Whamit!

Speaker: Bruna Karla Pereira (UFVJM)
Title: “Inflection of wh-determiners and wh-quantifiers in dialectal Brazilian Portuguese”
Date and Time: Thursday, May 26, 12:30pm-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: here

The MIT-Haiti Initiative, under the leadership of Michel DeGraff (MIT Linguistics), is announcing its seventh MIT-Haiti workshop on active learning of STEM in Kreyòl. This workshop is the second that’s co-organized by the State University of Haiti (“UEH”), and it will be hosted, June 13-16, 2016, on the Campus Henry Christophe of UEH at Limonade. Deadline for registration is this Friday, May 27. The announcement is online at: http://bit.ly/1TCYcd4

Speaker: Sophie Moracchini (MIT)
Title: Metathesis in Verlan: reducing syllable reversal to segment reversal
Date/Time: Monday, May 16, 5:00–6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

The abstract can be found here.

Speaker: Bruna Karla Pereira (UFVJM; CAPES Foundation- Ministry of Education of Brazil)
Title: Cardinals and the DP-internal distribution of the plural morpheme in Brazilian Portuguese
Date: Tuesday, May 17th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

The abstract can be found here.

Michel DeGraff contributed a commentary that appeared this week in the Boston Review, on the topic “What is education for?”.

Speaker: Shayne Sloggett (UMASS)
Title: “Do comprehenders violate Binding Theory? Depends on your point of view”
Date/Time: Thursday, May 19/12:30pm-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461

In the course of sentence comprehension, comprehenders will, inevitably, need to interpret anaphoric elements (e.g. pronouns, reflexives, ellipsis). A good deal of work in psycholinguistics has been aimed understanding how such elements are interpreted in real-time, investigating the role played by grammatical constraints and their interaction with general memory mechanisms. For pronouns and reflexives, it has been claimed that comprehenders use Binding Theory (Chomsky 1986) to tightly restrict the search for an antecedent in early stages of comprehension (Chow, Lewis, & Phillips, 2014; Dillon, Mishler, Sloggett, & Phillips, 2013; Nicol & Swinney, 1989; Sturt, 2003). However, recent findings challenge this view, demonstrating that reflexive comprehension sometimes accesses antecedents solely on the basis of their match with the reflexive’s morphosyntactic features (Chen, Jaeger, & Vasishth, 2012; Patil, Lewis, & Vasishth, 2016; Parker, 2014). In this talk, I will explore the source of this ‘grammatical fallibility’ in the real-time application of Binding Theory: do apparent violations of Principle A in comprehension reflect processing errors in antecedent selection, or are they instead the result of alternative grammatical constraints on reflexive interpretation? I will present the results of two eye-tracking while reading studies which demonstrate that comprehenders do not simply “make mistakes” in finding reflexive antecedents, but rather attend to non-Principle A antecedents when a discourse-oriented, logophoric interpretation of the reflexive is available. Curiously, it is not clear that such interpretations are fully licensed in English, suggesting that comprehenders make use of “sub-grammatical” knowledge of possible linguistic structures in other languages. These findings thus suggest a rather tight link between grammatical knowledge and linguistic processing, albeit, one interestingly complicated by “sub-grammatical” information. Finally, these findings might be extended to improve our understanding of Binding Theory by providing potential evidence against predicate-based theories of binding (Pollard & Sag 1992; Reinhart & Reuland 1993).

This issue coincides with the end of the Spring semester at MIT. Until the beginning of the Fall semester next September, we will publish only occasionally, to announce talks and other events that may be scheduled over the the summer, and any other important news.

Thank you for being our readers during the 2016-2016 Academic Year!

Whamit’s 2015-16 Editors:
Adam Albright
Kai von Fintel
Lilla Magyar
Sophie Moracchini
David Pesetsky
Benjamin Storme

TALK 1: REGULAR MONDAY MEETING

Speaker: Mingqiong (Joan) Luo (Shanghai International Studies University)
Title: Opacity in MC Nasal Rhymes—-Phonetics and Phonology
Date/Time: Monday, May 9, 5:00–6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Cross-linguistically speaking, nasal place assimilation is quite common when the nasal is followed by a consonant. English and Japanese have plenty of examples for it. However, although it is well-known that Mandarin Chinese (MC) has two nasal phonemes in the coda place: /n/ and /ŋ/, there is very few literature on what exactly happens to the nasal place in VN.CV context, when the nasal is followed immediately by a consonant. This research explored this problem by conducting a phonetic experiment and using R to analyze the data. Results show that (i) there is no place assimilation in MC VN.CV context; (ii) nasal place contrast has been neutralized in the citation form; (iii) the only cue to nasal place contrast in MC nasal rhymes is vowel-nasal transitional formant 2; (iv) there is opacity in Chinese nasal rhymes, ever since the citation form, and it can be captured by the following two rules in order:

(a) V/N backness agreement: V → V [αback] / _N[αplace]#

(b) Nasal place deletion: N[α place] → N[0 place] / _#

TALK 2: FRIDAY PRACTICE TALK

Speaker: Juliet Stanton & Sam Zukoff (MIT)
Title: Prosodic Misapplication in Copy Epenthesis and Reduplication
Date/Time: Friday, May 13, 1:00–2:00pm
Location: 32-D831

The term copy epenthesis refers to patterns of vowel epenthesis in which the featural value of the inserted vowel co-varies with context, “copying” the features of a neighboring vowel (e.g. /pra/ → [para], /pri/ → [piri]). This paper focuses on a class of cases in which the similarity between copy vowels and their hosts extends beyond featural resemblance, and how the existence of these effects informs the analysis of copy epenthesis – and by extension, the analysis of copying phenomena more generally. In particular, we show that copy vowels and their hosts strive for identity not only in all segmental features, but in all prosodic properties as well – and that this drive for prosodic identity can cause the misapplication of prosodic properties (i.e. stress, pitch, length). To explain these effects, we propose that copy vowels and their hosts stand in correspondence with each other (Kitto & de Lacy 1999). We show that this correspondence-based approach naturally extends to a class of similar misapplication effects in reduplication, and argue that the empirical overlap between the phenomena signals a formal similarity. In this way, the paper develops Kitto & de Lacy’s (1999) suggestion that copying, phonological and morphological, is mediated by correspondence constraints (cf. Kawahara 2007).

Speaker: Colin Davis & Justin Colley
Title: A new approach to Turkish nominalized clauses (WAFL test-run)
Date: Tuesday, May 10th
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

In this talk, we account for the properties of several clause types in Turkish, where we see alternations between genitive and nominative subjects in several circumstances. We make use of two primary tools: 1 - A configurational system of case (Marantz 1991, Levin & Preminger 2014) in which nominative and genitive are reflexes of the unmarked case, respectively in the clausal domain and the nominal domain. 2 - A dynamic view of phasal domains (Den Dikken 2007, Alexiadou et al 2014, Wurmbrand 2013) in which in some circumstances, phasehood shifts its structural position. Taking these concepts together, if nominative and genitive are domain sensitive realizations of the same case specification, we expect that this case will be realized differently in some scenarios where, by phase extension, the relevant domain changes. We argue that this general idea can make sense of a variety of facts about the morphology of Turkish nominalizations, among these some unique traits of nominalizations in adjunct contexts, and contrasts between subjunctive and indicative nominalizations. (Kornfilt 2006)

Speaker: Zuzanna Fuchs (Harvard)
Time: Wednesday, May 11, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: Topichood and split DPs in Georgian: movement or base-generation?

Discontinuous (or split) DPs have been reported in several languages, including Polish, Russian, German, Warlpiri, Mayan Yucatec, and others. In these constructions, material external to the DP can intervene between a head noun and one or more of its modifiers. While the null hypothesis for split DPs is subextraction out of the DP, a range of evidence for Georgian (adjective scope reconstruction, Principle C binding effects, and more) appears to argue against such an analysis for the Georgian data, suggesting instead that one part of the split may be base-generated in a topic position. Additionally, case concord interacts with split DPs in Georgian in a peculiar way that existing accounts of split DPs cannot account for: (1) for some modifiers, case concord is ungrammatical in continuous DPs but obligatory in split DPs and (2) the dative and accusative cases on modifiers are null in continuous DPs but are realized as -s in split DPs — a form restricted to the dative and accusative on head nouns in continuous DPs. In this talk, I present the arguments against subextraction for Georgian DPs and give an NP-ellipsis account of the case concord facts.

The 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics was held from April, 29 to May, 1st in the Universiy of Utah. Three second year grad students gave talks or presented posters:

• Omer Demirok. A compositional semantics for Turkish correlatives and its implications.
• Daniel Margulis. Expletive negation is an exponent of only.
• Naomi Francis. Modal scope in negative inversion constructions.

Speaker: Alexandru Nicolae (Romanian Academy - University of Bucharest)
Title: The syntactic configurations of Romanian modal verbs: modals and phases
Time: Thursday, May 12th, 12:30-1:50 pm
Place: 32-D461

The distributional and interpretative properties of the Romanian modal verbs `putea’ (‘can, be able to’) and `trebui’ (‘must, have to’) indicate that the modal verbs have a uniform syntactic behavior, in spite of superficially different syntactic configurations (the monoclausal configuration / the biclausal configuration) in which they appear: (i) they are subject raising verbs, which (ii) select a phasal complement. With respect to the biclausal configuration, in contrast to previous literature, which claims that the embedded subjunctive is a “reduced” / “truncated” / “defective” CP in order to derive the subject raising effect, we show that the subjunctive CP is a fully articulated domain from a structural point of view; hence, the subject raising effect has to be derived in a different manner. As for monoclausal configuration (in which the modal verb selects a non-finite complement), we show (i) that, in spite of the different morphosyntactic realization of the complements of the modal verb (bare short infinitive, participle, supine), they are structurally isomorphic, in the sense that the non-finite complement projects up to v-Voice, and (ii) that the [modal verb + nonfinite complement] is a restructuring configuration. Furthermore, the Romanian data suggest that the restructuring effect might actually fall out of minimality (verb movement considerations).

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: On the roles of anaphoricity and relevance in focus
Date: Friday, May 13rd
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

The placement of accent on elements in sentences interacts both with the felicity of sentences in their conversational context — so-called free focus (FF)—and, in the presence of certain operators, with the truth conditions and presuppositions of sentences—so-called association with focus (AF). For example, John DRINKS tea is acceptable as a response to John sells tea but not to John drinks coffee (FF); and John only DRINKS tea, with the AF operator ‘only’, can entail that it is false that John sells tea but not that it is false that he drinks coffee. It is commonly assumed that focus-sensitivity in both FF and AF is related to focus alternatives, sets of sentences that are identical to the original modulo focus-marked constituents (e.g., {John drinks tea, John buys tea, John sells tea, …} for John DRINKS tea). Moreover, this connection is often taken to be anaphoric: in FF, the focus alternatives of a sentence are required to have a contextually salient element or subset (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992, Schwarzschild 1999); and in AF, focus alternatives are matched against an anaphoric element that determines the domain restriction of an operator like ‘only’ (Rooth 1992, von Fintel 1994).

My goal in this talk is to argue that the role of anaphoricity in focus sensitivity is more limited than commonly thought and that the main factor, both in FF and in AF, is relevance to a question (in the sense of Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984). I start by reviewing several empirical puzzles for Rooth 1992 and Schwarzschild 1999. These puzzles suggest a central role for questions in focus sensitivity, though they do not help choose between relevance and anaphoricity to a question. I proceed to present the details of a relevance-based account of focus sensitivity, building on Fox 2007’s architecture in which the grammar, enriched with a silent exhaustivity operator, is responsible for all specialized alternative-sensitive computations, while the pragmatic component does not perform such computations and is mostly limited to disambiguating between parses and determining possible values for contextual variables. Finally, I use an extension of Wagner 2005’s ‘convertible’ paradigm to argue that the dependence of focus sensitivity on questions in both FF and AF must be one of relevance rather than anaphoricity. The argument relies on a crucial difference between the two mechanisms: anaphoricity can pick up arbitrary sets of alternatives, while relevance, due to contradiction avoidance, is sometimes incapable of making selections that would lead to arbitrary alternative-based inferences.

Speaker: Abdul-Razak Sulemana (MIT)
Title: The Definite Morpheme in Bùlì
Date: Monday, May 2nd
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

The abstract is available here.

Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: Locality and copular allomorphy in North Azeri
Date: Tuesday, May 3rd
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Place: 32-D461

In this talk I analyze the distribution of copular allomorphy in North Azeri (Turkic), which I argue supports a theory of allomorphy that is constrained by structural locality. (Bobaljik 2012) In specific, when a copula is sufficiently local to a T bearing relevant features, copular allomorphy is possible, but when these conditions are unmet, either due to featural mismatch or lack of structural locality due to intervening phrases, the copula defaults to an elsewhere form. This system captures a range of facts in a principled way, while keeping a uniform syntax in all cases. I extend this argument to account for a syncretism between that elsewhere copular form, and the form of the verb “become”, which are the same in this language. I suggest that we can decompose “become” in the syntax into a copula plus an additional head encoding inchoative semantics or some related species of inner aspect, and that the addition of this head results in structural dis-locality between the copula and a potential allomorphy trigger, just as we see elsewhere in the language. That is, while we might posit accidental syncretism between these two things, I suggest that we do not have to do so.

Speaker: Itai Bassi (MIT)
Time: Wednesday, May 4th, 2016
Place: 32-D831
Title: Existential Semantics for Bare Conditionals (joint work with Moshe E. Bar-Lev)

Bare conditionals show quantificational variability contingent on whether they are in an Upward Entailing or a Downward Entailing environment. For example, the conditional in (1) is interpreted universally while (2) existentially:

1) if you work hard you succeed
in all cases where you work hard you succeed
2) no one will succeed if they goof off
no x is such that there is a case where they goof off and succeed

We suggest that contrary to the widely accepted view, the basic semantics of if p, q involves existential quantification, and its universal character in UE environments is derived by a grammatical strengthening mechanism of recursive exhaustification over domain alternatives. We further show how the phenomenon of Conditional Perfection (from if p, q to if and only if p, q), a long-standing puzzle, can be derived in our system.

Some challenges to the analysis will be mentioned, as well as the prospects of extending it to deal with Homogeneity phenomena in general.

Speaker: Yuta Sakamoto (UCONN)
Title: Beyond deep and surface: Clausal complement anaphora in Japanese
Time: Thursday, May 5th, 12:30-1:50 pm
Place: 32-D461

In this talk, I investigate the possibility of extraction out of both overt and covert anaphora sites in Japanese, i.e. extraction out of clausal complements that are “replaced” by soo ‘so’ and clausal complements that are phonologically missing. Specifically, I show that both of them allow certain types of extraction out of them, unlike clausal complement anaphora in English, where extraction is uniformly banned out of its domain. Based on the extraction possibility, I then argue that the Japanese cases in question are instances of ellipsis, not pro-forms. Furthermore, I argue that both deletion and LF-copying are available strategies for implementing ellipsis. In particular, I argue that “replaced” clausal complements are best analyzed in terms of deletion and silent clausal complement anaphora in terms of LF-copying.

This weekend, the department held a conference on the occasion of Ken Wexler’s retirement, to honor and celebrate his foundational, lasting contributions to the field. The program can be found here. You can read messages of congratulations from his colleagues and students and also add your own here.

Speaker: Daniel Büring (University of Vienna)
Title: Backgrounded ≠ Given — The relation between focusing, givenness and stress in English
Date: Friday, May 6th
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

Standard wisdom sees the given/new distinction, and its effects on (de)accenting, as either independent of, and ultimately secondary to, focusing (e.g. Fery & Samek-Lodovici 2006, Katz & Selkirk 2011), or subsumes it wholesale under an anaphoric theory of focusing (e.g. Schwarzschild 1999, Wagner 2006,2012, Büring 2012).

In this talk I explore a novel and rather different picture: givenness is a necessary, but not, ever, sufficient condition for deaccenting (or more in general for what I call “prosodic reversal”), and so is “contrastive focusabilty” (of the then-accented element). Crucially, the target of focussing (say, the value of C in Rooth’s, 1992, ~C), never has to be contextually salient; in other words: focusing is not anaphoric. Consequently, even the background of a focus only needs to be given if is deaccented (“prosodically demoted”).

This view offers new perspectives on a number of thorny problems, including the proper analysis of deaccenting (or the lack thereof) within broad foci (and yes, there will be “convertible” examples!). In a nutshell, using non-anaphoric focal targets (which now we may!), we can re-analyze all cases of apparent anaphoric deaccenting as narrow contrastive foci, while the givenness condition ensures that we do not deaccent (though possibly background) non-given elements.

The proposal is implemented in Unalternative Semantics, a new method for calculating focus alternatives, which solely looks at whether two sister nodes show default or non-default relative stress (no F- or G-marking!). I show that this method provides for a particularly natural implementation of the division of labor between focus and givenness argued for.

Speaker: Edward Flemming (MIT)
Title: Fieldwork recording
Time: Friday, May 6th, 2-3pm
Place: 32-D831

This is a general talk on fieldwork recording that addresses practical questions, such as how to choose a recorder and recording accessories for a particular fieldwork setting, what to do or not do in a particular recording environment, etc.

Class 1 (Wednesday)
Title: Unalternative Semantics, basics
Time: 5:00-6:30pm
Venue: 32-461

UNALTERNATIVE SEMANTICS (UAS) provides a new method to calculate focus alternatives. It directly and compositionally calculates focus alternatives from relative stress patterns, without the mediation of [F]-markers or similar devices. Crucially, the structural cue for deriving focus alternatives (in English and similar languages) is the distinction between default and non-default metrical patterns among sister nodes, rather than properties of constituents in isolation (such as presence of an accent, or a particular amount of stress). The result is a simpler, yet arguably more adequate model of the connection between prosody and focus semantics.

The first class introduces the basic workings of UAS. I then discuss how UAS avoids classical problems such as over-focussing, under-accenting, and how it accounts for second occurrence focus.

Class 2 (Thursday)
Title: Unalternative Semantics, further applications
Time: 5:00-6:30pm
Venue: 32-461

The basic framework from class 1 is applied to new phenomena: focus positions, “unfocus” positions (in Hausa), and sentences with two intermediate phrases and two nuclear pitch accents (in English again). If we’re lucky, we can discuss impromptu ideas by students that work on related phenomena, speculate how they could be approached in UAS etc.

Michel DeGraff participated in a panel on education as part of the launching this weekend (April 28-29, 2016) of the City University of New York’s Haitian Studies Institute, to be hosted at Brooklyn College. Michel’s presentation for the event was titled:

Haitian Studies => Solutions to Haiti’s “language & education problem”.

Some photos from the event, including the program, are available on Michel’s Facebook page.