours. I propose that the appropriate metric is Sonority Angle, defined to be the angle formed by C1-C2 and C1-V. Given a standard sonority scale mapping classes of consonants to numerical sonority, this metric predicts a certain hierarchy of susceptibility to epenthesis for consonant clusters.

I present two case studies of sonority-driven epenthesis in Chaha (Ethiopia; Southern Semitic) and Irish (Celtic) that demonstrate the correctness of certain rankings of clusters in the hierarchy, in contrast with alternative proposals.

MIT linguists in Manchester

MIT will be well represented at the 21st Manchester Phonology Meeting this week (May 23-25), with a number of current students and faculty, as well as recent alums, presenting talks and posters.

    • Michelle Fullwood: The perceptual dimensions of sonority-driven epenthesis
    • Juliet Stanton: Positional restrictions on prenasalized consonants: a perceptual account
    • Adam Albright and Young Ah Do: Biased learning of phonological alternations
    • Maria Giavazzi (PhD, 2010): A rule selection deficit in Huntington’s disease patients: evidence from a morphophonological task
    • Donca Steriade: The cycle without containment: Romanian perfects
    • Andrew Nevins (PhD, 2004): Restrictive theories of harmony (invited talk)
    • Giorgio Magri (PhD, 2009): The stochastic error-driven ranking model of child variation (poster)

New paper by Gibson and colleagues

A new paper by Ted Gibson with Leon Bergen and Steve Piantadosi called “Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation” has appeared in PNAS.  If the paper itself is not accessible from your location, you can read an abstract here and some discussion here.

“Introduction to Linguistics” for high-school students

During the spring semester, a group of MIT grad students in linguistics created and taught an “Introduction to Linguistics” class for high school students.

The class was offered through HSSP, a program that allows students in grades 7-12 from all over the Boston area to take classes at MIT at low costs. Classes can be taught by any MIT student and can be about any topic. Our linguistics class had two sections, each co-taught by three teachers (Section 1: Ruth Brillman, Aron Hirsch, Coppe van Urk; Section 2: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, Iain Giblin, Hadas Kotek). It offered an interactive introduction to Linguistics as a science and covered such topics as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, experimental approaches, and dialects.

Hadas and Aron (together with new teachers Mia Nussbaum and Juliet Stanton) will be teaching this class again in the summer, and a second course dealing more specifically with syntax will also be offered by Coppe and Iain. They hope (and we do too!) that teaching such classes through HSSP and making linguistics more accessible to wider audiences will become an MIT Linguistics tradition that will continue in future years.

Steriade in Oxford

Donca Steriade will give a talk at Oxford University on Monday, May 20 (today), at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, entitled “Vowel-to-Vowel Intervals as Rhythmic Units: Evidence From the Typology of Rhyming Domains”.

See you in September!

With this issue, Whamit! goes on its annual summer semi-hiatus —  ”semi” because we may put out an issue or two if our pile of exciting news items gets big enough to justify it.  Otherwise, see you in September!!

Syntax Square 5/14 - Suyeon Yun

Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Title: Two Types of Right Dislocation in Korean
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 14, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

This paper proposes that right dislocation of an argument to the post-verbal position in Korean involves two different structures, rightward movement and bi-clausal adjunction following ellipsis, based on prosodic and syntactic evidence. Focusing on Seoul Korean, I also argue that rightward movement is triggered by a focus effect, achieved by the movement of non-focused element bearing old information, and bi-clause adjunction expresses afterthoughts through repetition of a clause.

Ling-Lunch 5/16 - Aniruddh D. Patel

Speaker: Aniruddh D. Patel (Dept of Psychology, Tufts)
Title: Speech-music rhythmic relations: empirical studies
Date/Time: Thursday, May 16, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Rhythm is widely acknowledged to be an important aspect of speech and music, and theoretical work on rhythm within each domain has long expressed interest in possible connections with the other domain. Yet empirical studies comparing rhythm in speech and music are rare. In this talk I will argue that the paucity of research reflects a fixation on periodic rhythms in human auditory cognition, and that meaningful connections between linguistic and musical rhythm are more likely to be found in the domain of nonperiodic rhythms, i.e., in systematic patterns of timing, accent, and grouping which have nothing to do with periodicity. Two lines of cross-cultural empirical research will be used to support this argument, one concerning differences in how Americans vs. Japanese listeners hear simple nonlinguistic rhythms, and one concerning reflections of speech rhythm in instrumental classical music.

ESSL Meeting 5/16 - Benjamin Storme

What: Even more Turkshop results
Who: Benjamin Storme
When: Thursday, May 16, 5:30
Where: 32-D831

The final lab meeting of the year will be dedicated to results of projects created by Turkshop participants. We will hear from Benjamin Storme about his project on wh long extraction in French.

Yasutada Sudo to University College London

We are delighted to announce that our very own Yasutada Sudo, who received his PhD from this department last summer (dissertation: On the Semantics of Phi Features on Pronouns), has accepted a position as Lecturer in Semantics at University College London  (the British counterpart of a tenure-track Assistant Professorship.)

Yasu will be moving to London from Paris, where he has spent the past year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institut Jean Nicod.  Congratulations, Yasu!!

 

 

 

Hackl on the Syntax-Semantics Interface in Lingua

An article by Martin Hackl on the Syntax-Semantics Interface has appeared in a special June issue of the journal Lingua.  The purpose of the special issue, as summarized by its editor, Luigi Rizzi, is “to present some fundamental ideas and empirical results of modern syntactic research, and make them available to the scientific communities interested in the study of language as a cognitive capacity” - an especially important task at a time when interest in linguistic questions is increasing within cognitive science.

2013 Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching for Isaac Gould!!

Third-year grad student Isaac Gould has been chosen to receive the 2013 James A.and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching, given by MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Isaac’s award letter describes the prize as follows: “This prize recognizes those instructors in our School who have demonstrated outstanding success in teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and who have been nominated by students themselves for work above and beyond the ordinary classroom responsibilities. This prize indicates that you have really made a difference in the lives of our remarkable students, an achievement that is as elusive and difficult as it is rewarding. It is a great honor to be so named.”

Isaac has been a teaching assistant for two classes, our undergraduate introductory class 24.900 Introduction to Linguistics in Fall 2011 and the first-year graduate class 24.951 Introduction to Syntax in Fall 2012, and was an outstanding teacher in both classes. This is a great honor for Isaac.  We are very proud of him!

Congratulations!!

P.S.  Isaac is in fact the second linguistics graduate student to win this award in the last four years.  Click here to learn who our 2010 winner was.

MIT’s Austronesianists go to AFLA

Next weekend, three talks from MIT will be presented at the 20th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association at the Arlington campus of the University of Texas.

At this year’s AFLA,  Norvin Richardsone of three invited speakers at the conference, will be asking and answering the question “Why are so many Austronesian languages verb-initial”.  Fourth-year student Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine will be speaking on ”Topic, Specificity, and Subjecthood in Squiliq Atayal” (research arising from his fieldwork in last summer as a member of the NSF-hosted East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute in Taiwan).  Third-year student Ted Levin will be speaking on the topic of  ”Dissolving the Balinese Bind: Balinese Binding and The A/A-Bar status of Spec TP”.   But that’s not all!    Joey Sabbagh  (PhD 2005) is one of the conference organizers, so we know it will be a great meeting.

Colloquium 5/17 - Emmanuel Chemla

The final linguistics colloquium of the semester takes place this Friday.

Speaker: Emmanuel Chemla (LSCP-CNRS Paris)
Date/Time: May 17 (Friday), 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Polarity items are acceptable in subjectively monotone environments (Based on joint work with Vincent Homer and Daniel Rothschild)

Abstract:

This talk is part of a reflection about the status of linguistic generalizations of the form: “Sentence S is acceptable to the extent that it satisfies property P”, where a linguistic intuition is related with an abstract, objective, mathematical property P. As a case study, we will defend the following version of the good-old generalization about the distribution of NPIs: “NPIs are acceptable *to the extent that* they are in an environment that is recognized as downward entailing”. We will present two sets of results in favor of this subjective version of the generalization. First, we will show that the acceptability of an NPI for a given speaker best correlates with the ability of this particular speaker to recognize that the environment is downward-entailing (Chemla, Homer, Rothschild, 2011). Second, we will show that the presence of a polarity item influences inferences comprehenders are willing to draw. Roughly, they create illusions of monotonicity (contra Szabolcsi, Bott, McElree, 2008). We will show that the shape of these illusions provides further direct evidence in favor of the generalization we defend and against previous approaches (in particular, they go against the idea of local licensing of NPIs under double negations, see Chemla, Homer, Rothschild, in preparation). We will conclude with a discussion about: (a) the position of our generalization with respect to critical configurations discussed in the literature about polarity items (Schwarz/Heim puzzle, non-assertive environments such as questions, etc.), (b) what such results teach us about the linguistic ability and its interface with other abilities.

Pesetsky@FASL 22

The weekend before last, David Pesetsky journeyed to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he was a keynote speaker at the 22nd annual conference on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL 22).  In his talk, entitled “Dvuxètapny case assignment and Richards’ conjecture: the Tangkic language Russian, and the Slavic language Lardil”, he argued that the proposal of a deep kinship between Russian and Lardil case marking proposed by Norvin Richards in the article blurbed here runs even deeper.  FASL 22 was brilliantly organized by our own Ivona Kučerová (PhD 2007), with a great team of McMaster students.

MIT linguists at SALT 2013

The 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference was held at UC Santa Cruz on May 3-5, 2013. Current students and alumni friends at the conference included:

Igor Yanovich, Variable-force modals on the British Isles: semantic evolution of *motan
Edwin Howard, Superlative Degree Clauses: evidence from NPI licensing
Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998), Presuppositions and the alternative tier
Philippe Schlenker (PhD 1999), Monkey Semantics: Towards a Formal Analysis of Primate Alarm Calls (invited talk)
Wataru Uegaki and Paul Marty, Investigating the alternative-sensitivity of ‘know’
Alexander Podobryaev, Two kinds of indexicals, one kind of monster
Ezra Keshet (PhD 2008), Sloppy identity unbound
Guillaume Thomas (PhD 2012), Is the present tense vacuous?

Thank you, Maziar!

book presentation

Last Wednesday, the department said our enthusiastic but tearful good-bye to Maziar Toosarvandani, who has been an active, much appreciated member of the department for the past two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow — and is now taking up an Assistant Professor position at UC Santa Cruz (as reported here). The grad students presented Maziar with two books about MIT and the Stata Center to remember us by, sentimental speeches were made, N. Paiute nominals and the Persian ezafe construction were discussed, and lots of great food was consumed!

IMAG1012 cropped

photo credit: Snejana Iovtcheva

Syntax Square 5/7 - Neil Myler

Speaker: Neil Myler (NYU)
Title: Building and interpreting possession sentences in Cochabamba Quecha
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 7, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available here (pdf).

This talk develops an analysis of the syntax and semantics of three different predicative possession constructions in Cochabamba Quechua, a Quechuan language of Bolivia, and draws out the consequences of that analysis for the theory of thematic roles and their place in the grammar.

Ling-Lunch 5/9 - Neil Myler

Speaker: Neil Myler (NYU)
Title: Building and interpreting HAVE sentences in (mostly) English
Date/Time: Thursday, May 9, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available here (pdf).

The literature on the syntax and semantics of possession sentences is vast. However, much of it can be seen as trying to deal with two major puzzles: what we might call the too many meanings puzzle (why do possession constructions across languages have the ability to convey a myriad of seemingly unrelated meanings, like kinship, body parts, permanent ownership, abstract attributes, etc.?), and the too many (surface) structures puzzle (why do possession constructions vary so much in their surface syntax across languages, from transitive HAVE constructions, to existential BE constructions containing an oblique possessor, to copular BE constructions containing a PP possessee?; Why is the transitive HAVE pattern relatively rare?).

I suggest that a solution to both of these puzzles is forthcoming if we take thematic roles out of the syntax, and instead have them be read off from the output of syntax in the semantic component (a conclusion argued for already on different grounds by Schäfer 2008; Wood 2012; Bruening 2013; Marantz 2009, 2013). The post-syntactic conception of thematic roles has an important consequence: whether a given argument-introducing head takes a complement or specifier is determined in the syntax, but whether it assigns a thematic role or not is determined in the semantics. This means that the notion of “syntactic argument of head X” is potentially independent of the notion of “semantic argument of head X”. I argue that this independence is key to understanding the syntactic structures of possession sentences and how they give rise to the gamut of apparently unrelated “possessive” interpretations. In particular, I argue for the following hypotheses, which rely on this conception:

  • HAVE and BE are realizations of the same abstract light verb ‘v’. Semantically, this ‘v’ is a type-neutral identity function, which will simply pass the denotation of its complement up the tree (this follows a long tradition of proposals that BE and HAVE are meaningless in themselves).
  • This ‘v’ is spelled out as HAVE only if it occurs in the environment of Kratzer’s (1996) Voice, and Voice takes a specifier. Otherwise, this ‘v’ is spelled out as BE. (i.e., HAVE is simply the transitive form of BE- much in the spirit of Hoekstra 1994. The analysis also follows the tradition of Freeze 1992 and Kayne 1993 in taking HAVE to be BE+”something else”, but takes the “something else” to be something other than an incorporated preposition).
  • The thematic roles associated with permanent ownership and the various inalienable possession relations (the part-of relation, kinship, etc) are associated with distinct DP-internal argument-introducing heads, but languages may vary in whether they first-merge the possessor in a possession sentence into the specifier of one of these DP-internal positions, or somewhere higher up in the tree.
  • The main source of cross-linguistic variation in the syntax of possession sentences is thus the position in which the possessor is introduced into the structure. If the possessor is introduced in spec-VoiceP, we have a HAVE construction/language. If the possessor is introduced anywhere lower than spec-VoiceP (e.g. in a spec position inside the possessee DP itself, in the spec of a pP which takes the possessee as its complement, in the spec of an applicative head, etc.), then we have a BE construction/language.

ESSL 5/9

What: Even more Turkshop results
When: Thursday, May 9, 5:30
Where: 32-D831
Who: Despina Oikonomou, Ruth Brillman, Wataru Uegaki, Paul Marty

This week’s lab meeting will be dedicated to results of projects created by Turkshop participants. We will hear from Despina Oikonomou, Ruth Brillman, Wataru Uegaki and Paul Marty.

Colloquium 5/10 - Andrew Nevins

Speaker: Andrew Nevins (University College London)
Date/Time: Friday May 10th, 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Agree-Link, Derivational Sandwiching, and Agree-Copy

Abstract:

Recent work on agreement with coordinated DPs has largely converged on the hypothesis that agreement is established in two steps (a move anticipated in Pesetsky & Torrego 2004). Adopting the terminology in Arregi and Nevins 2012, we can refer to these as Agree-Link, or the syntactic establishment of an Agree relation between Probe and one or more Goals, and Agree-Copy, or the postsyntactic (PF) copying from Agree-Linked Goal(s) onto the Probe. Evidence for this split of Agree into two separate steps comes from the fact that they can be derivationally intercalated by postsyntactic operations such as Linearization in Hindi and Slovenian (Bhatt and Walkow, to appear; Marusic, Nevins and Badecker, to appear) postsyntactic morpheme displacement in Bulgarian (Arregi and Nevins, to appear), and Vocabulary Insertion in West Germanic (van Koppen 2005).

Further evidence for this two-step analysis of agreement comes from a different empirical domain, namely, variation in the interaction of agreement with case syncretisms due to postsyntactic impoverishment in Basque dialects and Indo-Aryan languages. In both cases, variation in the realization of agreement is due to a uniform establishment of syntactic Agree-Link relations, coupled with dialect- or language-particular differences in the application of Agree-Copy and its derivational interaction with postsyntactic impoverishment rules. The variation found is thus largely reduced to familiar feeding and counterfeeding interactions among operations in a derivational theory.

The interaction of agreement and case syncretism in these languages thus converges with crosslinguistic coordination patterns in providing evidence for a strongly derivational theory of Agree in which the latter is established in two steps: hierarchically defined syntactic Agree-Link, followed by postsyntactic Agree-Copy, which can interact in different derivationally defined ways with other postsyntactic operations. As such, it provides converging evidence for the view that minimalist and Distributed Morphology approaches to inflection involve sequenced derivational ordering of specific elementary operations (Müller 2008, Epstein & Seely 2002).