Whamit!

Heartfelt congratulations to our colleague Sabine Iatridou, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Crete last Wednesday — a great honor!! See the link for the official announcement. Here is the announcement of the event by the university, and here is a link to the coverage in the local paper.

Speaker: Brian Dillon (UMass)
Title: Which noun phrases is this verb supposed to agree with… and when?
Date and time: Monday, March 28, in 32-D831, 1:00-2:00 pm

The study of agreement constraints has yielded much insight into the organization of grammatical knowledge, within and across languages. In a parallel fashion, the study of agreement production and comprehension have provided key data in the development of theories of language production and comprehension. In this talk I present work at the intersection of these two research traditions. I present the results of experimental research (joint work with Adrian Staub, Charles Clifton Jr, and Josh Levy) that suggests that the grammar of many American English speakers is variable: in certain syntactic configurations, more than one NP is permitted to control agreement (Kimball & Aissen, 1971). However, our work suggests that this variability is not random, and in particular, optional agreement processes are constrained by the nature of the parser. We propose that variable agreement choices arise in part as a function of how the parser stores syntactic material in working memory d uring the incremental production of syntactic structures.

Speaker: Kevin Ryan (Harvard)
Title: Strictness functions in meter
Date/Time: Monday, March 28, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Meters can vary in strictness along several dimensions, four of which I’ll illustrate using the Finnish Kalevala, though the principles are arguably universal.
1. Strictness increases across constituents such as the line (couplet, etc.), such that exceptions are most frequent at the beginning and taper off towards the end.
2. Although the meter is conventionally described as regulating only stressed syllables, I show that degree of regulation correlates with degree of stress, such that violations of the meter are more tolerated for more weakly stressed syllables, but not fully ignored.
3. Although conventionally described as binary, the meter evidently treats weight as gradient, such that the more the duration of a syllable deviates from its metrical target, the more the mapping is penalized.
4. Word boundaries are increasingly avoided towards the end of the line (beyond prose baselines). The conventionally recognized prohibition on line-final monosyllables is only the most extreme manifestation of this tendency.
In all four cases, strictness of mapping (i.e. how much a violation of the meter is “felt”) is modulated by some scale such as position in the line, stress level, or duration. I discuss how such modulations of strictness can be modeled in a maxent or logistic constraint framework and some resulting typological predictions.

Speaker: Kenyon Branan (MIT)
Title: Real object agreement in Tigre
Date: Tuesday, March 29th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

Whenever the phi-features of an argument are cross-referenced by a morpheme in the verbal complex, the question arises: is this morpheme an agreement morpheme, or is it a doubled clitic. Recently, instances of object cross-referencing have been argued to be clitic doubling (Woolford 2008, Preminger 2009, Nevins 2011, Kramer 2014), raising the question of whether or not languages ever allow for true object agreement. I’ll argue, based on a variety of diagnostics, that object cross-referencing in Tigre appears to be a real instance of Agree.

Speaker: Daniel Margulis (MIT)
Time: Wednesday, March 30, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D831

Daniel Margulis will discuss Champollion’s (2016) paper titled Overt distributivity in algebraic event semantics.

Speaker: Naomi Francis (MIT)
Title: Scope in negative inversion constructions: Evidence from positive polarity item modals
Time: Thursday, March 31th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

Negative inversion is a construction that involves the preposing of a negative expression and obligatory subject-auxiliary inversion (e.g. `Under no circumstances are you to buy another pet giraffe’). Collins and Postal (2014) claim that the preposed negative element takes scope over everything else in the clause. I show that, while the negative expression does take scope over quantificational DPs, deontic modals should, must, and to be to, which have been argued to be positive polarity items (PPIs) (Iatridou & Zeijlstra 2013), are able to outscope it. I argue that this can be explained if PPI modals undergo covert movement to escape environments where they are not licensed, as proposed by Iatridou and Zeijlstra (2013) and Homer (2015). This picture is complicated by the fact that epistemic PPI modals behave differently from their deontic counterparts in negative inversion constructions. Furthermore, there is interspeaker variation in the acceptability of epistemic PPI modals in these constructions; at least two patterns of data are attested. I propose that these facts can be captured if we allow certain aspects of the Epistemic Containment Principle (von Fintel & Iatridou 2003) to vary across speakers.

Paper: Hayes, Wilson, and Shisko (2012) “Maxent Grammars for the Metrics of Shakespeare and Milton” Language 88.4, pp. 691-731
Time: Thursday, 03/31/2016, 5:00-6:30 PM
Venue: 32-D461

Two of our graduate students and two recent alums presented their work at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) last week in Berkeley.

• Second-year student Abdul-Razak Sulemana presented a papret on “Wh-in-situ and intervention in Bùlì”.
• Third-year student Kenyon Branan spoke about “Abstract dependent case: evidence from Kikuyu”
• Claire Halpert (PhD 2012) of the University of Minnesota was a plenary speaker. Her topic was “Surmountable Barriers”
• Newly minted alum Isaac Gould (PhD 2015) co-presented (with Tessa Scott) a talk on “Two derivations for amba relative clauses in Swahili”

Speaker: Bruce Hayes (UCLA)
Title: Stochastic constraint-based grammars for Hausa verse and song
Date: Friday, April 1st
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

I pursue a long-standing tradition in phonology, namely appeal to poetic metrics as a testing ground for ideas more broadly applicable in phonology as a whole. The research I will describe is from an ongoing collaboration with Russell Schuh of UCLA.

The rajaz meter of Hausa is based on syllable quantity. In its dimeter form, it deploys lines consisting of two metra, each with six moras. A variety of metra occur, and the analytical challenge is to single out the legal metra from the set of logically possible metra. Our analysis, framed in maxent OT, does this, and also accounts for the statistical distribution of metron types — varying from poem to poem — within the line and stanza. We also demonstrate a law of comparative frequency for rajaz and show how it emerges naturally in maxent when competing candidates are in a relationship of harmonic bounding.

Turning to how verse is sung, we observe that rajaz verse rhythm is always remapped onto a sung rhythm, and we consider grammatical architectures, some serial, that can characterize this remapping. Lastly, we develop a maxent phonetic grammar, adapting the framework of Edward Flemming, to predict the durations of the sung syllables. Our constraints simultaneously invoke all levels of structure: the syllables and moras of the phonology, the grids used for poetic scansion, and the grids used for sung rhythm.

Faculty member Michel DeGraff gave a 2-hour keynote workshop at the Third Bremen Conference on Language and Literature in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts.

Speaker: Katsuo Tamaoka(Nagoya University, Japan)
Title: Indexing Movement: Eye-tracking experiments on Japanese scrambled sentences
Date/Time: Monday, March 14, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: 32-D769 (location change)

Movement is part of many syntactic structures. However, due to the absence of a directly-compatible baseline, it is usually difficult to visualize syntactic movement in sentence. Japanese scrambled sentences provide an ideal environment for visualizing movement. This talk presents the results of eye-tracking experiments that compared scrambled and canonical Japanese sentences. The results indicate three possible indexes for movement; (1) re-reading time of a moved phrase, (2) regression frequency ratio into the moved phrase, and (3) regression frequency ratio out of the possible trace position. At least one of these three (if not all), depending on the ease of processing load, is likely to appear in the scrambled sentences. This talk will propose the possible indexes for movement in the cognitive processing of sentences.

Speaker: Patrick Jones (Harvard) and Jake Freyer (Brandeis)
Title: Emergent complexity in melodic tone: The case of Kikamba
Date/Time: Monday, March 14, 5:00-6:00pm
Location: 32-D831

Melodic tone assignment, in which inflectional features of verbs are signaled entirely through tonal morphemes assigned to particular positions within verb stems, are pervasive within Bantu languages. A considerable body of recent work has focused on melodic tone in various Bantu languages, in an effort to better understand its core properties (in particular, the extensive 2014 volume of Africana Linguistica, edited by Lee Bickmore and David Odden). From this work, one possible conclusion is that melodic tone is relatively unconstrained both in what tones it may assign and what positions within the verb stem they may target. For example, in one extreme case, in Kikamba, a melody reportedly assigns four distinct tones to three separate positions simultaneously. In this talk, we propose a reanalysis of Kikamba which (a) restricts melodies to two target positions and (b) reduces the total inventory of target sites. More generally, we argue that since core properties of melodic tone are often obscured in surface forms due to interactions with language-particular rules, the cross-linguistic comparison of melodic tone should proceed on the basis a (more) underlying level in which these rules are controlled for.

Speaker: Abdul-Razak Sulemana (MIT)
Title: Deceptive Overt wh-movement in Bùlì
Date: Tuesday, March 15th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

Deceptive Overt wh-movement in Bùlì: Abstract

Speaker: Aron Hirsch
Time: Wednesday, March 16, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: Co-ordinating questions

There is disagreement in the literature about whether or not constituent questions can be disjoined (e.g. Groenendijk & Stokhof 1989, Szabolcsi 1997, Krifka 2001, Haida & Repp 2013). In this talk, I introduce novel data arguing that questions can be both disjoined and conjoined. I propose an analysis of disjoined constituent questions which unifies them with alternative questions and mention-some questions. Although questions are often taken to denote sets of propositions (type ), the proposed analysis will further render the data compatible with a hypothesis that only type t meanings can be co-ordinated (e.g. Hirsch 2015, Schein 2014, Ross 1967).

Speaker: Polina Berezovskaya (University of Tübingen)
Title: `Small Degrees’: Degree Modification in Nenets.
Time: Thursday, March 17th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

In Nenets, an underrepresented Samoyedic language from the Uralic language family, the suffix ‘-rka’ is commonly found on the gradable adjective in comparison constructions, cf. (1):

(1) Katja Masha-xad saml’ang santimetra-nh pirc’a-rka.
Katja Masha-ABL five cm-DAT tall-RKA
‘Katja is a little taller than Masha.’

Contrary to claims in the descriptive literature (e.g. Terezhenko 1947, Nikolaeva 2014), according to which this suffix is a comparative marker, original fieldwork data shows that it is not. I am proposing an analysis under which ‘-rka’ is a degree modifier that modifies a difference degree stating that this degree is small.

The Puzzle. The striking fact is that this suffix also appears outside of comparison constructions. (2) and (3) show instances of ‘-rka’ on nouns and verbs.

(2) a. ngamderc’- chair, ngamderc’arka - kind of a chair
b. neb’a - mother, neb’arka - a mother who kind of fulfils her duties as a mother, but not quite
c. ne - woman, nerka - kind of a woman (e.g. doesn’t really behave like one)

(3) Man’ s’urba-rka-dm.
I run-RKA-1.SG
‘I ran a little.’

The question here is what the core meaning contributed by ‘-rka’ in all these cases is and whether nouns and verbs carrying this suffix make reference to some kind of an implicit comparison.

The Plot. In this talk, I will explore the meaning contribution of this suffix in and outside of comparison constructions. An analysis of Nenets comparisons that are not marked by ‘-rka’ will be provided in the spirit of the standard analysis (cf. von Stechow 1984, Heim 2001, Beck 2011). I will also propose an analysis of cases like (1) using a certain type of the Restrict operation (cf. Chung and Ladusaw 2004). Ultimately, we will discuss the meaning contribution of -rka outside of comparisons.

Speaker: Norvin Richards (MIT)
Title: Fieldwork Methodology and More
Date: Wednesday, March 16th
Time: 5-6pm (UPDATED - one hour later than originally announced)
Place: 7th floor seminar room

Norvin will be talking to us about a few fieldwork-related issues (elicitation preparation, types of judgment, etc.)

A few topics that he might cover are:

(i) judgment types (grammaticality, felicity, etc.), judgment scale (good/?/*, numeric, etc.), ways to elicit judgments

(ii) elicitation prep: questionnaires with randomized items, grouping questions that target the same phenomenon together (not randomized), etc.

(iii) ways to elicit specific constructions, diagnostics to detect certain phenomenon

(iv) how to recruit speakers: any criteria for selecting speakers to work with when one just starts on a language (gender, education background, occupation, etc.).

(v) his fieldwork in Australia

Speaker: Naomi Feldman (University of Maryland)
Title: How phonetic learners should use their input
Time: Wednesday, 03/16/2016, 3:30-5:00 pm
Venue: 32D-461

Children have impressive statistical learning abilities. In phonetic category acquisition, for example, they are sensitive to the distributional properties of sounds in their input. However, knowing that children have statistical learning abilities is only a small part of understanding how they make use of their input during language acquisition. This work uses Bayesian models to examine three basic assumptions that go into statistical learning theories: the structure of learners’ hypothesis space, the way in which input data are sampled, and the features of the input that learners attend to. Simulations show that although a naïve view of statistical learning may not support robust phonetic category acquisition, there are several ways in which learners can potentially benefit by leveraging the rich statistical structure of their input.

Speaker: Naomi Feldman (University of Maryland)
Modeling language outside of the lab
Time: Friday, 03/18/2016, 3:30-5:00 pm
Venue: 32D-461

Speakers and listeners operate in complex linguistic environments. They extract phonetic information from highly variable speech signals and track the salience of entities in rich discourse contexts. However, little is known about the representations that support language use in these complex environments. In this talk, two cognitive models that were developed for laboratory settings are modified to operate over more naturalistic corpora. A rational speaker model is used to predict how entities are referred to in news articles, and a model of speech perception is trained and tested directly on speech recordings. In each case, simulation results show how cognitive modeling can be used to probe the way in which speakers and listeners represent the complexity of their linguistic environment.

This week’s ESSL/LacqLab weekly meeting will feature two short presentations - one on language acquisition, by Athulya Aravind, and one on processing, by Aron Hirsch. The meeting will take place on Monday, March 07, 1:00-2:00 PM, in 32-D831.

Speaker: Erin Olson (MIT)
Title: Intermediate markedness: a case for using gradual OT learners
Date: Monday, March 7th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

In the phonological acquisition literature, it has been observed that there are some children who acquire marked structures of the target language in a two-step fashion: they go through a stage where they are only able to produce the marked structure in some privileged position(s) within the word before being able to produce that structure in the full range of positions allowed in the target language. It is commonly assumed that the intermediate stage is due to the ranking Positional Faithfulness >> Markedness >> General Faithfulness (Tessier 2009). However, if this characterization is adopted, gradual OT learners such as the GLA (Boersma 1997, Magri 2012) will not predict that children should ever go through such a stage (Jesney & Tessier 2007, 2008; Tessier 2009). This failure to predict an intermediate stage has been used to argue that gradual OT learners either must be modified (Tessier 2009) or abandoned in favour of using HG (Jesney & Tessier 2007, 2008).

In this talk, I will show that gradual OT learners as currently formulated are capable of predicting such stages, so long as positional Markedness is an option for their characterization. I will also examine cases where description of a privileged position within the word cannot be reduced to positional Markedness, and will show that while reference to positional Faithfulness can still guide children’s productions, it can do so while ranked much lower than would be necessary under previous analyses. Since gradual OT learners can properly model such intermediate stages, their existence should not be used as an argument for preferring one learning algorithm over another.

Speaker: Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Wh-movement to complement position in Kikuyu (and cross-linguistically)
Date: Tuesday, March 8th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm (the previously announced time was incorrect)
Place: 32-D461

In Kikuyu (Northeast Bantu; Kenya), wh-questions are formed by moving a wh-word to the left periphery of any clause (matrix or embedded) or by leaving it in situ. In the cases of overt movement, the wh-word surfaces with a left-peripheral focus morpheme, which I take to occupy Foc in an articulated CP (Rizzi 1997). The main claim of this talk is that wh-movement in Kikuyu, triggered by an EPP property on Foc, lands in the complement of Foc, rather than in Spec-FocP (as is usually assumed); I’ll refer to this kind of movement as Undermerge, following Pesetsky (2007, 2013). Undermerging to complement position allows the focus morpheme, analyzed here as a focus operator (cf. Abels & Muriungi 2008), to directly take the wh-word as its semantic argument. I additionally demonstrate that this analysis accounts for some seemingly unrelated properties of Kikuyu such as the morphosyntactic behaviour of negation. This proposal for Kikuyu dovetails with previous work on association with focus via covert movement (Wagner 2006, Erlewine & Kotek 2014) and also lets us draw novel parallels with similar-looking phenomena from Turkish (Özyıldız 2015) and Navajo (Bogal-Allbritten 2013, 2014). Finally, I extend the Kikuyu facts to Cable’s (2007, 2010) Q theory of wh-movement/pied piping and show how this extension lets us explore the nature of the relationship between the Q particle and the higher interrogative C it forms a dependency with.

Speaker: Paul Crowley (MIT)
Time: Wednesday, March 9, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: A puzzle with contrastive polarity

Contrastive stress is commonly taken to indicate F-marking in the syntax, which is licensed under conditions that apply in the focus semantic domain (Rooth 1992, Schwartzchild 1999). This talk will be concerned with a puzzle relating to the licensing conditions on the contrastive stress appearing in expressions like (1), represented in CAPS.

(1) John didn’t read a singleNPI book that MARY DID read.

The sentence in (1) features two points of contrastive stress, on Mary and did. Stress on Mary expresses a contrast between the subjects of the matrix and relative clauses and stress on did indicates a contrast between the polarity of the two clause domains. Standard accounts of contrastive polarity assume that the accenting on did in the affirmative clause is associated with a covert affirmative head, which acts as the counterpart to the overt Neg (Chomsky 1955, 1957, Laka 1994). It will be shown that a parallel antecedent for the F-marked object containing the affirmative head in (1) can only be created by raising the object DP to scope above the negation at LF. However, the object DP cannot scope above the negation given that it contains an NPI which is only licensed within the scope of that negation.

It will be argued that the conflict in (1) must be resolved by assuming that contrastive polarity accenting does not indicate F-marking in the syntax and is licensed under different conditions than ‘normal’ contrastive accenting, e.g. contrastive subjects. Additional data will be offered as evidence for this. The rough beginnings of an analysis will be discussed, with many crucial details missing and many questions left unanswered. Lastly, contrastive polarity will be compared to another case of ‘abnormal’ contrastive accenting, contrastive voice, which raises independent questions. It will be suggested that these two types of accenting should be analyzed in a similar way.

Speaker: Amanda Swenson (MIT)
Title: A Semantics for Malayalam Conjunctive Participles Constructions
Time: Thursday, March 10th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

Amritavalli & Jayaseelan (2005), Hany Babu & Madhavan (2003), a.o. raise the question of whether the traditional tense morphemes should be reanalyzed as aspect in Malayalam, making Malayalam a tenseless language. Conjunctive Participle/Serial Verb Constructions, (1), play a central role in this debate.

(1) a. njaan oru maanga pootticch-u thinn-u
I one mango pluck-U/I eat-PAST
‘I plucked and ate a mango.’ (Amritavalli & Jayaseelan 2005 p199: 37a)
b. mani avan-te katha karanj-u paranj-u.
Mani he-GEN tale cry-U/I tell-PAST
‘Weeping, Mani told his tale.’ (Gopalkrishnan 1985 p18: 8)

In this talk I assume, following Hany Babu & Madhavan (2003) and Asher & Kumari (1997) a.o., that the –u/i marker in Conjunctive Participles (`non-main verbs’) has a distinct temporal analysis from that of main verbs. In main verbs, –u/i is a past tense marker and in non-main verbs it is a semantically vacuous, frozen form (cf. Jayaseelan 2003). I propose an account for the way multi-verb constructions are temporally interpreted based on Stump (1985), thereby removing an argument for the claim that Malayalam is a tenseless language.

Speaker: Elliott Moreton (UNC)
Title: Inside adult phonotactic learning
Date: Friday, March 11th
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

Lab studies of phonological learning by adults (“artificial-language” studies) have become common in recent years as a way to test hypotheses about phonological inductive biases. However, not much is at present known about what participants are actually doing in the experiments. Do all participants approach the task in the same way? How does the experimental procedure affect the participants’ approach? Does the participant’s approach affect which patterns are easier or harder to learn? In this talk, we will discuss results from a series of phonotactic pattern-learning experiments that address these questions using both objective measures (e.g., proportion correct, reaction time, abruptness of the learning curve, etc.) and subjective ones (analysis of participants’ introspective reports). The main conclusion is that in any of a range of experimental conditions, two sub-populations emerge: implicit (intuitive, cue-based) and explicit (rational, rule-based) learners, and that the two learning modes can differ in sensitivity to different patterns: Rule-seeking amplifies an advantage which family-resemblance patterns enjoy over exclusive-or patterns. The existence and experimental signatures of implicit and explicit learning modes are very similar to what has been found in non-linguistic pattern learning; however, the effect of rule-seeking on relative difficulty is quite different. Implications will be discussed for both phonological theory and for the relationship between phonological and non-phonological pattern learning.

Our warmest congratulations to Adam Albright on his promotion to the rank of Full Professor!