Whamit!

Speaker: Gaja Jarosz (Yale/MIT)
Title: Inductive Bias in the Acquisition of Syllable Structure in Polish
Date/Time: Monday, Sept 30, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D831

(Joint work with Shira Calamaro and Jason Zentz, Yale University.)

A growing body of recent computational and experimental work investigates the kinds of constraints or inductive biases that are needed to explain adult learning outcomes and artificial language learning results. This paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the extent to which inductive biases are needed to explain phonological development. Our focus is on modeling development of production to probe the learning biases that affect the acquisition process in a naturalistic setting. We use statistical modeling to make and test predictions for learning based on properties of the language input. In particular, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous productions of four Polish-learning children, we present detailed analysis of the acquisition of syllable structure in Polish and the phonological factors underlying the observed development. We subsequently construct a variety of phonotactic probability models estimated from a corpus of spontaneous speech spoken to these children and examine the abilities of these input-based models to explain the observed acquisition effects. Our findings indicate that, while certain phonotactic probabilities are highly predictive of acquisition, none can explain the full range of observed acquisition effects. We show that development of syllable structure is sensitive to phonological factors not recoverable from the phonotactic probabilities, suggesting a crucial role for inductive biases. We also show that access to abstract phonological representations plays a key role in explaining the developmental effects. We discuss implications of these results for theories of phonological learning.

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: On the structure of Japanese passive constructions
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 1, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Please see the full abstract (pdf).

Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Title: What moves where when you process wh-in-situ
Date/Time: Thursday, Oct 3, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Recent theories of interrogative syntax/semantics adopt two strategies for the interpretation of in-situ wh-phrases: covert movement (Karttunen 1977, a.o.) and in-situ interpretation (Hamblin 1973, a.o.). The availability of covert movement is traditionally assumed to be all-or-nothing: the in-situ wh covertly moves to C or else stays in its base-generated position and is interpreted without movement at LF. In this talk I argue that this assumption cannot be maintained. I present evidence from real-time sentence processing of English multiple wh-questionswhich shows that wh-phrases require both covert movement and in-situ interpretation for their derivation. I propose a new syntax-semantics for multiple questions that can derive the experimental data.

The Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab (ESSL) is resuming its regular lab meetings on Thursday evenings at 5 pm in 32-D831. The organizers are currently looking for people to present their research at these meetings (ongoing and finished projects are equally welcome). If you are interested in presenting, please email Erin Olson with a preferred presentation date and a title/short description of what you’d like to present.

Congratulations to Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011), who has just been officially named a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Canada’s most coveted postdoctoral award! As a Banting Fellow (who made it through stiff national and international competition), Bronwyn will conduct collaborative research with Elisabeth Cowper and other colleagues at the University of Toronto on a project entitled “Variation in temporal categorization: Towards a feature system for tense and aspect”. Great news!

Side note: Unless we have missed someone, we believe that Bronwyn is just the second linguist to win this fellowship since it was inaugurated three years ago. The other linguist so honored (two years ago) was Jessica Coon (PhD 2010), now an Assistant Professor at McGill.

The organizers of LFRG would like to arrange a few meetings around the theme of exhaustivity and scalar implicatures this semester. If anyone would like to present so if anyone would like to present a paper or ideas of their own on these topics, please contact Edwin Howard or Chris O’Brien.

Speaker: Chris O’Brien
Date/Time: Friday 10/4, 1-2.30 pm
Location: 32-D831
Topic: Experimental evidence for embedded scalar implicatures (Chemla & Spector 2011)

Chris O’Brien will discuss Chemla & Spector’s 2011 paper “Experimental evidence for embedded scalar implicatures”. Abstract of the paper:

“Scalar implicatures are traditionally viewed as pragmatic inferences which result from a reasoning about speakers’ communicative intentions (Grice 1989). This view has been challenged in recent years by theories which propose that scalar implicatures are a grammatical phenomenon. Such theories claim that scalar implicatures can be computed in embedded positions and enter into the recursive computation of meaning—something that is not expected under the traditional, pragmatic view. Recently, Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009) presented an experimental study in which embedded scalar implicatures were not detected. Using a novel version of the truth value judgment tasks, we provide evidence that subjects sometimes compute embedded scalar implicatures.”

Speaker: Michael Wagner (McGill)
Date/Time: Friday October 4th, 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Additivity and the Syntax of ‘Even’

Abstract:

Whether ‘even’ carries an additive presupposition remains controversial. While Horn (1969), Karttunen and Peters (1979), Wilkinson (1996) and many others have argued that it does, Stechow (1991), Krifka (1992) and Rullmann (1997) reached the opposite conclusion. This talk identifies a restriction on the focus alternatives that additive operator may range over: They cannot entail or be entailed by what is asserted. Based on tests relying on this restriction and more conventional arguments, the talk then develops a novel syntactic generalization about the circumstances under which even triggers an additive presupposition which reconciles apparently contradictory evidence from the earlier literature. Consequences for our understanding of the syntax of focus operators are explored.

Speaker: Gaja Jarosz (Yale/MIT)
Date/Time: Monday, Sept 23, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

Gaja Jarosz will lead a discussion of her recent Phonology paper, “Learning with hidden structure in Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar: beyond Robust Interpretive Parsing.”

Speaker: Sam Steddy
Title: The syntax of distributive and collective pluralities
Date/Time: Tuesday, Sept 24, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

I argue that distributivity, over collectivity, is a linguistic primitive. DPs which convey some plurality, whether transparently (“the cats”) or obliquely (“the team”), may be ‘distributivised’ by a syntactic head ‘#’, merged at the top layer of their DP, which acts as a plural goal for morphological agreement. I will present a number of ‘agreement mismatches’ that show that # is not solely a semantic operator but has an influence on syntax. The optionality of merging #, combined with LF-raising operations creates nuanced semantic interpretations. Finally, #’s phonology will also be shown to cause the different agreement of British and USA English.

Speaker: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (University of Arizona/MIT)
Title: Steps to the Physics of Language
Date/Time: Thursday, September 26, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

The study of complex systems seems to affirm the Thompson-Turing claim that “some physical processes are of very general occurrence.” Notably, those involving Fibonacci-based “golden” forms, ubiquitous in nature, and a number of mathematical models standard in modern physics (matrix representation of operators, with associated eigenvalues and eigenvectors expressing directional stability). This lends immediate interest to the observation that the repeated structural motif in the human syntactic system, the X-bar schema, is likewise a “golden” form (Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2008, Medeiros 2008, Piattelli-Palmarini and Medeiros in preparation) and leads us to inquire whether whatever is behind the natural ubiquity of such phenomena, in other domains, might possibly be at work in language as well. If so, this peculiar aspect of human phrase structure (the X-bar configuration) would fall under Chomsky’s (2005) “third factor”, a factor about language which is neither encoded in the particulars of our genome, nor learned from the environment, but determined by domain-general principles beyond the organism.”

Date/Time: Thursday, 26 September, 6 pm
Location: 32-G449 (Kiva)
Speaker: Ted Gibson

language@mit, a new group aimed at bringing together researchers investigating various aspects of language across the Institute, will hold its inaugural meeting on 26 September at 6 pm in 32-G449. Ted Gibson will give an overview of his lab’s research, followed by general discussion, including canvassing ideas for future events. All are welcome. Pizza will be served.

LFRG meetings are scheduled for Friday 1 pm in 32-D831 this semester. There are still multiple slots open this semester. Please contact the organizers Edwin Howard and Chris O’Brien if you would like to give a presentation.

Last Friday and Saturday, about 130 linguists gathered at MIT for M@90: Workshop on Stress and Meter to celebrate Morris Halle’s 90th birthday, where phonologists celebrated Morris’s achievements as a researcher, teacher and “founder of modern phonology” (to quote Noam Chomsky’s introduction to Morris’s own talk) — while simultaneously making progress on some of the toughest problems in stress theory and meter (linguistic, poetic, musical). A great celebration honoring the greatest of linguists, our colleague, our teacher, our friend. We extend our deepest thanks to all who gave talks and participated in the (extremely lively) discussions.

Title: Factorial typology and metrical faithfulness (poster rehearsal for m@90)
Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Date/Time: Monday, Sept 16, 5:30-7:30p
Location: 32-D831

In Pintupi, Diyari, Dyirbal, and Walpiri, four Pama-Nyungan (PN) languages, unsuffixed forms are stressed identically but suffixed forms are not. I argue, following Kenstowicz (1998), that these divergences reflect differences in the type and strength of morphological influence on stress in derivatives. This account differs from prior work as it uses directional base-derivative (BD) correspondence constraints to account for all paradigmatic uniformity effects. I assess the predictions of the constraint set via a cyclically evaluated factorial typology. An analysis of PN stress invoking BD correspondence makes tighter typological predictions than competing alternatives (cf. Alderete 2009).

Syntax Square is not meeting this week. There are still multiple slots open, including the next three weeks, so please contact the organizers (Ruth Brillman and Miriam Nussbaum) if you would like to give a presentation.

Speaker: Julia Horvath (Tel Aviv University)
Title: Phrasal Idioms and the Architecture of Grammar
Date/Time: Thursday, Sept 19, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Tal Siloni, Tel Aviv University.)

The investigation of idioms is important not only per se but also because it has consequences with regard to our choice of theory and for the architecture of grammar. The focus of this talk will be phrasal idioms, as defined by the Type-Sensitive Storage Model (H&S), such as the verb phrase idioms “shoot the breeze,” “spill the beans,” “put (something) on the back burner,” namely idioms headed by a lexical category (not by clausal functional material).

Idioms exhibit an inherent duality. On the one hand, they are complex entities whose internal makeup reflects structural properties of phrasal units. They have syntactic structure similar to phrases built in the syntax. On the other hand, they have conventionalized meanings that cannot be predicted by semantic composition. This means that they must be stored. Since they involve syntactic structure, the question as to how they are stored is especially intriguing and important.

The talk will report three studies (one corpus-based study and two psycholinguistic studies) that help us decide between the various possible hypotheses as to how phrasal idioms are stored in mental representations.

Theoretically, the studies to be discussed provide evidence against theories such as Construction Grammar, as developed by Goldberg 2006 a.o. Such theories advance the claim that our knowledge of language is nothing but a stored set of constructions (their “Construct-i-con”) — a construction being the association of form and semantic-pragmatic function including abstract patterns, idioms, words and morphemes. Constructions on this view are formed on the basis of general cognitive mechanisms, reflect functional needs, and they are all stored. Our study of idioms turns out to offer an elegant argument against such views. Moreover, the findings on phrasal idioms provide evidence with regard to the nature of the lexical component.

M@90, the 2-day workshop on stress and meter to celebrate Morris Halle’s 90th birthday, will be held at our department this week, Sept 20-21. Registration is free but required for attendance — registration details and program information are available at the website, http://m90.mit.edu/.

There will be an organization meeting of the Phonology Circle on Monday, Sept 9 at 5:30pm in 32-D831. If you would like to reserve a date but cannot attend, please contact Michael Kenstowicz.

Syntax Square will be held on Tuesdays 1-2p this semester. This informal student-run talk series is for all kinds of presentations including works in progress and recaps of articles/conference talks. The organizers for this term are Ruth Brillman and Miriam Nussbaum — contact them if you’re interested in giving a presentation.

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Balinese Pseudo-Noun Incorporation: Licensing under Morphological Merger
Date/Time: Tuesday, Sept 10, 1-2p
Room: 32-D461

A full abstract is available (pdf).

Head Movement of a nominal into a verb (Noun Incorporation) has two consequences. The nominal is adjacent to the verb and is (possibly) licensed without Case (Baker 1988). This raises the question of whether Head Movement or the head-head adjacency it creates is responsible for licensing. In this talk, I argue for the latter based on properties of Balinese (Austronesian) Pseudo-Noun Incorporation (PNI). Balinese PNI exhibits properties problematic for previous account of the phenomenon; only Agents including some definite ones (pronouns and Proper Names) undergo PNI. Themes, unexpectedly, never do (contra Farkas & de Swart 2004 inter alia). Furthermore, Balinese PNI is sensitive to nominal-internal word order. As such, it can neither be described as an instance of string-vacuous Head Movement (Baker 2012) or a bare NP (Massam 2001). I posit that Balinese PNI occurs when a caseless nominal head (N or D) happens to be adjacent to V. Head-head adjacency licenses that nominal via Morphological Merger (Marantz 1984).

Ling-Lunch is an informal setting for presenting talks on any linguistic topic, scheduled for Thursdays 12:30-1:45p. If you would like to present, please contact the organizers for this term, Isa Bayirli and Juliet Stanton, at ling-lunch-organizers@mit.edu.

Speaker: Ruth Brillman
Date/Time: Friday, 13 September, 1 pm
Location: 32-D831
Topic: Parasitic Degree Phrases (Nissenbaum & Schwarz 2011)

I’ll discuss Nissenbaum & Schwarz’s (2011) Natural Language Semantics paper “Parasitic Degree Phrases” (available here), which argues that sentences like “John is too rich for the monastery to hire ___,” dubbed gapped degree phrases, contain an instance of null-operator movement identical to the null operators which arguably appear (Chomsky 1986, Nissenbaum 2000) in parasitic gap constructions like “Who did the monastery hire without talking to ___?”). Since gapped degree phrases, unlike their parasitic gap counterparts, don’t appear dependent on a prior instance of A-bar movement, this sort of construction at first appears at odds with a null operator analysis. In fact however, N&S claim that exactly this kind of structure is predicted by Nissenbaum’s (2000) analysis.

• Michelle Fullwood and Timothy O’Donnell (MIT BCS) presented their paper Learning Nonconcatenative Morphology at the Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) workshop, collocated with the Association of Computational Linguistics meeting in Bulgaria in August 2013.
• Suyeon Yun presented Two types of right dislocation in Korean at the 15th Harvard Symposium on Korean Linguistics, held August 3-4.
• Sam Steddy reports: “I spent the summer traveling around the linguistic community in the UK. I gave two talks: A Distributed Morphology View of Auxiliary Splits in Upper-Southern Italian at the Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting in June, and The Syntax of Distributive and Collective Pluralities and the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, at SOAS, London, in August. I also attended a workshop on Phonological Typology at Oxford, in August, where Donca was presenting, and the ACTL Summerschool on Morphology at UCL, where a week’s lectures were given by [recent MIT grads] Omer Preminger and Yasutada Sudo.”
  

  

• Anthony Brohan presented a paper (with Jeff Mielke, NCSU) entitled A typology of cross-linguistically frequent segmental alternations at the Oxford Phonological Typology workshop in August, and on Father’s Day, he climbed Mt. Baker (10,781ft) in Washington.
  

  

Today, Tuesday September 3, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter, appears every Monday during the semester (Tuesdays if Monday is a public holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Michelle Fullwood, Ryo Masuda, and David Pesetsky.

To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6 pm. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what members of the department did during the summer break.

Hope to see you all at the departmental barbecue, 12 noon at the Stata amphitheater (rain location: 8th floor departmental lounge)!

Visiting Scholars

• Gaja Jarosz (Yale University) studies language learning from a computational perspective. Her research employs computational and statistical methods to develop models of phonological acquisition and to examine the primary learning data and its properties. One major focus of her recent work is the development of more robust computational models of phonological learning that make fewer simplifying assumptions about the nature of the input, with a particular emphasis on statistical models that can effectively cope with hidden structure, noise, and other sources of ambiguity.
• Masashi Nomura (Chukyo University) works on case and agreement, clausal architecture, locality, cyclicity and optionality.
• Dennis Ott (University of Groningen) works on theoretical and experimental syntax, in particular Ā movement, locality, ellipsis and morphosyntax. He also works on the formal foundations of linguistic theory and the philosophy of language and linguistics.
• Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (University of Arizona) works on cognitive science, language and mind, biological foundations of language, language evolution, judgment and decision-making.
• Gwang Rak Son (Kyungpook National University) works on the interaction between syntactic structure and prosodic structure (focus, topic, wh–questions, intervention effects, quantifiers, etc.); syntactic theory within generative grammar, including, but not being limited to, minimalism; interpretational mechanisms related to specificity in English, Asian, and Slavic languages; scrambling phenomena of East Asian, Germanic, and Slavic languages; neuroimaging of syntax and syntactic processing (ERP/EEG effects of syntactic processing); comparative syntax and comparative studies of language development; and the neuroscience of phonetics and phonology.
• Masayuki Wakayama (Paichi Shukutoku University) says: “My research concerns how language variation should be explained theoretically with a special focus on transitivity and word order variation. In addition, I am also interested in a correlation between human development and language evolution.”
• Wendy Wu (Shanghai International Studies University) works on the relationship between foreign language production and perception, using ERP and behavioral investigations of cross-linguistic perception; production and perception of different lexical strata in Japanese; phonology-morphosyntax interactions in Makassar languages (Austronesian languages of South Sulawesi, Indonesia); the quality and position of vowels inserted in loanwords and vowel epenthesis in Arabic dialects.

Visiting Student

• Eduard Artés Cuenca (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)’s research explores the trade-off between phonology and morphology. Specifically, it focuses on “morphological epenthesis”, i.e., a direct relation between morphology and the phonological content of epenthesis. The data analyzed come mainly from Catalan, Italian and Spanish.

Luka Crnic (PhD 2011) has just accepted a tenure-track position as Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and the Language, Logic and Cognition Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (the Israeli counterpart of an Assistant Professorship). Congratulations, Luka!

…and his classmate Tue Trinh (PhD 2011) has taken a tenure track position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.  Congratulations, Tue!

At least three conferences and workshops will be held at MIT during the fall semester:

M@90, a two-day workshop on Metrical Structure: Stress, Meter, and Textsetting to celebrate Morris Halle’s 90th birthday, will be held on Friday September 20th and Saturday 21st. Advance registration is free but required; please email Lilla Magyar to register.

Japanese/Korean Linguistics 23 will be held from Friday October 11th to Sunday October 13th.

Invited speakers are:

• Yoonjung Kang (University of Toronto)
• Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
• Junko Shimoyama (McGill University)
• James Hye Suk Yoon (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

NECPhon, the Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop, will be held on Saturday October 26th in room 32-D461. Please contact Adam Albright for more details.

Title: Language, reasoning, and commonsense knowledge

Speaker: Noah Goodman (Stanford University)

Date: Tues 9-3-2013

Time: 4:00 PM

Location: Singleton Auditorium, MIT 46-3002

Host: Prof. Joshua B. Tenenbaum; Tim O’Donnell

Human reasoning is a beautiful puzzle: it is productive, extending to new situations without bound, and it is uncertain, dealing gracefully with noisy evidence and shades of belief. Reasoning is also a key window on cognition, providing some of our best evidence about the structures that underly everyday, commonsense thought. I will argue that the core representations that support reasoning can be understood as a ‘probabilistic language of thought’, and that reasoning is an approximation to probabilistic inference. I will illustrate this claim with examples of reasoning about games and property induction. However, I will suggest that the bridge between the probabilistic language of thought and empirical data is a firm understanding of natural language. I will sketch a model of natural language pragmatics and semantics, and describe experimental evidence from communication games and quantity implicature. I will then describe how we can extend this framework to encompass vague language, focussing on scalar adjectives (like “tall”). I will conclude by coming back to reasoning, explaining two puzzling patterns: the sorites paradox and the effect of additional premises when reasoning general-to-specific. Time permitting, I will discuss possible process-level implementations in a short coda.

24.956 Topics in Syntax: Movement - what is it and how does it work?

Instructors: Norvin Richards & David Pesetsky

Monday 2:30-5:30pm, 32-D461

The existence and ubiquity of syntactic movement is one of the signature discoveries of the last half-century of research on syntax. With the realization that syntactic constituents may occupy multiple positions in phrase structure has come a cascade of findings, questions, and new conundrums that could not have been imagined before the discovery of movement. Why does movement exist? Why are there locality limitations on movement, what are they, and where do they come from? What determines the size of moved constituents? Why do types of movements seem to sort into A vs. A-bar varieties, and how do they interact? What types of dependencies instantiate movement — for example, is control a variety of movement?

This seminar will have a broad focus, covering many topics related to movement, in an attempt to learn the state of the art on some of these questions, and (if we are lucky) to push the state of the art forward a bit. If we succeed, the class will provide you with “news you can use” in your own syntactic research, by offering both a big picture and serious discussion of an array of exciting open problems.

24.964 More Advanced Phonology

Instructor: Edward Flemming

Friday 11am-2pm, 32-D461

24.964 this semester is ‘More Advanced Phonology’ or Phonology III rather than a seminar on a single research topic. Candidate topics are listed below. We will start with stochastic phonology, then cover additional topics depending on time and interest.

(1) Stochastic phonology

We will read key papers on the analysis of probabilistic phonological patterns, e.g. patterns where there is some free variation or exceptionality and the probability of a particular variant (or an exception) depends on phonological properties. We will focus on three interrelated questions:

(i) What is the relationship between categorical and stochastic phonology? Is the former just a limiting case of the latter, or are they distinct in some way?

(ii) What is the mechanism of constraint interaction in stochastic phonology? Frameworks differ substantially on this point, e.g. Stochastic OT is based on strict constraint domination, whereas MaxEnt grammars sum constraint violations.

(iii) Are all types of probabilistic phonological patterns amenable to a single form of analysis?

(2) Laryngeal neutralization and assimilation in obstruents

The typology of patterns of neutralization of voicing and aspiration contrasts, focusing on phenomena that motivate extensions and modifications to existing analyses. These include asymmetrical voicing assimilation (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic dialects, Ukrainian), consonants that undergo, but do not trigger, voicing assimilation (e.g. Hungarian, Russian, Czech), voicing of obstruents before sonorants (e.g. Krakow Polish, Slovak), morphological effects on voicing neutralization (e.g. German). The goal is to review the theoretic background, then investigate some of these phenomena based on data we collect during the course.

(3) Phonetic grammars

It has long been known that the grammars of languages must regulate relatively fine details of phonetic realization, but relatively little is known about the form of the relevant component of grammar. We will study a model based on weighted constraints (Flemming 2001) and investigate interactions between phonetics and phonology in light of this model.

(4) Do speakers’ grammars contain phonetically-based constraints?

Phonological typology has been shown to reflect a variety of phonetically-based constraints, but it remains controversial whether these constraints play a role in individual grammars, or whether they are external to grammar, applying only through processes of sound change (e.g. Blevins 2004). We will try to clarify the empirical claims that are at issue here and examine experimental evidence that bears on those claims.

24.979 Models of Information Structure Meaning and Expression

Instructor: Noah Constant

Tuesday 10am-1pm, 32-D461

This course explores how information structure is conveyed across languages, with the goals of: (i) gaining familiarity with different conceptions of information-structural distinctions like topic/focus, given/new, and contrastive/non-contrastive, (ii) gaining familiarity with the facts of how these distinctions are signaled (or not signaled) in different languages, and (iii) comparing recent formalisms of information-structural categories and realizations, with attention to their ability to extend to the range of observed cross-linguistic phenomena.

On the semantic/pragmatic side, topics to be covered include different sub-types of topic and focus, thetic vs. categorical judgments, theories of the interpretation of focus and givenness, and formalizations of discourse structure.

As for how information structure is conveyed, we will look at reflexes in word order effects, in discourse particles, and in prosody. For syntactic reflexes, we’ll look at topicalization, left-dislocation, right-dislocation, focus movement and scrambling, and discuss to what degree cartographic approaches to the left periphery can handle these effects. For particles, we’ll look at a range of topic- and focus-marking particles and discuss the potential for treating these in a unified way. For prosodic reflexes, we’ll look at theories of pitch accenting based on givenness and/or contrast, and at the effects of information structure on phrasing and on pitch movements correlating to topic and focus marking (e.g. English “A and B” accents).

Participants will give in-class presentations of one or more assigned readings, and will write a short final paper. The course presupposes basic familiarity with the frameworks covered in the first-year graduate syntax and semantics sequence. We’ll connect with some issues in intonational phonology, but no prior experience with prosody is assumed.

24.S95 Computational Linguistics for Linguists

Instructor: Martin Rohrmeier

Monday and Wednesday 11-12:30, 56-180

This course provides an introduction to the foundations of formal language theory, computational linguistics and related topics in cognitive language research. It is particularly intended for linguistics graduate students with little background in computational and cognitive research. The class will cover various types of formal languages and related theorems, the Chomsky hierarchy, automata theory, types of parsers, formal models of minimalist grammars, corpus analysis, principles of probabilistic modeling, and probabilistic models of language and language processing. Throughout the class these theoretical topics will be discussed in perspective with current cognitive research trends. In addition to the theoretical foundations, another main goal of the class is to provide a hands-on introduction to programming and its specific applications in language processing and modeling. The class will provide you with foundations to follow computational and cognitive linguistics papers.

The class is intended as an introductory class. It does not presuppose prior programming or modeling experience; core skills will be acquired throughout the class.

Participants will be required to attend regularly and to participate actively in class discussion, to submit homework exercises, to do in-class presentations (of their research projects) and to hand in a final term paper on a topic related to the class.

MIT was well represented at the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL9) held at Cornell, August 23-25. Omer Preminger (now at Syracuse, jointly with Jaklin Kornfilt) and Yusuke Imanishi gave papers, and Ted Levin gave a poster, which was selected as the best poster presentation at WAFL9.

WAFL10 will be held at MIT, May 2-4, 2014. The deadline for abstracts is January 15, and invited speakers are:

Katja Lyutikova, Moscow State University
Masha Polinsky, Harvard University
Koji Sugisaki, Mie University
Sergei Tatevosov, Moscow State University

The MIT Linguistics Colloquium schedule for this academic year is below. All talks are on Fridays, 3:30-5:00 p.m. in room 32-141. For further information, please contact the organizers for this year, Sam Steddy and Wataru Uegaki. This schedule is subject to change, especially for Spring 2014 — please visit the Colloquium webpage for updates.

Fall 2013:

October 4: Michael Wagner, McGill
October 18: Jennifer Smith, UNC Chapel Hill
October 25: Barbara Partee, UMass Amherst
November 1: Eric Reuland, Utrecht
December 6: Gillian Ramchand, CASTL

Spring 2014:

February 7: Raj Singh, Carleton
February 14: Elena Anagnostopoulou, University of Crete
March 14: Marcel den Dikken, CUNY
April 4: Adamantios Gafos, Yale, Potsdam
April 25: Richard Kayne, NYU
May 2: Matthew Gordon, UCSB
May 9: Julie Legate, UPenn

Over the summer, our new linguistics lab manager, Erin Olson, started work.  She will be helping with experimental research throughout the linguistics side of the department, including the Phonetics lab and the Experimental Syntax and Semantics lab.

Erin is originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She got her BA in Linguistics from McGill University in Montréal, Québec in 2012, and worked at McGill as a research assistant in the Prosody Lab and Fieldwork Lab there until June 2013. She tells us that he’s primarily interested in phonology (especially stress systems), but is also interested in other kinds of experimental research, including sentence processing and first language acquisition. When not concentrating on linguistics, she enjoys “fencing, swimming, drawing, watching hockey, exploring the city, and finding new and interesting places to get a good meal or drink”.   Welcome, Erin!

The members of ling-13, the incoming graduate class, have provided brief biographical notes for us. Be sure to say hello to the newest cohort, perhaps by dropping by the newly renovated first years’ office on the 9th floor.

Athulya Aravind reports: “I’m originally from Kerala, a region in the southwest nook of India, but grew up mostly in Maryland and New York. In 2011, I received my BA in Linguistics from Northeastern University, after which I spent two years managing a Language Development Lab at Smith College. My main interests lie in language acquisition, syntax/semantics, and experimental linguistics. In my spare time, I’m an avid consumer of pop culture and an aspiring yogi.”

Kenyon Branan moved around a lot as a kid, but he’s “mostly from Newton, New Hampshire.” He continues: “I did my BA in linguistics at Brandeis. My main interests at the moment are syntax and Tibeto-Burman languages. I like to spend my free time watching films and reading.”

Paul Crowley is a local, having grown up just south of Boston. He writes: “I went to the University of York, UK where I did a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Philosophy. I’m interested in the interfaces and the philosophy of language. Music is a big part of my life with Spanish flamenco guitar and North Indian classical sitar being my main focuses. I also like hiking, cycling, woodworking, reading, beering.”

Sophie Moracchini writes: “I’m from Nantes, in the West of France. My name is Corsican this is why is does not sound typically French. I did a M.A in Linguistics at the University of Nantes, I was interested in the semantic primitives of comparison and I mostly looked at the Vietnamese language. In my free time, I enjoy listening to music, reading, cooking and hiking.”

Takashi Morita is from Chiba, Japan, with a degree from International Christian University (linguistics major and mathematics minor). As an undergrad he spent a year as an exchange student at UC Santa Cruz. He considers himself “open-minded” with respect to his academic interests, but mentioned in particular biolinguistics, formal semantics, and theoretical phonology.

Ezer Rasin grew up in Israel, in a small town near Tel Aviv. His last name is a Hebraized version of an Arabic phrase roughly translating into “one who has two heads”, and carries dual morphology. He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Linguistics from Tel Aviv University, where he was also working on his M.A. in Linguistics. His previous research focused on induction of morphophonological grammars, drawing on insight from theoretical computer science. While still not committed to a particular linguistic subfield, he hopes to have the opportunity to work in all theoretical subfields at MIT and to continue investigating the relationship between linguistic representations and language learnability.

Milena Sisovics writes: “I come from Austria, which could lead people to stereotypically believe that I love classical music, hiking and the mountains in winter and that I have lived and studied in Vienna. All of that is true. In addition, I like reading, can have a lot of fun trying out new food, and love spending time with my friends and family. Apart from my MA in Linguistics, I received a BA in Russian Language/Slavic Studies from the University of Vienna and also spent one semester studying at RGGU (Russian State University for the Humanities) in Moscow. While I was mainly concerned with syntax during my study in Vienna, I look forward to going deeper into the semantic side of things at MIT.”

Michelle Yuan reports: “I was born in Beijing, China, but grew up in Toronto, ON, where I received my BA and MA in linguistics at the University of Toronto. I’m primarily interested in syntax, particularly that of Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken across northern Canada. I’m also interested in Dinka (Nilo-Saharan), and hope to continue working on both languages (as well as others!) while at MIT. Outside of linguistics, I like cats, biking, and listening to music.”

In late July, the MIT News office published a very nice article about 5th-year student Rafael Nonato.  You can read it here:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/student-profile-rafael-nonato-0722.html

A week later, Rafael presented some of his research on coordination in Kĩsêdjê at the conference Recursion in Brazilian Languages & Beyond.