Whamit!

Speaker: Angela Carpenter, Wellesley College
Title: Learning of a Natural and Unnatural Stress Pattern by Older Children
Date: Nov. 24 (M)
Time: 5-6:30
Location: 32D-461

Recent research into adult learning of natural and unnatural pairs of artificial languages has demonstrated that it is easier to learn a phonological rule that is based on naturalness in language than a similar, but unnatural, version of the same rule. This effect has been seen in a variety of phonological research (e.g. (Moreton 2008; Pater & Tessier 2005; Zhang & Lai 2010). Research in the area of infants’ learning of natural and unnatural phonology (Gerken & Bollt 2008; Seidl & Buckley 2005), has provided mixed results regarding the infants’ ability to learn natural and unnatural patterns of phonology. There has been little work done with older children to investigate whether they exhibit a learning bias that favors natural phonological patterns over unnatural ones.

The present study focuses on English-speaking older children’s learning of a natural and unnatural version of a stress rule based on vowel height. Previous research has shown that both English-speaking and French-speaking adults are able to more accurately learn a natural phonological rule where stress occurs on a low vowel than when stress occurs on a high vowel (Carpenter 2010). A study of how older children learn natural and unnatural stress patterns is important as it bridges the gap between infants and adults, allows comparison with both groups, and perhaps may shed some insight on the interaction between a general cognition, which allows learning of patterns in many areas, and a language-specific one, which perhaps bias learning of a natural pattern over an unnatural one.

References
Carpenter, Angela. 2010. A naturalness bias in learning stress. Phonology 27. 345-92.
Gerken, LouAnn & Alex Bollt. 2008. Three exemplars allow at least some linguistic generalizations: Implication for generalization mechanism and constraints. Language Learning and Development 4. 228-48.
Moreton, Elliott. 2008. Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology 25. 83-127.
Pater, Joe & Anne-Michelle Tessier. 2005. Phonotactics and alternations: Testing the connection with artificial language learning. UMOP 31: Papers in Experimental Phonetics and Phonology, ed. by S. Kawahara. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Seidl, Amanda & Eugene Buckley. 2005. On the learning of arbitrary phonological rules. Language Learning and Development 1. 289-316.
Zhang, Jie & Yuwen Lai. 2010. Testing the role of phonetic knowledge in Mandarin tone sandhi. Phonology 27. 153-201.

Con-grat-ul(?)-at-ion-s to our alum Rochelle Lieber (PhD 1980), and to her co-authors Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag, whose book The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology has just been honored with the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by the Linguistic Society of America! Shelly Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire.

Speakers: Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk
Title: Austronesian voice as extraction marking
Date/Time:Tuesday, Nov. 25, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

One major question within Austronesian syntax concerns the relationship between Voice marking, case, and extraction, which (commonly) display a one-to-one correspondence. Broadly, two approaches are employed to capture these correlations: (i) Voice morphology marks case and extraction via (wh-)agreement (e.g. Chung 1994; Richards 2000; Pearson 2001), (ii) Voice morphology determines case and extraction via changes in argument structure (e.g. Guilfoyle et al. 1992; Aldridge 2004; Legate 2012). Under a deterministic view of Voice morphology, dissociations of voice and case/extraction are unexpected. In this talk, we present two systems that display such dissociations, supporting the case/extraction-marking analysis of Voice (i). We present a concrete proposal for Voice as extraction marking that explains its effects on case.

Emmanuel Chemla (CNRS) will be giving two lectures this week:

• Tuesday 11/18 5:15-8PM; 32D-831
• Wednesday 11/19; 3-6PM; 32D-461

Below is the abstract and information for the lectures:

We will ask how simple psycholinguistic methods can be relevant for the study of various questions in linguistic theory. We will start by discussing the case of scalar implicatures, where many illustrations can be found, both in terms of questions and methods, without a perfect alignement between the two, however. We will quickly move to other topics including questions, scopal relations, cumulative/distributive readings of plurals. The methods we will discuss include truth value and acceptability judgments, basic “priming” studies and response time studies. The hope is to demonstrate that these methods are useful and simple to deploy.

Speaker: Loes Koring (MIT/Utrecht)
Title: A visual signature of computation
Date/Time: Thursday, November 20, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I will present a new method to track argument reactivation during processing of intransitive verbs. In particular, I will show how the Visual World Paradigm can be used to obtain a precise record of (re)activation of the verb’s argument throughout the entire sentence. Using this method, we will see that the argument of unaccusative vs. unergative verbs is reactivated at a different point in time depending on their syntactic position. The timing difference is independent of the thematic role of the argument, as we will conclude from the behavior of theme unergative verbs.

Speaker: Karlos Arregi
Title: How to sell a melon: Mesoclisis in Spanish plural imperatives
Date/Time:Friday, November 21, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (hereafter, Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of imperative plural inflection -n in non-standard Spanish. For instance, alongside standard “vénda-n-me-lo” (“Sell it to me!”), where -n precedes enclitics, one also finds forms such as “vénda-me-lo-n” and “vénda-n-me-lo-n”, in which the plural suffix follows enclitics, with an optional copy of the suffix before them. More recently, Kayne (2009) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be uniformly treated in the syntax. In this talk, I reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desiderata of any general analysis of these sorts of phenomena is restrictiveness, but contending that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through metaconstraints on the Generalized Reduplication formalism rather than through byzantine syntactic derivations. I present supporting data from morphological reduplication and metathesis phenomena in the Basque auxiliary system, demonstrating that they are better accounted for postsyntactically, and conclude with general remarks about the division of labor in word-formation.

The eighth meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology Circle (NECPhon 2014) was held at NYU over the week end. Third year student Juliet Stanton gave a talk entitled “Rare forms and rare errors: deriving a learning bias in error-driven learning”.

The 2014 edition of the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS 2014) was held at UMass Amherst on Saturday. Three MIT students gave talks:

• Fifth year student Wataru Uegaki: “Predicting the Variation in Exhaustivity of Embedded Questions”
• Third year student Aron Hirsch: “An Unexceptional Semantics for Expressions of Exception”
• Third year student Benjamin Storme: “Present perfectives in English and Romance”

Three 2014 PhD theses are now available on the MITWPL webstore!

• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, 2014: Movement Out of Focus
• Yusuke Imanishi, 2014: Default Ergative
• Hadas Kotek, 2014: Composing Questions

Also, both volumes of Irene Heim’s Festshrift are now out of print and available from the MITWPL webstore:

• First volume
• Second volume

A public service announcement from Kai von Fintel - not just relevant for semanticists!

On October 30, Irene Heim’s colleagues and students past and present gathered to celebrate her 60th birthday with the presentation of a Festschrift (that we already linked to in an earlier post) and a great party with food, drink, speeches and reminiscences. Master of ceremonies was Uli Sauerland. Irene also was presented with framed versions of the artwork for the Festschrift by Sarah Hulsey (PhD 2008).

(photo credit: mitcho Erlewine — thank you!)

From left to right: Sarah Hulsey, Irene Heim & Uli Sauerland; Irene Heim; Angelika Kratzer; Danny Fox; Kai von Fintel; Gennaro Chierchia; Barbara H. Partee; Mats Rooth & Uli Sauerland

Speaker: Isabelle Charnavel (Havard)
Title: Perspectives on Binding and Exemption
Date/Time:Thursday, Nov. 13, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Some anaphors are exempt from Condition A regardless of how it is formulated. Drawing on French and English data, I will propose a way to draw the line between exempt and non-exempt anaphors and I will argue that exempt anaphors are in fact bound by covert logophoric operators. These operators code three kinds of perspective centers: attitude holders, empathy loci and deictic reference points.

Emmanuel Chemla (CNRS) will be giving a series of four lectures starting this Friday:

• Friday 11/14; 3-6PM; 32D-461
• Tuesday 11/18 5-8PM; room to be announced (check this page)
• Wednesday 11/19; 3-6PM; 32D-461
• Tuesday 11/25; 5-8PM; room to be announced (check this page)

Below is the abstract and information for the lectures:

We will ask how simple psycholinguistic methods can be relevant for the study of various questions in linguistic theory. We will start by discussing the case of scalar implicatures, where many illustrations can be found, both in terms of questions and methods, without a perfect alignement between the two, however. We will quickly move to other topics including questions, scopal relations, cumulative/distributive readings of plurals. The methods we will discuss include truth value and acceptability judgments, basic “priming” studies and response time studies. The hope is to demonstrate that these methods are useful and simple to deploy.

The 39th BU Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 39) took place this past weekend at Boston University. The following MIT students and faculty gave talks or presented posters:

• Second year student Athulia Aravind, and Jill de Villiers (Smith College): Implicit alternatives insufficient for children’s SIs with some.
• Fifth year student Ayaka Sugawara, and Martin Hackl: Question-Answer (In)Congruence in the Acquisition of Only
• Ayaka Sugawara and K. Wexler: Japanese children accept inverse-scope readings induced by scrambling, but they do not accept unambiguous inverse-scope readings induced by prosody

Michel DeGraff has received the “Award for Excellence” from the Haitian Studies Association at their 26th annual conference at Notre Dame University this weekend. (Read the citation in the photos below.) Great news, Michel!

http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff/

Congratulations to five of our 21st-century alumni on the recent publication of their books!!

• Heejeong Ko’s (PhD 2005) Edges in Syntax was published by Oxford University Press. Heejeong is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Seoul National University.
• Márta Abrusán’s (PhD 2007) book Weak Island Semantics has been published by Oxford University Press.  Márta is a CNRS Research Scientist at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse.
• Omer Preminger’s (PhD 2011) Agreement and its Failures was published by MIT Press. Omer was an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University during the writing of this book, and is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.
• On the Grammar of Optative constructions by Patrick Grosz (PhD 2011) has been published by Benjamins in their series  Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today.  Patrick is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen.
• Young Ah Do’s (PhD 2013) dissertation on Biased learning of phonological alternations was published by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics (MITWPL).  Youngah is Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University.

Speaker: Loes Koring (Utrecht)
Title: The semantics and acquisition of non-embedding reportatives
Time: Thursday, November 6, 5:30-7
Place: 32-D461

Two seemingly similar Dutch evidential raising verbs, schijnen and lijken, have been shown to differ in their distribution (Haegeman 2006). Although they can both be translated to ‘seem’ in English, they do differ in meaning (van Bruggen 1980, Vliegen 2011). Schijnen means that the speaker has indirect reported evidence for the proposition (Vliegen 2011, cf. De Haan 1999); whereas lijken means that the speaker has some type of direct evidence for the proposition, but the evidence is unclear (van Bruggen 1980). Interestingly, whereas lijken can be embedded under modals, negation, and questions for instance, schijnen cannot. One goal of this talk is to identify a semantic property that is responsible for the restrictions in distribution reportative schijnen shows. The claim is that schijnen is restricted in evaluation to the here and now of the speaker (i.e. it is subjective) and as such it cannot occur in nonveridical contexts (cf. Giannakidou 2011). Crucially, the difference in semantics between schijnen and lijken does not only affect their distribution, but also their acquisition and processing. As a secondary goal of this talk, we will look at the effect of the extra semantic computation in acquisition and processing.

Nor snow nor rain nor heat nor NELS can stay these pumpkins from the swift completion of their appointed carvings [e].

Some of the results:

Last week, we celebrated Irene Heim’s 60th birthday. On this occasion, a Festschrift was offered to Irene by some MIT students, faculty and alumni to honor her great contribution to the field of formal semantics. Happy birthday, Irene!

Speaker: Klaus Abels (UCL)
Title: Guess what else!
Date: Friday, November 7th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

Ross’s seminal paper on sluicing, that is, elliptical wh-questions of the type in (1), contains two generalizations that have driven analyses of sluicing in radically different directions.

(1) Somebody just left. - Guess who!

On the one hand, Ross observes that, at least in languages where this is directly observable, the wh-phrase in the elliptical question must bear the same case as its perceived correlate in the antecedent sentence, as in the German example in (2).

(2) Er hat jemandem geholfen, aber er verrät nicht {wem | *wen | *wer}.
he has someone.dat helped but he divulges not who.dat | who.acc | who.nom}
‘He helped someone but he won’t divulge who.’

On the other hand, sluicing ameliorates island constraints, as seen in the contrast between the acceptable (3) and the ungrammatical full version (4).

(3) They want to hire someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don’t know which.
(4) *They want to hire someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don’t know which Balkan language they want to hire someone who speaks.

The case matching effect in (2) is often taken as a straightforward argument for the presence of syntactic structure at the ellipsis site which is (nearly) identical to the syntactic structure of the antecedent. The island amelioration effect seen in (3) suggests the exact opposite.

In the first part of this talk, I will report on joint work with Gary Thoms. In this work, we use contrast sluices in languages with resumptive pronouns as a diagnostic tool. Contrast sluices are examples like (5), where the correlate in the antecedent clause is definite and the sluice asks about the identity of a different relevant entity.

(5) He gave the car to his son and guess what else!

The cross-linguistic distribution of island repair in contrast sluices strongly suggests that sluicing does not literally repair island effects. It also strongly suggests that ellipsis identity for sluicing in general cannot be understood as strict syntactic identity.

This conclusion calls for a careful evaluation of the case-matching effect, a task that will be taken up in the second part of the talk. Finally, a possible way forward will be suggested based on Fox and Katzir’s structural theory of focus alternatives.

NELS 45 was held at MIT over the week end and it was a success! The following MIT students and faculty gave talks or presented posters:

• Roger Schwarzschild, one of the three invited speakers: Markers of mass and count
• Third year student Aron Hirsch and Michael Wagner (McGill): Prosodic evidence that parentheticals are placed by rightward movement
• First year student Erin Olson, fifth year student Ayaka Sugawara, and Martin Hackl: Processing only: Scalar presupposition and the structure of ALT(S)
• Second year student Ezer Rasin and Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv): A learnability argument for constraints on underlying representations
• Third year student Juliet Stanton: Wholesale Late Merger in A’-movement: Evidence from preposition stranding
• Ryan Sandell (UCLA) and third year student Sam Zukoff: A new approach to the origin of Germanic strong preterites
• Visiting student Brian Buccola (McGill): Global semantic constraints: The case of Van Benthem’s Problem

A lot of MIT alumni were present:

• Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), one of the three invited speakers, now Professor at the University of Arizona: Aggressive Passives in Haiki
• Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD 2012), now at the University of Tübingen: Different again
• Dorothy Ahn (Harvard) and Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998), now at ZAS: Reverse quantification with proportional quantifiers
• Michael Y. Erlewine (PhD 2014), now at McGill: On the position of focus adverbs
• Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2013), now at HSE Moscow: Syntax and semantics of person in coordinations
• Ora Matushansky (PhD 2002), now at the CNRS and Utrecht: On being [feminine] and [proper]
• Mark Baker (PhD 1984), now at Rutgers: Applicative markers as agreement with PP in Amharic (co-authored with Ruth Kramer (Georgetown))
• Seth Cable (PhD 2007), now at UMass: Graded Tenses in Complement Clauses: Evidence that Future is not a Tense
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009), now at the CNRS and Utrecht: The error-driven ranking algorithm learns inventories of obstruents (co-authored with Rene Kager (Utrecht))
• Tara McAllister Byun (PhD 2009), now at NYU: Parallels in speech acquisition and loss as evidence for a grammar of articulatory reliability (co-authored with Sharon Inkelas (Berkeley) and Yvan Rose (MUN))
• Lisa Bylinina (Meertens), Natalia Ivlieva (PhD 2013), now at the CNRS, Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2013), now at the HSE Moscow, Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012), now at UCL: A non-superlative semantics for ordinals and the syntax of comparison classes
• Joanna Zaleska (Leipzig) and Andrew Nevins (PhD 2004), now at UCL: Transformational language games and the representation of Polish nasal vowels
• Natalia Ivlieva (PhD 2013), now at the Institut Jean-Nicod/CNRS: Deriving multiplicity
• Patrick Grosz (PhD 2011) and Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD 2012), now at Tuebingen: Re-evaluating the distinction between personal and demonstrative pronouns
• Susi Wurmbrand, now at UConn: Restructuring cross-linguistically
• Dennis Ott, visiting student at MIT in 2013, now at Humboldt: On the form and meaning of appositives (co-authored with Edgar Onea (Goettingen))
• MIT alumni Roni Katzir (PhD 2008), now at Tel-Aviv, and Michael Wagner (PhD 2005), now at McGill, co-authored papers with current MIT students (see above)

A picture of Mitcho’s poster presentation:

Speaker: Rebecca Woods (University of York/UMass Amherst)
Title: Embedded Inverted Interrogatives as Embedded Speech Acts
Date/Time:Tuesday, November 4, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: See attachment SyntaxSquare abstract

Speaker: Christiana Christodoulou (MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences/University of Cyprus)
Title: Towards a Unified Analysis of the Linguistic Development of Down Syndrome
Date/Time:Thursday, Nov. 6, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Previous studies on the linguistic development of individuals diagnosed with Down Syndrome (DS) report both phonetic/phonological as well as morphosyntactic impairment. To date, there has not been any research on the effects of phonetic/phonological restrictions on inflectional marking, nor a theoretical analysis of the distinct performance of individuals with DS. Cypriot Greek individuals with DS exhibit distinct articulation and phonological difficulties that affect the production of inflectional marking. Once those are factored out, results reveal high accuracy rates (over 95%) with aspect, tense, person, number and case. In this talk I deal with the small residue of differences, which were morphosyntactically conditioned, and argue that the use of alternative forms exhibit a clear preference for the default value of each inflectional feature. I provide a unified analysis couched within the Distributed Morphology framework, covering both morphosyntactic as well as phonological differences. I suggest that failure to use the targeted form and the consistency in using default values derives from failure of the Subset Principle to fully apply.

There is no Phonology Circle meeting this week. The next meeting will be on November 24.