Whamit!

Speaker: Abdul-Razak Sulemana (MIT)
Title: Q-particles and the nature of Covert movement: evidence from Bùlì
Date and time: Tuesday February 28, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

It is a well known fact that wh-questions in many languages may contain an in-situ wh-phrase. The nature of this wh-phrase, however, has been a contentious issue in the literature. While some have argued that the in-situ wh-phrase undergoes covert movement at LF (Aoun, Hornstein, and Sportiche, 1981; Huang, 1982; Nishigauchi, 1990; Pesetsky, 2000, Richards, 1997; 2000; Nissenbaum, 2000; Cable, 2007; 2010; Kotek, 2014; 2016), others have argued against this view (Watanabe 1992; Chomsky 1995; Reinhart 1998). A well-known puzzle for proponents of covert movement are the apparent differences in island-sensitivity between overt and covert movement — leading Huang (1982), for example, to propose that island-sensitivity is a property of S-structure or PF but not LF. The goal of this paper is to show that wh-questions in Bùlì provide strong arguments for covert movement of wh-in situ that eliminate the need to posit any overt/covert differences in island-sensitivity cross-linguistically. The key to this demonstration is the distribution of an overt Q-marker in Bùlì, and Bùlì’s status as an in-situ language.

Speakers: Athulya Aravind and Ezer Rasin‏
Title: The nature of the semantic stimulus: quantifier learning as a case study
Date and time: Wednesday March 1, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Language acquisition involves making sense of unanalyzed input: the child brings to the task a hypothesis space, each point in which represents a grammar, and she chooses a point in that space that can generate the input. If two grammars G, G’ are compatible with the input and the child ends up converging on G, we can draw interesting conclusions regarding acquisition: it could be, for example, that G’ is outside of the child’s hypothesis space, or that the child is biased towards choosing G over G’. The literature on acquisition in syntax and phonology has identified cases where the input is not rich enough to eliminate alternatives to the adult grammar, suggesting that learning in those domains is non-trivial.

Our goal is to evaluate the richness of the input in semantics, and our case study is the acquisition of quantificational determiners. We address the following question: are there logically weaker or logically stronger alternatives to quantifier meanings that are compatible with the child’s input, or is the input rich enough to eliminate competing hypotheses? We report our preliminary conclusions from a study of several English CHILDES corpora:

• Systematic truth-conditional evidence for ruling out logically weaker meanings does not seem to be available. Obvious candidates for providing such evidence like the direct rejection of a child’s utterance and the use of quantifiers in downward-entailing environments were either absent from most corpora or consistent with weaker meanings.
• Contextual evidence for ruling out logically weaker meanings is available. We identify contexts where a weaker meaning for a quantifier would violate some pragmatic constraint. If children can use this contextual evidence early enough, then logically weaker meanings would be incompatible with the input.
• With respect to logically stronger alternatives, the situation is quite different. We construct classes of quantifiers with complex, logically stronger meanings designed to be consistent with any finite number of utterances. If such quantifiers are in the child’s hypothesis space, then converging on adult meanings would require non-trivial induction.

Speaker: Victoria E. Mateu (UCLA)
Title: On the Acquisition of Raising and Control: A Cross-linguistic Study
Time: March 2 (Thursday), from 12:30 – 2:30
Room: 24-121
Abstract:

This study investigates the delays observed in the acquisition of raising with seem (e.g. Mary seems to John _ to be cautious) and control with promise (e.g. Mary promises John _ to be cautious). One prominent explanation for the difficulties with these constructions holds that it is related to the presence of the intervening argument. Crucially for this type of accounts, an intervener is possible with Spanish prometer ‘promise’, but not with the modal-like verb parecer ‘seem’. The experiments presented here were designed to answer the following questions: i) are the delays observed in these constructions due to intervention effects? If so, ii) are they grammar- or processing-based? and iii) if they are grammar-based, is the grammatical machinery used to by-pass the intervener the same in raising and control?

The results obtained from the raising experiments reveal that Spanish-speaking children comprehend raising sentences with the semi-modal verb parecer by age four, while English-speaking children experience difficulties with raising seem until at least age six – even when the intervening argument is not overtly produced. This cross-linguistic asymmetry suggests that the (overt or covert) intervening argument is the root of the difficulty. Consistent with intervention accounts, the results obtained from the control experiments reveal that both English- and Spanish-speaking children show difficulties comprehending control with promise/prometer until at least age six.

Regarding our second question, an in-depth look into the raising and control data reveal two different groups of children: i) below-chance group: children who lack the grammatical means to circumvent the intervening argument and ii) chance and above-chance group: children who have an adult grammar system but still experience difficulties due to their immature processing system. We refer to this as the Dual Source Intervention hypothesis.

Importantly for our third question, our results do not show a correlation between performance on raising and control in all children –some children perform below chance with raising and above chance with control and some vice-versa, showing a grammatical dissociation between these two constructions. This has important consequences for syntactic theories that claim that raising (with seem) and control (with promise) are derived similarly (e.g. by A-movement, Hornstein 1999, Boeckx & Hornstein 2004, i.a.; or Smuggling, Belletti & Rizzi 2013).

Speaker: Vera Gribanova (Stanford)
Title: Head movement, ellipsis, and identity
Time: Friday, March 3rd, 3:30-5:00 pm
Venue: 32-155
Abstract:

In this talk I examine paradigms of crosslinguistic variation concerning the the verbal identity condition in verb-stranding ellipsis, building on a recent proposal about the mechanisms that yield head movement configurations (Harizanov and Gribanova, 2017).

When phrasal material is extracted from ellipsis sites (e.g. in sluicing), violations of lexical identity of the extracted material are permitted under focus of that material (Schuyler, 2001; Merchant, 2001). This is usually attributed to the licensing condition on ellipsis (Rooth 1992, Heim 1997, Merchant 2001), which takes distinct variables inside the ellipsis domain and its antecedent to be identical. I focus on analogous paradigms with head movement out of ellipsis sites (yielding verb-stranding), which appear to lead to contradictory conclusions regarding the architectural status of head movement. Languages like Russian - among them Hungarian, European Portuguese, and Swahili - permit mismatches between extracted parts of the verbal complex and their corresponding antecedent components under focus, just as with phrasal extraction in sluicing. Languages like Irish and Hebrew do not permit such mismatches under any circumstances, pointing to a postsyntactic status for head movement: there is no genuine movement out of the ellipsis site, giving rise to a total identity requirement (Schoorlemmer and Temmerman, 2012; McCloskey, 2016).

A point of leverage into understanding these patterns comes from a proposal by Harizanov and Gribanova (2017), who argue in favor of a bifurcation, both empirical and theoretical, in head movement types. One type involves displacement of fully formed words to higher syntactic positions (e.g. verb second, long head movement). The other type constructs complex morphological words (e.g. affixation, compounding). They point out that the empirical properties of the two types are quite distinct, and justify a theoretical move in which they correspond to distinct operations, in distinct modules of the grammar. They propose that the operation responsible for upward displacement of heads is genuine syntactic movement (Internal Merge); on the other hand, word formation is the result of postsyntactic amalgamation, which has properties that are not associated with narrow syntax.

With this revised view in hand, we can revisit the paradoxical verbal identity patterns: we expect that mismatches in verb-stranding ellipsis will be permitted when head movement is syntactic, but not when it is postsyntactic. I present independently motivated analyses of Irish and Russian clause structure which support exactly this conclusion. Verb movement in Irish involves postsyntactic amalgamation only, predicting a strict lexical identity requirement. By contrast, verb movement in Russian involves both the syntactic and the postsyntactic head movement types, with one of the movement steps being syntactic and giving rise to the possibly of verbal mismatches in verb-stranding ellipsis.

The MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy will be hosting the seventh annual Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 7) workshop on March 4-5, 2017. The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a platform to discuss formal or experimental approaches to syntax, semantics, phonology and morphology from the perspective of South Asian Linguistics.

The invited speakers are:

• Ashwini Deo (Ohio State)
• Miriam Butt (Konstanz)
• Norivn Richards (MIT)

The full program can be found on the FASAL 7 website. Attendees are requested to register for the workshop. We hope to see you there!

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has a great post up about the David Pesetsky@60 workshop! The post can be seen here.

This Tuesday 2/21 at 5:30-7:30pm Alexis Wellwood from Northwestern University will give a talk on “Meaning, vision, and acquisition” in the room 32D-461.

Speaker: Alexis Wellwood (Northwestern University)
Title: Meaning, vision, and acquisition
Date and time: Tuesday, February 21, 5:30-7:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Masha Esipova (New York University/MIT)
Title: Focus on what’s (not) at issue: co-speech gestures, presuppositions, and supplements under Contrastive Focus
Date and time: Wednesday, February 22, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

I would like to discuss some of my work in progress (or, as of very recently, in regress) on the interaction of various types of non-at-issue content with Contrastive Focus.

This project started out as a reaction to the debate on the status of the inferences triggered by co-speech gestures between Ebert & Ebert (2014), who claim that those inferences are supplemental, and Schlenker (2015, to appear), who argues that they are presuppositional. We will start from an observation that sometimes co-speech gestures seem to be making an at-issue contribution, in particular, under Contrastive Focus. We will then explore the data on how co-speech gestures, presuppositions, and supplements (in particular, non-restrictive relative clauses and appositives) interact with Contrastive Focus, and will see that while those data don’t necessarily settle the debate on the status of co-speech gestures, they shed some light on how different types of non-at-issue content come to have at-issue uses.

Speaker: Zheng Shen (UConn)
Title: Multi-Valuation and the Agreement Hierarchy
Day: Thursday, February 23
Time: 12:45pm—1:50 [please note the different time]
Abstract:

In this talk I present arguments for treating cross-linguistic agreement patterns of multi-valuation (Shen to appear) as an instantiation of the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979).

The nominal right node raising construction in (1) has been argued to involve a single probe that is valued by multiple goals; that is, it involves multi-valuation. In contrast to the multi-valued N in (1), a T node that’s valued by two singular features can be spelled out as plural in summative agreement in (2) (Grosz 2015). Thus there is an asymmetry between multi-valued N and multi-valued T which remains unaccounted for.

(1) This tall and that short student(*s) are a couple.

(2) [Sue’s proud that Bill __ ] and [Mary’s glad that John __ ] have/has traveled to Cameroon.

I argue that this asymmetry is an instantiation of the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979 et sq, Smith 2015). Cross-linguistically, three out of the four logically possible patterns of multi-valued Ns and Ts are attested (3), parallel to the original Agreement Hierarchy observed for collective nouns. I will discuss other positive consequences of this proposal, in particular regarding the agreement patterns of multi-valued adjectives and determiners reported in King and Dalrymple 2004.

(3)

	Multi-valued N	Multi-valued T
Croatian	singular	singular
English	singular	plural
Russian	plural	plural
unattested	plural	singular

Speaker: Rachel Walker (USC)
Title: Temporal Structure in Phonology
Time: Friday, February 24th, 3:30-5:00 pm
Venue: 32-155
Abstract:

In phonological structure, the segment root node is classically the locus of temporal organization for sub-segmental units, such as features, governing their sequencing and overlap (e.g. Clements 1985, Sagey 1986). Segment root nodes also classically mediate hierarchically between moras and sub-segmental elements, and by structurally identifying segments, roots figure in the calculation of weight-by-position, where coda consonants are assigned a mora (Hayes 1989). In this talk, I discuss evidence from phonotactic patterns that motivate an enriched representation of temporal relations, where coordination is represented directly among sub-segmental elements. Weight-by-position is also calculated over this sub-segmental temporal structure. In light of these representations, I consider implications for segment roots and suggest that root nodes be eliminated in favor of a set-based understanding of segments, extending set-based notions of feature classes (Padgett 2002).

Rachel Walker will be here for an extended visit from 2/22-2/24. In addition to her colloquium on Friday, she will also be teaching a mini-course on Wednesday and Thursday. Details are below.

Speaker: Rachel Walker
Title: Sub-segmental Representation
Time/Location:

• Wednesday 2/22: 1-2:30pm in 36-112
• Thursday 2/23: 4-5:30pm in 36-155

Description:

In this course, we will examine the representation of sub-segmental elements in light of patterns involving the neutralization of vowel quantity contrasts in the context of coda consonants. A case study of patterns of vocalic neutralization in General American English, supported by a real-time MRI study of speech articulation, will motivate a phonological representation of sub-segments as gestures (Browman & Goldstein 1986 et seq.). Key advantages that gestures offer are the representation of temporal coordination among sub-segments and encoding of goal articulatory states that may be blended under conditions of overlap. A phonological approach will be developed that governs sub-segmental temporal relations, formalized in terms of optimality theoretic constraints, building on proposals of Davidson (2003) and Smith (2016). Cross-linguistic predictions for patterns of vowel quantity neutralization in other languages and dialects will be considered.

The 7th Annual Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) will be hosted at MIT March 4-5, 2017. The conference offers a platform to discuss formal and experimental approaches to natural language from the perspective of South Asian Linguistics.

The program is available here. The invited speakers are Miriam Butt (Konstanz), Ashwini Deo (Ohio State) and Norvin Richards (MIT).

We ask that those who are planning to attend to please register. There is no registration fee.

MIT Working Papers in Linguistics is pleased to announce the publication of its 81st volume, Papers on Morphology, available at the MITWPL webstore. Edited by Snejana Iovtcheva and Benjamin Storme, the volume contains the following contributions:

• On An Impossible Affix - İsa Kerem Bayırlı
• Urarina Verbal Morphology - Michelle Fullwood and Suyeon Yun
• Root Realization in Albanian Verbal Morphology - Isaac Gould, Snejana Iovtcheva, and Despina Oikonomou
• Person-Number Morphology in Cupeño - Theodore Frank Levin and Ryo Masuda
• The DP-internal Distribution of the Plural Morpheme in Brazilian Portuguese - Bruna Karla Pereira
• The Mirror Alignment Principle: Morpheme Ordering at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface - Sam Zukoff

Michel DeGraff participated in a panel, with Ann Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson and Mary Bucholtz, at the 2017 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences. The panel was about Leveraging Linguistics for Broadening Participation in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM). Michel’s abstract is available here, and photos are available on Michel’s Facebook wall.

Linguistic Society of America has established a new student fellowship in honor of our own alumnus S.-Y. (Yuki) Kuroda (1934-2009), a former Professor Emeritus at UCSD; MIT dissertation from 1965 “Generative Studies in The Japanese Language”, supervised by Noam Chomsky. Sige-Yuki Kuroda, known most universally as Yuki, is considered by many the father of modern Japanese linguistics. From LSA: “His work showed that not only could Japanese be fruitfully analyzed using the theory of generative grammar, but that it could play an important role in extending and expanding that theory.”

This Saturday, linguists from around the world gathered in Cambridge to celebrate the life and work of our very own David Pesetsky, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday. The workshop, organized in secret over the last year and half by Claire Halpert (PhD ‘12), Sabine Iatridou (PhD ‘91), Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14), and Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15) (with the generous help of Mary Grenham), included two lively panels on topics close to David’s heart, case and wh-questions, and two poster sessions which presented work from linguists that David has inspired over the many years. The breadth of topics covered during the workshop spoke not only to David’s intellectual curiosity, but also to his ability as a teacher and adviser.

In tandem with the workshop, MITWPL also produced a festschrift, A pesky set: Papers for David Pesetsky, which includes 60 papers on a diverse range of topics written by David’s students.

Thank you to everyone who worked to make this a success!

(Thank you to Athulya Aravind, Snejana Iovtcheva, Michel DeGraff, and Abdul-Razak Sulemana for providing photos.)

Further information on the workshop, including handouts and slides, can be found on the workshop website.

Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: English Possessor Extraction and Linearization
Date and time: Tuesday February 14, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Received wisdom tells us that in English, wh-movement of a possessor requires pied-piping of the whole DP containing that wh-possessor, as in (1). This falls under the Left Branch Condition of Ross (1967), describing a ban on moving the leftmost element of a nominal phrase in languages like English. Unexpected in light of this generalization is the fact that for some English speakers, wh-movement of just the possessor, stranding the DP it originated in, is also possible. This is possessor extraction (PE), as in (2):

1. [Whose fat cat] do they think [t is cute]? (Pied-piping)
2. Who do they think [[t’s fat cat] is cute]? (Possessor extraction)

A classic example of a PE language is Hungarian (Szabolcsi 1984), some others are Chamorro, Tzotzil, and much of Slavic. However, English has never been recognized as a PE language as far as I know, though in the course of a study of child English Gavruseva & Thornton (2001) get some adult English PE data, and take it to be a production error. I show that to the contrary, English PE is a productive and interestingly constrained phenomenon. An example of such a constraint is the fact that PE out of an in-situ object is impossible, as in (3). PE out of the embedded object in (3) can be rescued, however, if the residue of the DP where the possessor was born is pied-piped/moved to the edge of the embedded clause, as in (4):

3. * Who do you think [John likes [t’s cake]]? (No PE from object in-situ)
4. Who do you think[[t’s cake] John likes t]? (PE from pied-piped object)

In the context of a Cyclic Linearization framework (Fox & Pesetsky 2005), I argue that some movements independently necessary for coherent linearization in PE contexts are in conflict with a PF constraint which, roughly speaking, requires adjacency between a (moving) possessor and the saxon genitive ‘s at the phase level. My ambition is to show that the quirks of English PE are an automatic consequence of this tension and the methods of its resolution. I argue that the unique pied-piping in (4) and a family of similar examples is one way of resolving this tension, while in some structures there is no possible repair, ruling out PE in those contexts.

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel-Aviv University & MIT)
Title: Structure and learning of quantificational determiners
Date and time: Wednesday, February 15, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Acquiring semantic denotations — even the entry for a single, well-exemplified, low-type element — presents the child with a difficult inductive challenge. I start by illustrating this challenge using the notion of learning known as identification in the limit, before switching to a less complete notion of learning, compression-based learning, which offers a more constructive way to approach the inductive challenge. Focusing on the representation and learning of quantificational determiners, I show how compression-based learning maps representational choices — e.g., basic determiners and their combinations, in an intensional variant of Keenan & Stavi 1986 (following last week’s discussion), or semantic automata, as in van Benthem 1986 — onto learners. This mapping, in turn, makes empirical predictions that can help us choose between competing architectures.

Michel DeGraff published an article on ‘linguistic apartheid’ in Haiti, sharing his concerns about human rights, education and development in his native Haiti.  The article is published in both English and Kreyòl.

While snow in a New England winter isn’t news, MIT’s second snow closure within five days might be. The institute is having its second snow closure of the season on Monday February 13th. A reminder to check the MIT Emergency Information page for up to date announcements about closures and other campus emergencies. Stay warm, watch your step, and enjoy the snow day!

Welcome to the first Whamit! edition of Spring 2017!

Whamit! is the MIT Linguistics newsletter. It is published every Monday during the semester. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Suzana Fong, and as of Spring 2017, Neil Banerjee, Yadav Gowda, and Mitya Privoznov. Welcome Neil, Yadav and Mitya!

To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.

Our best wishes for an enjoyable semester!

Visiting Scholars

• Joan Mascaró Altimiras (PhD ‘76, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Mascaró received his PhD from our department. Currently, he is a professor at UAB and he works on phonological theory and descriptive phonology and morphology

• Prerna Nadathur (PhD Student, Stanford University)

“My research interests are in semantics, pragmatics (particularly formal and experimental approaches), and reasoning. Currently, I’m working on implicative verbs (in Finnish and English) and related issues, inlcuding actuality entailments on ability modals.”

Visiting Students

• Masha Esipova (PhD Student, New York University)

“I am a third year PhD student at NYU Linguistics. My research interests lie primarily in the area of semantics and pragmatics, and their interfaces with syntax and prosody. I am keenly interested in cross-modal phenomena, in particular, in sign language and gesture.”

• Robert Pasternak (PhD Student, Stony Brook University)

“I’m a fourth-year PhD student at Stony Brook University specializing in semantics and its interfaces with pragmatics and syntax. More specifically, my work is primarily in intensionality, event semantics, gradability, and the pragmatics of co-speech gesture.”

We have several items of winter news from students and faculty:

• First and foremost, we are very happy to congratulate Amanda Swenson on the successful defence of her dissertation “The Morphosyntax and Morphosemantics of Malayalam verbs”.

• The most pressing world news of the winter affected MIT linguistic community as well. Our leaders can be smart or stupid, but, as a Soviet comedian once said, dealing with us, they have no idea of the class of professionals they are messing with, because we are quite accomplished at defending ourselves and our friends. Many members of MIT linguistic community participated in the Boston Women’s March, as well as in the protests against the President’s recent executive order. Faculty Wayne O’Neil reports: “On 21 January, I was among the ~175,000 at the Boston Women’s March. And on 29 January, I was with the ~20,000 at Copley Sq, protesting Trump’s illegal executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven predominately Muslim countries.”

• The linguistic life, however, goes on. Many our faculty members, students and alumni participated in the Linguistic Society of America’s 2017 Annual Meeting (see detailed account at our other post). As linguistics may at some point take its rightful place among such respectable high school disciplines as physics, The LSA Annual Meeting held an organized session on Getting high school students into linguistics - Current activities and future directions (7 January), where Wayne O’Neil presented a paper (‘This time is different’) at an LSA2017/Austin TX. The entire session will shortly appear on line.
• Another faculty member Michel DeGraff was part of a panel on Language and Educational Justice organized by Prof. Anne Charity Hudley and Prof. Mary Bucholtz on January 6, 2016.
• Michel DeGraff also took part in the General Assembly of the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen (“Haitian Creole Academy”) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on December 15-18, 2016.
• MIT was also represented at the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Michelle Yuan and former visiting student Nico Baier (UC Berkeley) presented “Anti-agreement with bound variables”. Omer Preminger (PhD 2011) gave a plenary talk titled “Privativity in Syntax”.

• Meanwhile, in the Old World our faculty member Roni Katzir and our graduate student Ezer Rasin taught a mini-course in Paris on “Compression-based learning in phonology and semantics”. A description of the course is available here (phonology) and here (semantics). This would be specifically interesting for those who plan to attend Roni Katzir’s class “Special Topics: Learning and Learnability” (24.S96) offered this semester, as well as several LFRG sessions devoted to the explanatory adequacy in semantics (keep an eye on WHAMIT and LFRG announcements).
• In Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Michel DeGraff taught a one-week course at the LOT Winter School of Linguistics (see also here) (January 9-13, 2017). He also gave the Schultink lecture, with the title “A Cartesian Creolist’s Agenda for Linguistics in the 21st century”. Abstract and more details are available here.
• David Pesetsky gave a six-hour mini-course entitled “Exfoliation: towards a derivational theory of clause size” at the University of Bucharest on January 19-20 (just as the anti-government demonstrations were getting under way) at the invitation of Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin and Alexandra Cornilescu, and was delighted to reunite with our Spring 2016 visitors Alexandru Nicolae and Adina Dragomirescu.

MIT linguists had another strong year at the LSA 2017 Annual Meeting, this year held in Austin, TX from January 5th-8th, 2017.

The following department members and recent graduates presented talks and posters:

Athulya Aravind and Kristen Syrett (Rutgers): Gradability and vagueness in the nominal domain: an experimental approach

Lauren Clemens (SUNY Albany), Jessica Coon (PhD ‘10), Carol-Rose Little (Cornell), and Morelia Vázquez Martínez (ITSM): Encoding focus in Ch’ol spontaneous speech

Michel DeGraff: Linguistics, STEM, educational justice and political and economic equality: MIT-Haiti as case study for retooling linguistics

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14): C-T head-splitting: evidence from Toba Batak

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Ted Levin (PhD ‘15): On the unavailability of argument ellipsis in Kaqchikel

Rachel Dudley (UMD), Meredith Rowe (Harvard), Valentine Hacquard (PhD ‘06) and Jeffrey Lidz (UMD): Distributional cues to factivity in the input

Aron Hirsch: Fragments, pseudo-clefts, and ellipsis

Michela Ippolito (PhD ‘02), Angelika Kiss (UToronto), and Tomohiro Yokotama (UToronto): The semantics of object marking in Kinyarwanda

Sudheer Kolachina (S.M. ‘16): Vowel harmony in Telugu

Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14): Movement and alternatives don’t mix: a new look at intervention effects

Ivona Kučerová (PhD ‘07): Evidence against φ-feature resolution accounts of agreement with DP coordinations

Ted Levin (PhD ‘15): Palauan DOM is a licensing phenomenon

Lilla Magyar: Gemination in loanwords: interaction between perceptual similarity and gradient phonotactic well-formed ness

Kevin Tang (Yale) and Andrew Nevins (PhD ‘05): Expectation and lexical retrieval in naturalistic and experimental misperception

Christopher O’Brien: ATB-movement and island effects: an experimental study

Wayne O’Neil: This time is different

Juliet Stanton: Interactions between prenasalized stops and nasal vowels

Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15): Mixed chains in Dinka

Michael McAuliffe (McGill), Michaela Socolof (McGill), Sarah Mihuc (McGill), Michael Wagner (PhD ‘04), and Morgan Sonderegger (McGill): Montreal Forced Aligner: an accurate and trainable forced aligner using Kaldi

Michelle Yuan: On apparent ergative agreement in Inuktitut

Ryan Sandell (UCLA) and Sam Zukoff: The development of the Germanic preterite system: learnability and the modeling of diachronic morphophonological change

Additionally, Christopher Baron (A prospective puzzle and a possible solution) and Cora Lesure (Phonologically null morphemes and templatic morphology: The case of Chuj (Mayan) ‘h’) presented at SSILA (Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas) 2017, which was held jointly with the LSA annual meeting.

Phonology Circle will be meeting on Mondays, from 5-6:30pm in 32-D831 (the 8th floor conference room). Presentations about work in progress, papers from the literature, and old squibs are every bit as welcome as practice talks. Light refreshments will be provided. Please contact Rafael Abramovitz and/or Abdul-Razak Sulemana if you would like to reserve a slot.

• February: 13, 27
• March: 20
• April: 24

Syntax Square will be meeting on Tuesdays, from 1-2pm in 32-D461 (the 4th floor seminar room). Rough ideas, works in progress and presentations of papers from the literature are very welcome! Please contact this semester’s organizers, Justin Colley or Danfeng Wu to reserve a slot. The following dates are still open:

• February: 14
• March: 7, 14, 21
• April: 4, 11, 25
• May: 2, 9, 6

LFRG will be meeting on Wednesdays from 1-2pm in 32-D461. LFRG is an informal, weekly semantics and syntax/semantics interface group. Rough ideas, work in progress, practice talks and discussion of papers from the literature are most welcome. Please contact this semester’s organizers Itai Bassi or Mitya Privoznov for more information.

LPRG will be on Wednesdays, 3:30-5pm in the 7th floor conference room. The Linguistics & Philosophy Reading Group is encouraging people planning to attend to sign up for presenting a paper or leading a discussion on a paper. Co-presenting is especially encouraged. Further questions can be directed to Chris Baron and/or Maša Močnik.

Ling-Lunch is a series of weekly talks, held on Thursdays from 12:30 to 1:50pm. It is open to all linguistics topics and everybody is welcome to present their work, though preference is given to members of the MIT Linguistics Department. Contact this semester’s organizers, Keny Chatain and/or Suzana Fong, to reserve a slot.

• April 20
• May 4

Colloquium talks will be held on Fridays from 3:30pm - 5:00pm in 32-155 unless otherwise noted. Please check the colloquia webpage for details and any updates. For further information, please contact organisers Nick Longenbaugh or Elise Newman.

• February 10: Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst)
• February 24: Rachel Walker (USC) - Extended visit
• March 3: Vera Gribanova (Stanford)
• March 24: Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford) - Third Annual Joint Ling/Phil Colloquium, location TBA
• April 7: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (University of Manchester)
• April 28: Jonathan Bobaljik (UConn)
• May 5: Jon Gajewski (UConn)
• May 12: Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst) - Extended visit

Speaker: Ezer Rasin (MIT)
Title: Keenan, E. L., & Stavi, J. (1986). A semantic characterization of natural language determiners. Linguistics and Philosophy, 9, 253–326 (link)
Time/date: Wednesday, Feb. 8, 1-2pm
Location: 32D-461

Speaker: Stuart Davis (Indiana University)
Title: On Explaining English Schwa Syncope
Time: Thursday, February 9, 12:30pm-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

English schwa syncope (Zwicky 1972, Hooper 1978, Kenstowicz 1994, Polgardi 2015) deletes schwa between word-internal consonants.  The structural observation is that schwa syncope is likely to occur if the resulting consonant cluster has rising sonority (1) but not if the resulting cluster has falling (or level) sonority (2) (where the target schwa is underlined).

(1) chocolate opera family happening javelin Deborah

(2) pelican felony monitor canopy picketing melody

Hooper (1978) emphasizes the structural conditions noting that even high frequency words will disfavor schwa syncope if the structural conditions are not right. Thus, mel­ody strongly disfavors schwa syncope since the resulting cluster after syncope has falling sonority.

Typologically, the schwa syncope pattern is odd since it favors rising sonority clusters over falling ones in syllable contact.  This can be contrasted with English hypocoristic formation which favors intervocalic falling sonority clusters over rising ones as can be seen in the comparison of Barbara-Barby with Gabriella-Gabby (not Gabry).  Further, the exact location of the syllable boundary of the resulting schwa-deleted forms in (1) is not clear; Hooper (1978) maintains that the resulting cluster is always ambisyllabic.   On the other hand, if schwa syncope were to apply in (2) the resulting cluster would have a clear syllable boundary. For example, schwa syncope applied to pelican (i.e. pel.can) results in a clear syllable break between the two consonants of the resulting cluster.  Under a new conception of English schwa syncope developed in this talk, schwa syncope is viewed as a problem of foot structure reduction:  Schwa syncope reduces a dactylic foot into a preferred trochaic one.  We will maintain that a preferred trochee in English has ambiguous syllabification within the foot and that this functionally helps to enhance the foot-initial boundary.

Speaker: Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst)
Title: Sonority Sequencing in Polish: Interaction of Prior Bias and Experience
Time: Friday, February 10th, 3:30-5:00 pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

Recent work on phonological learning has questioned the traditional view that innate principles guide and constrain language development in children and explain universal properties cross-linguistically. In this talk I focus on a particular universal, the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), which governs preferences among sequences of consonants syllable-initially. Experimental evidence indicates that English, Mandarin, and Korean speakers exhibit sensitivity to the SSP even for consonant sequences that never occur syllable-initially in those languages (such as [nb] vs. [bn] in English). There is disagreement regarding the implications of this finding. Berent et al. (2007) argue that these results can only be explained with reference to an innate principle; however, Daland et. al (2011) show that computational models capable of inferring statistical generalizations over sound classes can detect evidence for these preferences based on related patterns in the language input (and therefore no reference to innate principles is required). Building on these studies, I argue that English is the wrong test case: it does not differentiate predictions of these two hypotheses. I examine learning of syllable structure phonotactics in Polish, a language with very different sonority sequencing patterns from English. Polish provides a crucial test case because the lexical statistics contradict the SSP, at least in part. I review developmental evidence indicating that children acquiring Polish are nonetheless sensitive to the SSP, producing larger sonority rises more accurately in spontaneous production (Jarosz to appear). I then present results from two experiments investigating adult Polish native speakers’ phonotactic knowledge. The findings indicate that Polish native speakers’ phonotactic preferences are sensitive to the SSP and that this SSP sensitivity is not predicted by the computational models that succeeded for languages like English, Mandarin, and Korean. This suggests a crucial role of an inherent bias or a constraint on generalization from the input. At the same time, native speakers’ sonority-sequencing preferences are not entirely expected on the basis of SSP alone, suggesting an important role for experience as well. I discuss implications of these prior bias – experience interactions for modeling of phonological learning.

24.956: Topics in Syntax

• Instructors: Noam Chomsky, Sabine Iatridou, David Pesetsky
• Time: Fridays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

This semester’s 24.956 will cover a number of loosely related topics.

1. For the first five or six weeks, we will explore the syntactic behaviour of elements that are (apparently) totally or mostly devoid of meaning. We will have two foci: expletives and light verbs (such as English do of do-support fame). We will start with expletives. For the first class, please read and be prepared to hear about Amy Rose Deal’s 2009 paper in Syntax, entitled “The origin and content of expletives: evidence from selection”
2. Then, for the next three or four weeks we will look into recent work by Chomsky and by researchers inspired by his recent papers, with a focus on labeling and related matters. These papers are not always easy, and have not been a focus in recent classes at MIT, so this should be new to most of you. In particular, the idea is to be well prepared for…
3. … three classes by Noam. Here is an abstract for those classes:

   Assume, as reasonably well-established, that UG is a species property, with I-languages as instantiations, each a combinatorial system CS yielding representations at the conceptual-intensional CI interface, and modes of externalization to sensorimotor systems. Assume also that both methodological and empirical considerations suggest that the operations of CS are quite simple, perhaps approaching a version of the Strong Minimalist Thesis SMT. Crucial open questions arise at every point in this outline, among them the status of externalization (is it ancillary, or does it feed CI) and the nature of the operations of CS, which, there is reason to believe, have not yet been properly formulated, a matter of particular interest that I would like to turn to after some critical review and discussion of the general picture.

4. Following this, there will be three more classes, on a topic that we will choose together.

Sabine will be mostly in charge of part 1, David of parts 2 and 4 — and, well, you know who will be in charge of part 3

Requirements

Following we we think was a successful experiment in 24.956 last Spring, this class will not require a final paper or squib, on the grounds that if you’re interested in syntax, you are working on papers anyway. Instead, we will ask for :

• weekly submission of a comment or question+discussion based on that week’s reading
• co-presentation of one or two of the topics to be covered in parts 1, 2 or 4 of the class (details to be announced after class 1, partly depending on registration numbers)

If you find the class topics interesting and plan to attend, please register! Our hope is that people who attend will be active participants, and without the burden of a final research paper will find it more attractive to register— so they truly involve themselves in the class.

24.964: Topics in Phonology: The Phonetics and Phonology of Sentence Prosody

• Instructor: Edward Flemming
• Time: Wednesdays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Different ways of pronouncing the same sentence can convey different meanings. The properties of pronunciation that modify meaning in this way are referred to as sentence prosody. There are three components of prosody: intonational melody, prominence, and phrasing. These components will be introduced through an overview of English prosody, then we will investigate the phonological representation and phonetic realization of each in more detail based on data from a variety of languages.

The goal of this course is to provide sufficient understanding of the phonetics and phonology of sentence prosody for participants to be able to engage in research on prosody in its own right, or in relation to other areas of linguistics (e.g. syntax, semantics/pragmatics, sentence processing).

Topics

1. Overview of the prosody of English
   • The Pierrehumbert/Beckman analysis of American English intonation
   • ToBI transcription
   • The phonetic implementation of intonation and phrasing
2. Instrumental and experimental techniques
   • Pitch tracking
   • Resynthesis
3. Intonational melody
   • What are the contrastive units of intonation?
   • Phonetic realization of melody
   • Alignment of F0 and segments
4. Prominence
   • The variety of meaningful prominence distinctions
   • Focus marking across languages
   • Phonetic correlates of prominence
   • The interaction of downstep and declination with prominence marking (Japanese, English)
5. Phrasing
   • Representation (prosodic hierarchical structure? boundaries?)
   • The factors that determine prosodic phrasing

24.979: Topics in Semantics

• Instructors: Gennaro Chierchia & Irene Heim
• Time: Thursdays, 2-­‐5PM
• Places: 32-­‐D461 (MIT) & Emerson 106 (Harvard)

Indefinites: where do we stand?

This class will analyze the scope, quantificational, and anaphoric properties ofi ndefinites. We will start from the ‘classic DRT’ period and work our way to present days, through dynamic approaches and situation based ones.

• Week 1: Introduction to classic DRT for the uninitiated. Indefinites as variables, quantificational variability, adverbs of quantification, existential closure.
• Week 2: Developments of classical DRT. Diesing’s mapping hypothesis, aspects of the theory of generics
• Week 3: Basically, Heim (1982) and its developments. The birth of dynamic semantics: File Change Potentials.
• Week 4: “Standard” Dynamic Semantics of the 90’s. Indefinites as Dynamic Generalized Quantifiers, weak and strong readings of donkey pronouns, existential disclosure.
• Week 5: Situation based approaches and e-­‐type anaphora
• Week 6: More on situation based approaches and e-­‐type anaphora
• Week 7: The debate on long distance indefinites: Non canonical scope properties of indefinites. Weak 8: Students’ presentations
• Weak 9: An interesting way to compare dynamic vs. e-­‐type approaches: Plural anaphora.
• Week 10: Student presentations
• Week 11: An attempt at explaining Weak Crossover with dynamic semantics
• Week 12: More on Weak Crossover
• Week 13: Other Binding Theoretic issues (especially, principle B and principle C).

24.S95: Computation and Linguistic Theory

• Instructor: Roni Katzir
• Time: Tuesdays 10-1
• Room: 32-D461

In this class we will explore the connection between linguistic theory and models of learning, examining considerations of learning that have been central to work in theoretical linguistics over the years.

The first half of the class focuses on the learning challenge from a mathematical and computational perspective. We will discuss work by Gold, Angluin, and others showing that, on certain innocent-looking assumptions, the child faces insurmountable problems when faced with even basic learning tasks. We will further see that making the learning criterion probabilistic seems at first to make the learning task much easier but ultimately does not help. During this formal part of the course we will also discuss mathematical notions of complexity and look at how these provide a natural handle on the kind of generalization needed for learning, along with a tight connection between linguistic representations and the learning process.

In the second half of the semester we will look at experimental attempts to determine what can and cannot be learned both in humans and in other organisms, starting with the radical empiricist approach of behaviorists such as Watson and Skinner and moving to the instinct-centered approach of ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen. In this context we will discuss Chomsky’s review of Skinner, as well as other early generative work on learning. We will then turn to the familiar argument from the Poverty of Stimulus and examine its implications for the child in light of the conclusions arising from the first part of the semester. We will then consider results that show that humans are very good at extracting certain kinds of statistical regularities from unanalyzed data but very bad at learning other, seemingly similar patterns. We will end the semester by looking at what can be said about the division of labor between innateness and learning based on typological generalizations and at the nuanced view on this connection offered by evolutionary approaches to language change.

Requirements: attendance and participation; reading; and a final paper.

(Please, check back for updates!)