Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Hungry Wugs (11/30) - Giorgio Magri (MIT)

Hungry Wugs is an undergraduate discussion group aimed to connect linguistics undergraduates and prospective students with the research going on in our department and broadly, in the field of linguistics, in an accessible way. They have an event this week: 
 
Hungry Wugs discussion group
Date/time: Nov 30, Wednesday, 6pm
Location: 32-D461
Although it is aimed to be accessible to undergraduates, the talk is open to everyone.
 
Our presenter this week is Prof. Giorgio Magri.
 
The title of the presentation is:
 

The shifted sigmoids generalization. 

 
A short summary of the talk:
 

This talk will illustrate the gist of current research in linguistics by discussing a recent, beautiful, mysterious empirical observation: the shifted sigmoids generalization (Hayes 2022). It says that, when four linguistic forms are the cross-product of two independent linguistic dimensions, the empirical frequencies of the four forms fall on two shifted sigmoids, as illustrated by the plots at https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/GalleryOfWugShapedCurves/index.htm. I will introduce the generalization and present a couple of results that try to explain what it means and why it holds.

 
 
Dinner will be provided after the talk. We ask that prospective attendees RSVP (https://forms.gle/KK535oCqRrhb2Bns9) by Sunday Nov 27, to get a headcount for food.