Whamit!

The ‘McGill/MIT Workshop on Gradability and Quantity in Language and the Brain’ will be held at MIT on January 31-February 1st in Room 32-141. It is a two day workshop that brings together a group of neuroscientists with an interest in language and a group of experimental and formal linguists interested in the brain, in an attempt to enhance the dialogue between the linguistic and the neurophysiological cultures, and help to close the gap between these two growing groups of researchers. The theme of the workshop is centered on aspects of gradability and quantity as it pertains to the cognitive domains of Number, Space, and Time.

http://brainlang.scripts.mit.edu

The workshop is open and all are welcome to attend. To access the background material for the talks the following information is required: username: brainlang, password: mitmcgill2014

The invited speakers are:

• Katrin Amunts, University of Düsseldorf/Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Irene Heim, MIT
• Andreas Nieder, University of Tübingen
• Martin Hackl, MIT
• Roumyana Pancheva, USC
• Bernhard Schwarz, McGill University
• Veronique Izard, CNRS & Université Paris Descartes
• Manfred Krifka, ZAS and Humbolt University
• Yoad Winter, Utrecht University
• Roger Schwarzschild, Rutgers University
• Galit Sassoon, Bar-Ilan University
• Yonatan Loewenstein, The Hebrew University at Jerusalem
• Hans Otto Karnath, University of Tübingen
• Yosef Grodzinsky, McGill University

Grad students Iain Giblin and Sam Steddy and recent visiting student Jeffrey Watumull (Cambridge) responded to a recent article on linguistics by Harry Ritchie in the UK newspaper The Guardian. Their letter wasn’t posted online, but here is a scan of the print edition.

David Pesetsky gave a talk on language and music at Rome’s 2014 Festival of Sciences on January 26, based on his joint work with Jonah Katz (PhD 2010). Noam Chomsky was also in attendance, giving talks about politics and linguistics on January 24 and 25. More information here and here.

David Pesetsky’s book “Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories” has just been published in the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs.

Congratulations to fifth-year students Hadas Kotek and Michael Erlewine! Their paper “Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions” has been accepted for publication in Linguistic Inquiry.

Second-year grad student Anthony Brohan will be teaching a five-day mini-course on statistical methods next week.

We will meet from 10-1PM at 56-167 from the 20th to the 24th. Below is a rough outline of the topics I plan on covering each day. The first half of every lecture I will cover some statistical concepts, and on the second half of the lecture will be focusing on hands-on R skills.

Day 1
Distribution tests; Tests for the mean; t-tests (paired and unpaired); Are the means the same?; Are the variances the same?; Linear regression; Interpreting p-values

Day 2
Non-parametric tests; Chi-square; Fischer’s exact test; Transformation and regression

Day 3
Handling Discrimination and Reaction time data; ANOVA

Day 4
Generalized Linear Models (building, interpreting and evaluating models)

Day 5
Linear mixed effects models

Along the way R skills will emphasize on data exploration, scripting and plotting, as well as implementing these tests. We’ll be using Baayen’s textbook as well as some materials from Jaeger’s lab about the use of mixed-effects models.

MIT had a strong presence at this year’s LSA Annual Meeting, held Jan 2-5 in Minneapolis. The following talks and posters featured MIT presenters:

• Michael Erlewine: Association with traces and the copy theory of movement
• Michael Erlewine and Hadas Kotek: Morphological blocking in English causatives
• Iain Giblin and Sam Steddy: Disambiguating the Scope of In-Situ Wh-Phrases with Telugu Prosody
• Aron Hirsch and Martin Hackl: Presupposition projection and incremental processing in disjunction
• Yusuke Imanishi: When ergative is default: Ergativity in Mayan
• Patrick Jones: Cyclic evaluation of post-lexical prosodic domains: evidence from Kinande boundary tones
• Hadas Kotek: Intervention effects follow from Relativized Minimality
• Hadas Kotek and Martin Hackl: Wh-words must QR locally: evidence from real-time processing
• Theodore Levin: Pseudo-Noun Incorporation is M-Merger: Evidence from Balinese
• Miriam Nussbaum: The Interpretation of Indifference Free Relatives
• Juliet Stanton: A cyclic factorial typology of Pama-Nyungan stress
• Suyeon Yun : Two Types of Focus Movement

In addition Patrick Jones won a Student Abstract Award, for having one of the three highest-ranked abstracts authored by a student. Congratulations, Patrick!

Several recent alumni were also present:

• Bronwyn Bjorkman (University of Toronto): Multiple Agrees: Towards a non-unified theory of feature valuation.
• Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota) and Maria Stolen (University of Minnesota): Fixed aspect in Amharic Conditionals
• Ora Matushansky (Utrecht University) and E.G. Ruys (Utrecht University): Some indefinites are degrees
• Brian Buccola (McGill University) and Morgan Sonderegger (McGill University): On the expressivity of Optimality Theory vs. rules: An application to opacity
• Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University) and Rachael Hardy (McMaster University): Two scrambling strategies in German: Evidence from PPs
• Young Ah Do (Georgetown University): The asymmetrical base-inflected relation constrains child production and comprehension