Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Course announcements: Fall 2025

Course announcements in this post:

  • Topics in Semantics (24.979)
  • Topics in Phonology (24.964)

24.979: Topics in Semantics

  • Instructor: Amir Anvari & Martin Hackl & Viola Schmit
  • Time: Thursday, 2pm-5pm
  • Room: 32-D461

The very basic observation that expressions can refer to semantic objects raises two general questions. The first concerns the mapping, i.e., how a particular expression with a given conventional meaning actually gets to pick a particular semantic object (an entity, a function, etc.)? This issue is raised, for example, by pronouns, but also by expressions without overt pro-forms whose values seem to be (partially) dependent on the context. The second question concerns the status of the semantic objects that are being picked out themselves. We often take them to be given (as in standard model theoretic semantics), setting aside e.g. issues concerning how the context might contribute to individuating these objects. The seminar will consist of various explorations and case studies, which we hope will bring these foundational issues into sharper focus. Issues we hope to discuss include:  What are grammatically relevant notions of identity or similarity and distinctness? When do we take two expressions to refer to the same semantic object? When can we use expressions that intuitively relate to identity, like pronouns or operators like same? When do we take two expressions to refer to different objects? And when are those grammatical devices licensed that intuitively seem to relate to distinctness, like different, plurals or numerals?

24.964: Topics in Phonology
Modeling phonological typology
  • Instructor: Adam Albright
  • Time: Wednesday, 10am-1pm
  • Room: 32-D461
A primary goal of generative phonology is to characterize possible human grammars. On the face of it, this goal bears an obvious connection to a related goal of modeling phonological typology — and indeed, theoretical proposals have often been evaluated by comparing the set of languages that they can analyze or generate against the set of attested languages. The relation between possible grammars and predicted languages is not guaranteed to be straightforward, however. Attested phonological patterns may lie outside the space of possible grammars, if historical changes have yielded patterns that must synchronically be analyzed as exceptions. And not all possible grammars may be attested, due to chance, or additional forces that make some grammars or languages dispreferred.  This is good, because all current theories of grammar over- and undergenerate to varying degrees (often, by orders of magnitude).  However, it illustrates how truly testing the typological predictions of a grammatical model requires not only a way of using the model to predict a distribution over languages, but also formal models of how grammars are learned and transmitted, and statistical techniques for assessing fit to the attested typology.
 
The goal of this class is to examine a variety of issues concerning how we reason from and about typological data, and to survey approaches to predicting typological data using formal models. The exact choice of formal approaches and empirical domains will depend on the interests of class participants, but topics are likely to include:
  • Approaches to using grammatical formalisms to predict typological distributions
  • Categorical vs. gradient distributions over languages
  • Hard grammatical constraints on typological distributions (complexity, markedness, other computational limitations)
  • Soft grammatical constraints on typological distributions (economy, markedness)
  • Modeling how learnability shapes predicted distributions
  • Generational models of typological distributions
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