Whamit!

Congratulations to our very distinguished 1995 PhD alum, Jonathan Bobaljik, of the University of Connecticuty, on winning a Guggenheim fellowship to study endangered languages.

Speaker: Nick Longenbaugh (MIT)
Title: Medium-distance movement
Date: Tuesday, April 26th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

Many filler-gap dependencies traditionally analyzed as involving A’-movement of a null operator show constraints on the gap site that are not observed with other types of A’-movement (Stowell 1986; Cinque 1990; Rezac 2006; a.o.) wh-question formation, finite relative clause formation). In this talk, I focus on four such cases: degree-clauses, purpose clauses, non-finite relatives, and tough-movement. In each of these constructions, intervening finite clauses (but not infinitives) degrade object gaps and completely block subject gaps. I term this constrained movement medium-distance movement (MDM).

(1) Intervening finite CPs degrade object gaps
a. ?(?)That book was hard [Inf to convince Sally [CP that John wrote t]].
b. ??Sally was too smart [Inf to convince Arthur [CP that the professor had failed t]].
c. ??I chose this piano [Inf to convince Bill [CP that Mozart had practiced on t]].
d. ?(?)I’m looking for a book [Inf to convince Sue [CP that Roth would love t]]

(2) Intervening finite CPs block subject-gaps
a. *John was hard [Inf to convince Sally [CP t wrote that book]].
b. *Sally was too smart [Inf to convince Arthur [CP t failed the test]].
c. *I chose Sue [Inf to convince Bill [CP t won the race]].
d. *I’m looking for an author [Inf to convince Sue [CP t wrote this book]]

I argue that the constraints on MDM arise due to type-theoretic constraints on the interpretation of the top link in the relevant movement chain. I show that in each of the four cases under discussion, the top link in the movement chain must be interpreted as a predicate over individuals (type ). Adopting van Urk’s (2105) type-driven approach to the A/A’-distinction, where A- and A’-movement differ in the type of abstraction they are associated with at LF, this precludes precluding any pure A’-movement step in the course of the derivation of these constructions. Instead, I suggest, following van Urk (2015) and Longenbaugh (2016), that the relevant mechanism is composite A/A’-movement, and that finite CPs (but not infinitives) are islands for such movement in English. MDM out of a finite clause is thus island-violating movement, which captures Cinque’s (1990) observation that MDM shows the same constraints as wh-island-violating movement. This analysis both provides a straightforward explanation of the constrained nature of the movement involved in these constructions and furnishes new evidence for the ubiquity of composite A/A’-movement in natural language.

Speaker: Aron Hirsch (MIT)
Title: Coordination and constituency paradoxes
Time: Thursday, April 28th, 12:30-1:50 pm
Place: 32-D461

In Hirsch (2015), I discuss empirical diagnostics for hidden structure in examples like (1a), and argue for a “conjunction reduction” analysis, where (1a) involves vP conjunction rather than DP conjunction, (1b) (CR, cf. Schein 2014). Diagnostics involve the distribution of adverbs (cf. Collins 1988), available interpretations of VP ellipsis, and observed scope readings (cf. Partee & Rooth 1983).

(1) a. John saw every student and every professor.
b. John [t saw every student] and [t (saw) every professor].

In this talk, I employ these same empirical tests to identify a class of constituency paradoxes. I consider cases where `DP and DP’ appears to be singled out as a constituent — (pseudo)-clefts (2a), right node raising (2b), and examples with `both’ apparently adjoining to `DP and DP’ (2c) — and demonstrate that tests for hidden structure still come out positive in these cases.

(2) a. It’s a table and a chair that John saw.
b. John likes and Mary hates a table and a chair (respectively).
c. John saw both a table and a chair.

To resolve the paradoxes, I propose derivations of (2a)-(2c) which again involve hidden structure above the DP. Finally, I show how the proposal for (2c) may extend beyond apparent DP conjunction to provide an explanation for certain data involving apparent `CP coordination’: (3), where `or’ is interpreted as scoping above the intensional predicate, and observations from Bjorkman (2013).

(3) CNN believes either that Trump will be president or that Hillary will be. (or > believe, *believe > or)

Read Mark Liberman’s paper about Morris Halle in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Here is the abstract:

Morris Halle has been one of the most influential figures in modern linguistics. This is partly due to his scientific contributions in many areas: insights into the sound patterns of English and Russian, ideas about the nature of metered verse, ways of thinking about phonological features and rules, and models for argumentation about phonological description and phonological theory. But he has had an equally profound influence through his role as a teacher and mentor, and this personal influence has not been limited to students who follow closely in his intellectual and methodological footsteps. It has been just as strong—or stronger—among researchers who disagree with his specific ideas and even his general approach, or who work in entirely different subfields. This appreciation is a synthesis of reflections from colleagues and former students whom he has formed, informed, and inspired

Speaker: Benjamin Storme (MIT)
Title: The loi de position and the acoustics of Southern French mid vowels
Date: Monday, April 25th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

Southern French is often described as having a syllable-based distribution of tense and lax mid vowels, traditionally known as the loi de position: tense mid vowels occur in open syllables and lax mid vowels in closed syllables. But there is disagreement among authors as to (i) whether the loi de position holds across contexts (Is it limited to stressed syllables? Is it limited to certain consonantal contexts?) and (ii) whether there is durational difference between tense and lax mid vowels (with tense mid vowels being longer). These debates are reflected in dictionaries, which show conflicting phonetic transcriptions of mid vowels (e.g. Ecossais “Scottish” and accoster “touch land” are transcribed as [ekosɛ] and [akɔste] in the Lexique 3.80, in accordance with the loi de position, but as [ekɔsɛ] and [akɔste] in the TLF).

To answer these questions, I will present two acoustic experiments investigating the realization of French oral vowels in different syllabic/segmental/stress contexts. The results support the view that the loi de position holds both in stressed and unstressed syllables and across a range of consonantal contexts (before [r], [l], and [s]). However, the tense/lax distinction is not necessarily accompanied by a durational difference, suggesting that closed syllable vowel laxing and shortening do not always go together, contrary to what has been assumed in most phonological accounts of the loi de position.

Speaker: Cassandra Chapman
Time: Monday, April 25, at 1:00 PM
Place: 32-D831
Title: Processing of logical form structure: Evidence from binding

Previous psycholinguistic work on filler-gap dependencies demonstrates that the left-to-right incremental parser is sensitive to the syntactic dependency holding between a wh-filler and its gap position. However, little work has investigated how the parser might resolve constructions in which a phrase must be interpreted in a distinct structural position (i.e., in its logical form, or LF, position) from where it appears on the surface. The interpretation of three different types of DPs (namely, anaphors, pronouns and proper names) provide a tool to investigate LF structure in real-time. In three self-paced reading experiments, we examined how these DPs are processed in sentences where the anaphor or pronoun linearly preceded its antecedent. Results suggest that the parser searches for an antecedent as soon as it finds an unbound anaphor (Principle A) but that no such search occurs for pronouns (Principle B). Greater processing difficulty is also incurred when names are first introduced compared to pronouns, which can be explained by current models of variable binding: pronouns can enter the derivation with an index whereas an index needs to be created for names to serve as binders. In this talk, we propose a processing model which makes predictions about when processing difficulty will arise based on the current semantic theories.

Speaker: Paul Marty (MIT)
Time: Friday, April 29, 2-3pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: What it takes ‘to win’: a linguistic point of view

In this talk, I discuss and offer a solution to the `Puzzle of Changing Past’ presented in Barlassina and Del Prete (2014). This puzzle is based on the following true story:

The Rise And Fall Of Lance Armstrong: On 23rd of July 2000, Lance Armstrong is declared the winner of the 87th Tour de France by Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). However, on 22 October 2012, UCI withdraws all of Armstrong’s wins at Tour de France.

Now, consider the following sentence:
(1) Lance Armstrong won the 87th Tour de France.

The puzzle arises from the following observations. If the proposition expressed in (1) is evaluated before `22 October 2012’, then it is true; however, if it is evaluated after `22 October 2012’, then its negation is true. This is puzzling because it challenges the platitude that the truth/falsity of what we say about the past depends on how the past is and stands as it is once and for all, as exemplified in (2).

(2) Lance Armstrong was born in 1971.
a. If (2) is true at a time t in w, then for any t’ such that t’>t, (2) is true at t’ in w.
b. If (2) is false at a time t in w, then for any t’ such that t’>t, (2) is false at t’ in w.

One possibility is to consider this puzzle as a metaphysical one, and embrace Barlassina and Del Prete’s provocative conclusion that the past can change. Instead of taking this avenue, I will argue that this puzzle is linguistic in nature, and defend the platitude. In substance, I will propose that `win’-sentences of (1) involve a covert modality which can be thought of as the remnant of the original speech-act whereby the winner is `declared’ to be so (e.g., `It was declared that Lance Armstrong won the 87th Tour de France’). I will show how this view can account for sentences of (3), and in particular for the presence of the past tense morphology in the embedded clause.

(3) It is no longer the case that [Lance Armstrong won the 87th Tour de France].
(4) #It is no longer the case that [Lance Armstrong was born in 1971].

In the meantime, if you want to look at the original argument, Barlassina and Del Prete’s paper is available here.

Speaker: Keny Chatain (MIT/ENS)
Time: Wednesday, April 20th, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: Some puzzles with demonstratives

In this talk, I will present of some of my work in progress on demonstrative descriptions. Demonstrative descriptions exhibit a wide range of uses: they can co-occur with gestures such as pointing (deictic use), they can refer to an entity previously mentioned in the discourse (anaphoric use), or can occur on their own, without the need for external material to determine their referent. In this talk, I will focus on some cases of anaphoric uses which prove challenging under Elbourne (2001)’s influential account of demonstrative descriptions. Those cases involve sloppy interpretation of an anaphoric demonstrative when its antecedent is under the scope of a quantifier. These examples can be thought of as the counterpart of « paycheck pronouns » with demonstratives. This will allow me to highlight some parallel properties between simple pronouns and demonstratives (bridging inferences, anaphoric use, bound variables, etc). As a conclusion, I will provide an initial sketch of an analysis for these cases.

Speaker: Daniel Margulis (MIT)
Title: Expletive negation is an exponent of only
Time: Thursday, April 21th, 12:30-1:50 pm
Place: 32-D461

Contrary to the natural assumption that negative morphemes bring about truth-condition reversal, Hebrew sentential negation does not always make the expected contribution to meaning, just like other instances of expletive negation crosslinguistically.
Hebrew expletive negation is found in until-clauses (1) and free (headless) relative clauses (2).

(1)   yoni   yaSan ad     Se    ha-Sxenim       lo     hidliku muzika
+++ yoni slept   until that the-neighbors neg   lit       music
++ “Yoni was asleep until the neighbors turned on some music.”

(2)   mi    Se    lo      yaSav b-a-xacer    kibel ugiya
+++ who that neg sat      in-the-yard received cookie
++ “Whoever was sitting in the yard got a cookie.”

In this talk I discuss expletive negation’s contribution to interpretation and argue that the until data should be understood as an obligatory scalar implicature, arising due to an association between expletive negation and a covert `only’.

Why should the negative morpheme participating in expletive negation carry the meaning of `only’? I follow von Fintel & Iatridou’s (2007) decompositional analysis of `only’, according to which only has two components: negation and an exceptive, as attested overtly in some languages, e.g., French `ne…que’ and Greek `dhen…para’. Under such a view, the status of expletive negation would simply be that of any ordinary negation, and the only special property of expletive negation constructions would be that they contain a covert exceptive head.

I provide further support for the current proposal from the observations that expletive negation cannot license negative concord and that an overt `only’ cannot accompany expletive negation. Finally, I will mention a direction in which the proposal could be extended to the free relatives data.

Speaker: Giorgio Magri (CNRS)
Title: The Merchant/Tesar theory of inconsistency detection for learning underlying forms
Time: Thurs 4/21 3-5pm
Place: 32-D461

Date: Friday, April 22nd
Time: 2-3:30pm
Place: 32D, 7th floor seminar room

Lena Borise (Harvard) (with Mitya Privoznov (MIT)) and Tingchun Chen (MIT) will be giving two separate tutorials (45 minutes each) on the basics of ELAN and FLEx. ELAN is a tool for annotating video and audio recordings. FLEx is a fieldwork archiving program developed by the SIL that has many functions, including compiling a lexicon, storing and interlinearizing sentences and texts, etc.

Speaker: Norbert Corver (Utrecht)
Title: small but BIG: Augmentative schwa in the morphosyntactic build of Dutch
Date: Tuesday, April 12th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

The abstract is available here.

Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley) is visiting the department this week. In addition to her Colloquium talk on Friday, she will give two talks:

Title: Cyclicity and connectivity in Nez Perce relative clauses
Time: Wednesday, 04/13/2016, 1:00-2:30pm (note special time)***
Venue: 34-304
Abstract: This talk centers on two aspects of movement in relative clauses, focusing on evidence from Nez Perce.

First, I argue that relativization always involves cyclic A’ movement, even in monoclausal relatives. Rather than moving directly to Spec,CP, the relative element moves there via an intermediate position in an A’ outer specifier of the TP immediately subjacent to relative C. Cyclicity of this type suggests that the TP sister of relative C constitutes a phase — a result whose implications extend to “highest subject restriction” effects in resumptive relatives as well as an ill-understood corner of the English that-trace effect.

Second, I argue that Nez Perce relativization provides new evidence for an ambiguity thesis for relative clauses, according to which some but not all relatives are derived by a head-raising. The argument comes from connectivity and anticonnectivity in morphological case. These new data complement the range of standard arguments for head-raising, which draw primarily on connectivity effects at the syntax-semantics interface.

***Unfortunately, this time conflicts with Giorgio Magri’s lecture. Also, this is the usual LFRG time, which will instead take place on Friday.

Title: Interaction and satisfaction: toward a theory of agreement
Time: Thursday, 04/14/2016, 5:00-6:30pm (note special time)
Venue: 36-155 (note special location)

The operation Agree has typically been modelled as a device for repairing specific lexical deficiencies by feature transfer: [uF] on a head causes the head to probe, and transfer of [F] from a goal causes probing to stop. In this talk, I start with a different conception of Agree, one based not on lexical deficiencies (i.e. u-features) but on the ability to create redundancy. Probes, I propose, interact with (copy) all phi features they encounter until such point as they meet a satisfaction (halt) condition. A probe satisfied by a rather specific feature, such as [addressee], will nevertheless interact with the full phi-set, resulting in a “more than you bargained for” system of agreement. My primary empirical case for such a system comes from complementizer agreement in Nez Perce. I show how the theory is able to model not only the conditions on agreement with the complementizer, but also the workings of agreement in relative clauses and the non-interaction of agreement with A-scrambling.

Speaker: Despina Oikonomou (MIT)
Title: Sloppy pro in Greek: an E-type analysis
Time: Thursday, April 14th, 12:30-1:50 pm
Place: 32-D461

It has been observed that null subjects (NSs) in Japanese allow a sloppy interpretation whereas NSs in Romance languages do not (Oku 1998). This difference has led to the idea that NSs in Japanese-type languages is an instance of argument ellipsis whereas in Spanish-type languages they are silent pronouns (Oku 1998, Saito 2007, Takahashi 2007). However, Duguine (2014) provides empirical evidence for the availability of sloppy readings in Spanish and Basque NSs and argues for a unitary approach of NSs as Argument DP-Ellipsis.

In this talk, I show that sloppy readings are also available in Greek NSs (1), but I provide evidence against a DP-Ellipsis analysis. I argue instead that the sloppy NSs in Greek are E-type pronouns (`paycheck’ pronouns (Cooper 1979)) in the sense of Elbourne’s (2001) approach.

(1) A: i   Maria ipe   oti     to   agapimeno tis       fagito ine o musakas.
+++ the Maria said that the favorite     her.Poss food is the moussaka
+++ ‘Maria said that her favorite food is moussaka.’

+ B: i   Yoko ipe   oti ∅   ine to sushi.
++ the Yoko said that ∅ is the sushi
++ ‘Yoko said [it] is sushi.’
√Sloppy reading: Yoko said that Yoko’s favorite food is sushi.

Elbourne (2001) analyzes E-type pronouns as a determiner plus NP-Ellipsis. I show that sloppy interpretation becomes available when the antecedent involves a relational as opposed to a sortal noun. This contrast follows from Elbourne’s analysis; in relational nouns the possessor is an argument of the NP (Barker 1991), therefore it is present in the elided NP and can be bound. Object clitics behave in a similar way, allowing sloppy interpretations under certain conditions (cf. Giannakidou & Merchant 1997). A new question arises as to whether an E-type analysis of sloppy NSs is applicable in Japanese as well (Miyagawa 2015).

In the next two weeks, Giorgio Magri will give a series of four informal presentations about learnability in OT. The times and locations are listed below, and a description of the topics follows. (Meetings 1 and 3 will be special meetings of 24.981 and 24.964, respectively)

Topic 1: Idempotency, chain shifts, and learnability
Time: Monday 4/11 11am-1pm
Place: 32-D461
Reading: https://sites.google.com/site/magrigrg/home/idempotency

A grammar is idempotent if it yields no chain shifts. I will give a ”reasoned” overview of the OT literature on chain shifts. The idea is that idempotency holds if all the faithfulness constraints satisfy a certain idempotency faithfulness condition(IFC). You can study formally which faithfulness constraints satisfy the IFC and which do not. Once you have your list of faithfulness constraints that do not satisfy the IFC, you can synopsize the various accounts for chain shifts in OT based on which faithfulness constraint they pick from that list. This little bit of theory of idempotency/chain shifts might have some implications for learnability. From a learnability perspective, a chain shift (a->e->i) is not necessarily problematic, as long as it is ”benign”, in the sense that the typology explored by the learner contains another grammar which is idempotent (no chain shifts) and makes the same phonotactic distinctions ([a] illicit; [e, i] licit). The obvious reason is that a phonotactic learner can simply assume he is learning the latter grammar instead of the former. These considerations lead to the following question: is it true that all chain shifts are benign? I don’t know. Yet, I have some ideas on how to use the results of the theory of idempotency to try to establish that. Existing inventories of chain shifts (like the one compiled by Moreton) might provide the empirical basis to address the question. Dinnsen also has a long list of child case studies with chain shifts that might be interesting to look at.

Topic 2: Idempotency, the triangular inequality, and McCarthy’s (2003) categoricity conjecture
Time: Tuesday 4/12 3-5pm
Place: 24-115 (**** Note special place)
Reading: https://sites.google.com/site/magrigrg/home/idempotenceoutputdrivenness

The IFC mentioned above is a fairly abstract and weird-looking condition on the faithfulness constraints. I will suggest that it admits nonetheless a very intuitive interpretation. Here is the idea. Faithfulness constraints intuitively measure the ”phonological distance” between URs and SRs. Thus, it makes sense to ask whether they satisfy axiomatic properties of the notion of distance. One such property is the ”triangular inequality”, which says that the distance between A and C is smaller than the distance between A and B plus the distance between B and C. I will argue that the IFC turns out to be equivalent to the requirement that faithfulness constraints satisfy the triangular inequality (properly readapted). In other words, OT idempotency holds when the faithfulness constraints have good ”metric properties”. Crucially, I can establish this equivalence for faithfulness constraints which satisfy a slightly stronger version of McCarthy’s (2003) categoricity generalization. Is it true that the faithfulness constraints which are relevant for natural language phonology satisfy this stronger categoricity generalization? I don’t know. But the ones I have started to look at seem as they do. The connection between the IFC and the triangular inequality is strengthen in the case of HG, because in that case it holds for any faithfulness constraint, not only for the categorical ones.

Topic 3: Tesar’s characterization of opacity based on output-drivenness
Time: Wednesday 4/13 1-3pm
Place: 32-D461

Tesar (2013) develops an extremely difficult theory of his notion of output-drivenness. Intuitively, this notion is meant to capture opaque interactions (or at least a subset thereof) without resorting to rules, namely in a way which is consistent with constraint-based frameworks. I will present a reconstruction of (a slight generalization of) Tesar’s theory of output-drivenness which (I personally submit) is quite simpler than his original formulation. This reconstruction builds on the results on the faithfulness triangular inequality anticipated above. What is the actual relationship between Tesar’s notion of output-drivenness and opacity? I don’t know—and Tesar does not seem to really care about that after all (that is indeed not what his book is really about). I would be very interested in going through a list of opaque cases (like the list in Baković’s paper) and see how they fare from the classifying perspective of output-drivenness. The task is not trivial, because (as we will see), the definition of output-drivenness has a free parameter which needs to be ”set by the user”. Furthermore, I think that this little project might potentially turn out to be quite interesting for the following reason. We know that opacity is hard to get in OT and it has indeed motivated all kind of advanced technology. Tesar has a fresh approach to it. He cares about learnability, not opacity. He starts from the assumption that opacity is bad for learnability and thus he wants to put opacity aside. This means that he needs to develop constraint conditions which ensure that the grammars in the corresponding typology are output-driven and thus display no opacity. Since opacity is hard to get, you might expect that Tesar has an easy job in characterizing constraint sets which forbid opacity. That turns out not to be the case: Tesar’s task turns out to be very difficult—-even though he makes a number of additional simplifying assumptions (one-to-one correspondence relations, only three faithfulness constraints, etcetera). Thus, it looks like opacity in OT is at the same time hard to get and hard to avoid!! I wonder whether understanding this surprising tension might lead to any new insights on opacity in OT.

Topic 4: The Merchant/Tesar theory of inconsistency detection for learning underlying forms
Time: Thurs 4/21 3-5pm
Place: 32-D461

Speaker: Paul Marty (MIT)
Time: Friday, April 15th, 12-1pm
Place: 32-D461
Title: What it takes ‘to win’: a linguistic point of view

In this talk, I discuss and offer a solution to the `Puzzle of Changing Past’ presented in Barlassina and Del Prete (2014). This puzzle is based on the following true story:

The Rise And Fall Of Lance Armstrong: On 23rd of July 2000, Lance Armstrong is declared the winner of the 87th Tour de France by Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). However, on 22 October 2012, UCI withdraws all of Armstrong’s wins at Tour de France.

Now, consider the following sentence:
(1) Lance Armstrong won the 87th Tour de France.

The puzzle arises from the following observations. If the proposition expressed in (1) is evaluated before `22 October 2012’, then it is true; however, if it is evaluated after `22 October 2012’, then its negation is true. This is puzzling because it challenges the platitude that the truth/falsity of what we say about the past depends on how the past is and stands as it is once and for all, as exemplified in (2).

(2) Lance Armstrong was born in 1971.
a. If (2) is true at a time t in w, then for any t’ such that t’>t, (2) is true at t’ in w.
b. If (2) is false at a time t in w, then for any t’ such that t’>t, (2) is false at t’ in w.

One possibility is to consider this puzzle as a metaphysical one, and embrace Barlassina and Del Prete’s provocative conclusion that the past can change. Instead of taking this avenue, I will argue that this puzzle is linguistic in nature, and defend the platitude. In substance, I will propose that `win’-sentences of (1) involve a covert modality which can be thought of as the remnant of the original speech-act whereby the winner is `declared’ to be so (e.g., `It was declared that Lance Armstrong won the 87th Tour de France’). I will show how this view can account for sentences of (3), and in particular for the presence of the past tense morphology in the embedded clause.

(3) It is no longer the case that [Lance Armstrong won the 87th Tour de France].
(4) #It is no longer the case that [Lance Armstrong was born in 1971].

In the meantime, if you want to look at the original argument, Barlassina and Del Prete’s paper is available here.

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Title: Shifty asymmetries: toward universals and variation in shifty indexicality
Time: Friday, 04/15/2016, 3:30-5:00pm
Venue: 32-141

Indexical shift is a phenomenon whereby indexicals embedded in speech and attitude reports depend for their reference on the speech/attitude report, rather than on the overall utterance. For example, in a language with indexical shift, “I” may refer to Bob in a sentence like “Who did Bob think I saw?”. The last 15 years have seen an explosive growth in research on indexical shift cross-linguistically. In this talk, I discuss three major generalizations that emerge from this work, and present a theory that attempts to explain them. The account that I develop concerns the syntax of indexical shift along with its semantics, and has consequences for the linguistic encoding of attitudes de se. Throughout the talk I will exemplify indexical shift primarily, though by no means exclusively, with data from original fieldwork on Nez Perce.

On Saturday, April 16 MIT will host this year’s ECO5 student syntactic workshop. It is a yearly small conference where graduate students from five East Coast departments (Harvard, UConn, UMass, UMaryland and MIT) can present their ongoing or completed work on syntactic issues to a friendly crowd of faculty and students, which rotates between the five co-organizing departments.

This year it is MIT’s turn to run things, and you can find a program here.

The workshop starts at 9:15am on Saturday, and will continue until around 6pm.

See you there!

Speaker: Athulya Aravind (MIT)
Title: Children’s understanding of factive forget/remember
Date and time: Monday, April 11th, 1:00 to 2:00 PM
Venue: 32-D831

Children have been reported to have enduring difficulties with cognitive factives, even at an age when they don’t have generalized difficulties with (non-factive) attitude predicates or presupposition triggers. Specifically, children behave as if they don’t know that the veracity inference survives under negation. We examine 4-6-year-olds’ understanding of the factive verb-pair forget/remember and find two populations: one group (n=13) displays adult-like performance, while the other (n=19) appears to be treating factive predicates on par with their implicative counterparts. My goal for this talk will be twofold: (i) consider whether this pattern is indicative of an acquisition stage where children lack a factive representation for remember/forget and (ii) discuss ideas for follow-up experiments that could adjudicate between different interpretations of these results.

Speaker: Sudha Arunachalam (BU)
Title: How do children learn the meanings of event nominals?
Date and time: Monday, April 4th, 1:00 to 2:00 PM
Venue: 32-D831

Abstract: In the literature on vocabulary acquisition, much attention has been paid to the conceptual and linguistic differences between early-acquired verbs (labels for actions) and early-acquired nouns (labels for objects and people) and how these pose different learning tasks for the child. Event nominals pose an interesting challenge in that some are relatively early acquired, like “party” and “nap,” but they pose the same conceptual difficulties that accompany verbs while lacking the linguistic supports offered by verb argument structure. I would like to have an informal discussion about how we might investigate children’s representations for these early event nominals and what underlies their abilities to acquire them.

Speaker: Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: ATB-shifts and ATB-blockage in vocalic plateaus
Date/Time: Monday, April 4, 5:00–6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

The abstract is available here.

Speaker: Fabian Moss (TU Dresden) (BU)
Title: Towards a syntactic account for harmonic sequences in extended tonality
Date and time: Tuesday, April 5, 1:00 to 2:00 PM
Venue: 32-D461

A fundamental aspect of Western music is tonal harmony, or tonality, a complex rule system for specifying a) acceptable combinations of notes and chords within a key through reference to the tonic, its tonal center, and b) relationships between different keys. This is usually called harmonic function. Implicit knowledge of harmonic functions enables listeners to form strong expectations about the harmonic structure of musical pieces. To account for this phenomenon, previous research points to hierarchical grammatical models similar to those used to account for linguistic structure. The harmonic structure in music of the common practice period (Bach to Beethoven) is well described by grammars which define harmonic functions as recursive, tonic-headed patterns. In extended tonality, the language of the romantic period (Schubert to Mahler), harmonic patterns can be formalized in terms of finite state automata or as finite cyclic groups of transformations acting on notes or chords. However, the relationship to hierarchical descriptions and thus the integration into cognitive models that account for the building of harmonic expectations faces several challenges:

How to deal with cyclic patterns?

Are local dependencies enough?

How to determine head(s) of phrases?

This talk will outline the conceptual framework for dealing with musical instances of extended tonality in order to draw connections to current cognitive models of tonal harmony. Musical examples that will be discussed include:

F. Liszt: 5 Klavierstücke S. 192, No. 2 (Lento assai)

L. v. Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 op. 125, mvt. 2 (Scherzo)

J. Brahms: Double Concerto in A-minor, op. 102, mvt. 2 (Andante)

G. Verdi: Messa da Requiem (Rex Tremendae)

A. Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 “From The New World”, mvt. 2 “Largo”

A. Bruckner: “Ecce sacerdos magnus”, WAB 13

Speaker: Mike Jacques (MIT)
Time: Wednesday, April 6th, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: Approximators and Exceptives

There is a class of approximators (almost, nearly, practically) that have an anomalous distribution with quantifiers - approximator + universal quantifier is grammatical, while approximator + existential quantifier is ungrammatical. Consider the following data:

a. Almost/Nearly/Practically every student is here
b. Almost/Nearly/Practically no students are here
c. *Almost/Nearly/Practically {some/most/the/5} students are here

Previous analyses of these operators have failed to account for the distribution in (1). I argue that the key data point in trying to give a semantics for these approximators is their close relation with exceptive phrases. Consider the exceptive phrases with but in (2):

a. Every student but John is here
b. No student but John is here
c. *Some/Most/5/the students but John are here

In this talk, I argue that a precise semantics for these approximators can be given in terms of an exceptive semantics, where the exception itself is existentially quantified. I show that this semantics, coupled with pragmatic considerations of “closeness,” gives a straightforward prediction for approximators and quantifiers, which correctly accounts for the data in (1).

The 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL 46) was held last week at Stony Brook University (SUNY).

Third year student Sophie Moracchini & Aurore Gonzalez (Harvard) gave a talk about A morpho-semantic decomposition of French `le moindre’ into even + superlative.

Visiting scholars Adina Dragomirescu & Alexandru Nicolae (Romanian Academy - University of Bucharest) presented on Interpolation in Old Romanian and IstroRomanian

Three MIT alumni also presented talks: Dominique Sportiche ‘84 (UCLA) who gave a talk about Overt movement even with island resumptives and consequences; Richard Kayne ‘69 (NYU) about French HCI, Agree, and Clitic Doubling; and Viviane Déprez ‘89 (Rutgers), who gave a talk on Contextual and prosodic disambiguation of French concord and discord with Jeremy Yeaton.

The full program and abstracts can be found here.

Speaker: Adina Dragomirescu & Alexandru Nicolae (Romanian Academy - University of Bucharest)
Title: Inflected `non-finite’ forms: The Romance inflected infinitive vs. the Romanian Supine
Time: Thursday, April 7th, 12:30-1:50 pm
Place: 32-D461

In this talk we introduce the relevant data related to the inflected infinitive in the Romance languages and in languages from other families. We focus on the relation between inflected and non-inflected (regular) infinitives and on the origin of the inflected forms. The data presented make it difficult to give straightforward answers to questions like ‘what is an infinitive?’ or ‘how can we distinguish between an inflected infinitive and a subjunctive?’.

We then turn to the data regarding the Romanian supine and the competition between supine, infinitive and subjunctive forms in Modern Standard Romanian. We also pay attention to the usage of the supine in the northern varieties of Romanian, which, in contrast to the standard supine allows clitics, negation and even person and number agreement. This suggests that the functional structure of the standard supine is reduced when compared to the northern varieties.

Finally, we try to put all these data in the context of the ‘exfoliation’ hypothesis, presented by David Pesetsky in his class this semester. We show that the Romanian infinitive, like the inflected infinitive in other Romance languages, projects a full non-finite clausal domain, so that exfoliation is not relevant here. However, the standard supine (incompatible with subjects, clitics, and negation) obtains via exfoliation of the C domain, the higher projection being probably the MoodP, where de, the supine marker, is hosted. However, in the northern varieties, the supine is a CP, with de hosted by the C domain, and its functional domain contains at least NegP (where the negation is hosted), and a PersP (where clitics are hosted). Empirical arguments for distinguishing between ‘exfoliation’ and (Rizzi’s / Wurmbrand’s) ‘restructuring’ are also presented.

Open issues: Is exfoliation relevant from a diachronic point of view? Is exfoliation reversible? What is the relation between grammaticalization and exfoliation?