Whamit!

Whamit! will be on semi-hiatus over the summer, as usual. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall.

Thanks to our editors, contributors, and of course all our readers! See you all in the Fall!

Sad news has reached us of the death on May 10 of John Frampton, an important figure in linguistic research on both syntax and phonology for several decades, and a beloved member of the MIT Linguistics community — though he was neither faculty nor an alum of our department. John was an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Northeastern University (across the river from us). In the 1990s, John became fascinated with recent developments in theoretical linguistics and started attending classes at MIT, most notably Chomsky’s famous Thursday afternoon lectures — where he was a prominent participant, the sharpest mind in the room, it always seemed. Always seated next to his friend, colleague, and linguistics collaborator Sam Gutmann (also a member of the mathematics faculty at Northeastern), whose interests had turned in the very same direction, John could be counted on to spot every error in Noam’s presentation, and (more important) every unsuspected consequence and interesting road not taken as well — roads that he explored in numerous influential papers over many years. In more recent years, John’s interests turned to phonology, where he was a strong advocate for rule-based phonological systems, authoring the monograph Distributed Reduplication (MIT Press) and many other publications. Many linguists who use LaTex to write their papers will also know John as the author of ExPex, a widely used, enormously flexible package for numbering and formatting example sentences and other illustrative material — specifically designed for linguistics.

His daughter Prof. Stephanie Ann Frampton is an MIT colleague, a member of the Classics faculty in the Literature section and co-chair of the Program in Ancient and Medieval studies. She writes that John spent his last months, aware that his health was failing, finishing papers on prosody in Winnebago and Arabic, and adds: “Whether he was in agreement or disagreement with trends of linguistic theory among the faculty, John took enormous inspiration from being a member of the linguistics community at MIT for over three decades.” We in turn took enormous inspiration from John, who followed his intellectual passions wherever they led him with the most rigorous honesty, sparkling creativity, and insistence that the results should make sense. A great loss, we will miss him.

His daughter requests “in lieu of flowers, please send donations to the ACLU in his memory: https://action.aclu.org/give/make-gift-aclu-someones-memory”.

Speaker: Soledad Chango (MIT) & William Pacheco (MIT)
Title: Prosody in Salasaka Kichwa & Developing Inquiry and Research in Eastern Keres Ki:wa-Dialect
Time: Thursday, May 15th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This week’s LingLunch will consist of two presentations by MIT Indigenous Language Initiative (MITILI) students:

Title: Prosody in Salasaka Kichwa (Soledad Chango, MIT)
Abstract: This thesis investigates the prosodic features of Salasaka Kichwa, focusing on the interaction between pitch, stress, and syntactic structure in both natural and elicited speech. Adopting a descriptive and analytical approach, it examines how pitch peaks align with informational focus and morphosyntactic elements such as topic and question particles—particularly -mi and -chu. Data was collected from ten native speakers (ages 13–65), including the author, in the Salasaka community, through a combination of read-aloud tasks and spontaneous speech, yielding approximately 150 utterances. Prosodic analysis was carried out in Praat and annotated using ToBI-style conventions. The results show that in non-interrogative utterances, nuclear pitch accents consistently fall on the final element of the verb phrase—typically the object in SOV or the verb in SV constructions—reflecting the language’s head-final syntax. This default pattern shifts when focus particles like -mi are present, which attract the pitch peak regardless of their position. In interrogative utterances, suffixes such as -chu override default prosodic alignment and compete with other morphemes like -wan, often determining the placement of nuclear stress. This study contributes to the documentation of an underrepresented variety of Northern Quechua and offers empirical insight into the syntax-prosody interface in head-final languages. It also situates Kichwa within broader conversations on language endangerment, standardization, and revitalization.

Title: Emerging Questions: Developing Inquiry and Research in Eastern Keres Ki:wa-Dialect (William Pacheco, MIT)
Abstract: As a first-year student in the MITILI program and a Kewa Pueblo educator — I approach theoretical linguistic research as both a learner and a community member. In this casual talk, I will share the questions and observations that are shaping my developing research on Eastern Keres (Ki:wa dialect), grounded in a commitment to community use and knowledge continuity. Drawing on my background in education and language revitalization, I’ll reflect on areas of linguistic interest that have emerged through teaching and listening: the complexity of the Keres verb conjugation system (which has been described as having between 12 and 30 classes), consonant clusters and sibilants, and semantic uses of reflexive prefixes. Rather than presenting findings, this talk will be a preview of the fieldwork I will be conducting this summer, with the goal of supporting both deeper linguistic analysis and practical outcomes in curriculum and teacher development for my community.

Speaker: Si Berrebi (MIT)
Title: Absolute neutralization in Modern Hebrew? An experimental study
Time: Monday, May 12th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In a controversial analysis, Chomsky and Halle (1968) proposed that the underlying representation of the English word “nightingale” contains /x/, a velar fricative that never surfaces in the language. This state of affairs, where an underlying segment is never pronounced, is referred to as “Absolute Neutralization”, and the possibility of such neutralization has been under debate at least since Kiparsky’s 1968 “How abstract is phonology?”. In this presentation, I will discuss a phonological case study from Modern Hebrew for which the simplest analysis assumes an abstract pharyngeal consonant that never surfaces. I will present two experiments that aim to probe Hebrew speakers’ phonological knowledge in order to distinguish between an absolute-neutralization analysis and competing accounts.

Speaker: Jad Wehbe (MIT)
Title: Redundancy and presuppositional exhaustification
Time: Thursday, May 8th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Recent work has argued that different truth-value gaps, such as homogeneity and implicatures, are in fact presuppositions, based on similarities in their pragmatic status and their projection properties (Fox, 2018; Bassi et al., 2021 a.o.). Nevertheless, these inferences seem to differ from presuppositions in some ways: (i) as evidenced by the Hey, wait a minute! test, homogeneity and implicatures don’t interact with the common ground in the same way as presuppositions (Spector, 2013; Bassi et al., 2021) and (ii) homogeneity and implicatures project differently from presuppositions in some environments, like the scope of certain quantifiers (Spector, 2013; Križ, 2015; Chatain and Schlenker, 2023). In this talk, I argue that under the view that homogeneity and implicatures are due to a syntactically represented presuppositional exhaustification operator pex, (i) follows from an independently needed redundancy constraint which requires that presuppositions due to pex are obligatorily accommodated with the A operator. I then show that on a modular view of presupposition projection, this result can be exploited to account for at least some of the differences in projection.

Speaker: Hani Na’eem (MIT)
Title: The Nature of Emphasis Harmony in Jordanian Arabic
Time: Monday, May 5th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Most varieties of Arabic retain a set of uvularized or pharyngealized coronals (e.g. /tˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/) – called emphatics – which contrast with their non-uvularized – or plain – counterparts (e.g. /t, s, ð/). These emphatics trigger a type of back harmony, most salient on the low front /æ/ vowel, turning it into back [ɑ]. In Jordanian Arabic (JA), the extent and magnitude to which this harmony process affects its trigger’s context have seen notable disagreement, contributing to a scarcity of formal analyses that highlight the underlying mechanism behind the process. In this talk, I report on in-progress work attempting to establish/confirm/reaffirm empirical facts about the harmony pattern in JA and couching it within a theory of harmony systems attested cross-linguistically. Making provisional assumptions about the pattern – particularly regarding the transparency of certain segments – I specifically outline possible analyses within three models: (i) Generalized Alignment constraints (McCarthy, 1997), (ii) Optimal Domains (Cole and Kisseberth, 1994), and (iii) Agreement by correspondence (Rose and Walker, 2004). The aim is to discuss the validity of such analyses for the JA data and their implications for how we conceive of the harmony process, its phonetic basis and the grammatical principles governing how it applies.

Speaker: Nadine Bade (University of Konstanz)
Title: Shared Mechanisms Behind Local and Global Implicatures: Evidence from Priming
Time: Friday, May 2nd, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: The mechanisms underlying implicature derivation remain a topic of active debate. Competing theoretical accounts make distinct predictions about the role of different types of alternatives in implicature computation. Recent experimental work has begun to address this issue using priming paradigms (Chemla & Bott 2016; Rees & Bott 2018; Waldon & Degen 2021; Marty et al. 2024). In this talk, I present an extension of the existing priming paradigm that includes both matrix and embedded (downward-entailing) contexts, as well as conditions that manipulate the visual salience of alternatives. The findings suggest that both embedding and visual highlighting influence the rate at which implicatures are derived. I will discuss the implications of these results for theories of implicature and alternative-based reasoning.

Speaker: Noa Bassel (UMass Amherst/MIT)
Title: Toward a simpler binding theory
Time: Tuesday, April 29th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Classical Binding Theory has been successful at capturing basic facts about the distribution of DPs. It has also raised some long standing concerns at the empirical and conceptual level. These include high-profile violations of Principles A, B, and C that are nonetheless grammatical, and questions on these principles’ explanatory adequacy. This talk explores whether broader empirical coverage may be achieved by reducing the number of principles.

Specifically, I will show that many known counterexamples to the Binding Theory dissolve when we collapse its principles to a single rule based on default disjointedness. Building on ideas by Heim (1989) and Sauerland (2013), I will propose that covaluation between local DPs requires an identity statement at the level of presupposition (in anaphors) or assertion (in full DPs).

Speaker: Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: Agreement determines the interpretation of fraction partitives in some languages, but why?
Time: Wednesday, April 30th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This LFRG presents in-progress work on the syntax-semantics of fraction partitives (e.g., one-third of the cakes). In several Indo-European languages (but not American English), FPs are ambiguous between two readings if the complement is plural. On one reading, the FP is understood to denote a subplurality of the plural individual denoted by the complement. On the other, it can refer to any subpart of the plural individual measuring a fraction of that individual along some non-cardinal dimension. I call these readings count and measure, respectively. Apart from the cross-linguistic variation previously mentioned, this ambiguity is particularly interesting as Agreement determines which reading is licensed. If a DP-external element (e.g., a verb) Agrees with the phi-features of the complement, only the count interpretation is available. If that element Agrees with the fraction, only the measure interpretation is available.

While I ultimately will not offer a satisfying treatment for FPs, this talk outlines the relevant data and theory which may yield useful in understanding the alternation. Ideally, this session will mostly be discussion and deliberation. I welcome any thoughts!

Speaker: Cynthia Zhong (MIT)
Title: Coronal consonant typology in Japanese
Time: Monday, April 28th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In Japanese, the voiced coronal consonants /z/ and /d/ used to contrast before high vowels /i/ and /u/, forming a 4-way distinction among /zi, di, zu, du/. A merger that began around the 16th century neutralized these contrasts to different extents in different regions in Japan, and today we could observe 4, 3, 2, and 1-way contrasts across various Japanese dialects. Furthermore, in the same high vowel contexts, there are asymmetries in the number of contrasts available for voiced coronals versus voiceless coronals. One notable example of asymmetry is found in Standard Tokyo Japanese, which maintains a 4-way contrast among voiceless coronals /si, ti, su, tu/ but neutralizes the continuancy contrast between /d/ and /z/, resulting in a 2-way contrast [(d)ʑi, (d)zɯ] in voiced coronals. In this talk, I will present generalizations about the typology of Japanese coronal consonants that I gathered from the Japanese linguistics literature, then I will discuss a sketch of an analysis for the realization of coronals in Standard Japanese using the P-map (Steriade, 2008). The hope is that some of the constraints proposed and the general structure of analysis would be extendable to other dialects of Japanese.

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT)
Title: Concord as Insatiable Agree
Time: Thursday, April 24th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: The aim of this talk is to present an analysis of concord – nominal agreement in case and phi features – as insatiable Agree (e.g., Deal 2023, 2024; Clem and Deal 2024). On this approach, typical modifiers do not agree with nominal heads directly but are flagged with the relevant features by a higher functional head (e.g., D or K). This provides an immediate account of some otherwise puzzling facts about the number of exponed cases in overt case-stacking languages (e.g., as discussed in Richards 2013 and Pesetsky 2013 with respect to Lardil) and allows for a straightforward analysis of heterogeneous case patterns in Slavic and Finnic. I will argue that this approach to concord is theoretically superior to the current alternatives (Norris 2014, 2018; Bayırlı 2017), which require ad-hoc feature percolation principles. Moreover, given an appropriate rule of exponence of stacked feature bundles, it is immune to Norris’s 2018 Estonian challenge for case-stacking approaches to nominal concord. Empirically, this approach predicts some of the typological generalizations discussed in Bayırlı 2017 (when a language has both phi features and case, it may exhibit concord in phi features alone, but not in case alone) and naturally accounts for cross-linguistic observations in Norris 2018.

A draft manuscript on which this talk is based is available at https://tinyurl.com/4k97try2; at one point the slides will appear there as well. (There’ll be no paper handouts.)

Speaker: Zachary Feldcamp and Ido Elhadad-Benbaji (MIT)
Title: Structure matters: missing implicatures and their consequence for the theory of alternatives
Time: Wednesday, April 23rd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A central component to theories of conversational implicature is the delimitation of the set of alternative sentences that could have been uttered, but were not. Yet there is considerable disagreement about the mechanism underlying the computation of alternative utterances and the kind of objects that alternatives are claimed to be. Examining the domain of English aspect marking, we provide a novel case of implicatures disappearing when syntax independently rules out the alternatives required to generate them, and argue that this data supports a theory in which alternatives are syntactic objects, computed by an algorithm that appeals to the notion of structural complexity (Katzir 2007; Fox & Katzir 2011) but challenges theories in which alternatives are semantic objects, as in the focus theory (Rooth 1992), and the conceptual alternatives theory (Buccola et al. 2022).

Speaker: Philip Shushurin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)
Title: How to do voice restructuring in a language without voice: Transitivity Concord in Chechen.
Time: Tuesday, April 22nd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: The paper presents an analysis of a construction known as Transitivity Concord in Chechen. I argue that this construction presents a novel and previously undescribed type of Voice Restructuring. In the Transitivity Concord Construction, certain matrix transitive verbs impose a requirement to embed a strictly transitive structure.

(1) Asa kniga j-esa d’a-j-ol-ira
I.erg book f-read prf-f-begin-rpst
‘I began reading the book.’

(2) *So/*Asa ida d’a-d-oli-ra
I.abs/I.erg run prf-n-begin-rpst
‘I began running.’

I argue that this condition is in fact a requirement on the matrix verb to contain an agreeable (Absolutive) Direct Object in the embedded clause with which it establishes a long-distance Agree relation. The embedded verb in such a construction is shown to be syntactically deficient, despite bearing agreement morphology. The construction is analyzed in terms of Pietraszko (2021), Bryant, Kovac and Wurmbrand’s (2023) system whereby the embedded structure is featurally dependent on the matrix structure in terms of the ID feature. I depart from this system in assuming that (a) the embedded verb’s deficiency needs not be conditional on its case assigning potential (Absolutive assignment is very low in Chechen) (b) the voice dependency might be encoded as just ϕ. Furthermore, I assume that v and Voice are featurally dependent in Chechen which results in automatic feature transmission between the two heads.
I discuss the TCC’s implications for both the theory of restructuring and infinitives.”

Speaker: Yasutada Sudo (UCL)
Title: Specific indefinites and dynamic presuppositions
Time: Friday, April 18th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: This is an attempt to explain the exceptional scope behavior of specific indefinites in terms of ‘dynamic presuppositions’—presuppositions with anaphoric content in addition to propositional content. It is also claimed that puzzling interpretive properties of ‘certain’ indefinites are straightforwardly explained as dynamic presuppositions with functional anaphora.

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Warsaw / MIT)
Title: Cases are partially ordered: Evidence from Estonian
Time: Thursday, April 17th, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: Caha 2009 et seq. argues that cases are universally totally ordered: NOM < ACC < GEN < PAR < obliques, with obliques also totally ordered. Arguments for this include case syncretisms and morphological containments in various languages, including Estonian. The aim of this talk is to present arguments from Estonian for a partial ordering, where in particular GEN(initive) and PAR(titive) are unordered: NOM < ACC < {GEN, PAR} < obliques. Some of the arguments are morphological (syncretism, containment), but I also adduce a syntactic argument, from covert case stacking in so-called pseudopartitives (‘piece of bread’, etc.). This provides support for the views that case hierarchies are only partially ordered (e.g., Bárány 2021, Graf 2019, Zompì 2019), as well as for the view in Zompì 2023 that *ABA is not violated as long as there exists at least one path between the two A items that does not violate *ABA.

Speaker:Oddur Snorrason (QMUL) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: How are Icelandic degree questions moving many phrases
Time: Tuesday, April 15th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Icelandic, despite being a language which does not permit Left Branch Extraction in general, allows an exceptional way of forming degree questions in addition to the standard pied-piping structure, as shown in (1):

(1) a. Hvað  ertu        __ gamall?
           what  are.you         old
           ‘How old are you?’

      b. Hvað skrifaðir þú    __ langa bók?
          what  wrote      you         long book
          ‘How long a book did you write?’

More interestingly, evidence from parasitic gaps and reflexive licensing suggests that the apparently in-situ containing phrase is undergoing movement as well.

In this talk, we sketch a derivation in which both the degree operator and its containing phrase move simultaneously, drawing a comparison with Fox and Nissenbaum’s (2018) proposal for English pied-piping. We suggest that the difference between the English and Icelandic patterns can be reduced to distinct PF conditions. Finally, we show why alternative approaches, such as direct subextraction, remnant movement (with the left branch as a remnant), and covert pied-piping with distributed deletion, fail to account for the Icelandic data.

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT) & Sixing Cui (Central China Normal University, Wuhan)
Title: The replacement of Beijing Mandarin neutral tones in AABB reduplications: part 2
Time: Monday, April 14th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Earlier research (Cui 2012, 2021) suggests that when Mandarin disyllabic adjectives of the form AB such as [dàfang] 大方 ’generous’ are reduplicated to AABB [dàdà-fāngfāng] 大大方方, the B syllable is placed in a stressed position. Mandarin neutral tones (T0) are banned from stressed syllables (as well as the initial syllable of a word or phrase).  What tone is assigned to a T0 syllable when a disyllabic AB base with a final neutral tone is reduplicated to AABB? We present the results of a study that poses this question for six Beijing Mandarin native speakers. Our results indicate that the tone that is associated with the T0 character/morpheme helps the speaker choose among the four possible substitutes for the T0: specifically when the original tone of the B morpheme is T3 or T4 the speaker is significantly more like to substitute T3 or T4 while original T2 is more likely to change to T1.  We see this as a conflict between faithfulness to the original (remote) base and a markedness preference for a H tone in a stressed syllable. We then investigate whether there are traces of the original tone in the acoustic properties of the neutral tone of the AB base form. Finally, we consider possible phonetic correlates of the underlying metrical structure of the AB and AABB words.

Speaker: Zhouyi Sun and Peter Grishin (MIT)
Title: Ordering postsyntactic operations within domains
Time: Thursday, April 10th, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: In Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, et seq.), a number of postsyntactic morphological operations are proposed, such as Impoverishment, Fission, and Vocabulary Insertion (henceforth VI), among others, raising the question of how these operations are ordered (Arregi and Nevins 2012, Kalin 2022, Hewett 2023, a.o.). One underexplored aspect of this question (though see Kalin 2022) involves the distinction between what we can call “hypercyclic” vs. “non-hypercyclic” ordering: Given a set of postsyntactic operations a, b, and c ordered a ≺ b ≺ c (where ≺ is read ‘precedes’), under the hypercyclic derivation you apply operations a, b, and c in that order at each node, from bottom up, while under the non-hypercyclic derivation you first apply operation a from bottom up (within the domain), and then b, and then c. For a continuous sequence of syntactic terminal X, Y, and Z, in the order from bottom up, the hypercyclic derivation dictates the order Xa ≺ Xb ≺ Xc ≺ Ya ≺ Yb ≺ Yc ≺ Za ≺ Zb ≺ Zc, whereas the non-hypercyclic derivation Xa ≺ Ya ≺ Za ≺ Xb ≺ Yb ≺ Zb ≺ Xc ≺ Yc ≺ Zc. Here, we argue (i) for the order of operations given in (1), and (ii) this order is non-hypercyclic, examining data from verb agreement in Algonquian languages which evidence crucial interactions between Impoverishment, Fission, Displacement, and VI (e.g. contextual allomorphy).

(1) Impoverishment ≺ Fission ≺ Displacement ≺ Vocabulary Insertion (VI)

Speaker: J. Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: Honorification as omnivorous Agree in Kikai Amami
Time: Tuesday, April 8th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Japanese (Japonic > Yamato) is well-known for its complex systems of honorification, both of clausal arguments (sonkeigo) and discourse participants (teineigo). However, the honorific systems of the related Ryukyuan languages have received comparatively little attention. This Syntax Square will consider the interaction of addressee and subject honorification in Kikai Amami (Japonic > Ryukyuan > Northern > Amami), an endangered language spoken in Kagoshima-ken, Japan. Briefly, both kinds of honorification can be realized by a single suffix -ee, whereas Japanese has separate morphological processes for addressee and argument. A blocking effect is also observed in certain dialects of Kikai Amami if the subject is of a certain animacy status. I will also present (a draft of) an analysis of this honorification system in Generative terms. This analysis has three key ingredients: representation of speech-act participants in the syntax (Ross, 1970; a.o.) Honorification as Agree (following Miyagawa, 2017, 2022; a.m.o) and (plausibly binary) HON features (contra Wang, 2023).

Speaker: Nina Haslinger (MIT)
Title: Strengthening under quantifiers: Gap projection rules vs. supervaluationism
Time: Wednesday, April 9th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In line with the goal of moving to a more informal, interactive format for the LFRG, this will not be a talk presenting results, but an attempt to start a discussion and figure out the theoretical options in an ongoing debate together.

I want to look at a recent line of work on strengthened meanings under quantifiers, which makes use of the idea that exhaustification results in trivalent meanings that follow a Strong Kleene projection pattern, and explore an alternative account of some of the basic data motivating this approach, based on a supervaluation principle.

The core data points I am interested in involve embedded strengthening of some to a ‘not all’ interpretation in sentences like (i)/(ii) (e.g. Chemla & Spector 2011). At first sight, an LF along the lines of (iii) with a standard bivalent exhaustifier is problematic for at least two reasons. First, without further stipulations it leads us to expect strengthening under negative quantifiers (‘no student’) as well, but such readings are marginal. Second, with a non-monotonic embedding environment such as (ii), it seems possible to get embedded strengthening in the UE (‘at least two’) component without also strengthening the DE (‘at most two’) component (Bassi et al. 2021, Gotzner & Benz 2022).

(i) Every student did some of the reading. possible reading: ‘Every student did some, but not all of the reading.’ (ii) Exactly two students did some of the reading. possible reading: ‘There are two students who did some, but not all of the reading, and it is not the case that there are three students who did some of the reading.’

(iii) {every student / exactly two students} [1 [exh [[some of the reading] [2 [t_1 did t_2]]] ]]

One currently popular account of this pattern (Bassi et al. 2021) makes use of the idea that exh triggers presuppositions that project following a Strong Kleene pattern (cf. George 2008, Fox 2013). An analogous puzzle arises for homogeneity effects triggered by definite plurals, as in (iv)-(vi), whose projection pattern has been studied experimentally in Križ & Chemla (2015) and Romoli et al. (2024). Motivated by these similarities, the presuppositional exhaustification account has been extended to definite plurals (Guerrini & Wehbe to appear, Paillé 2023).

(iv) Every boy opened the presents. (v) Exactly two boys opened the presents. (vi) No boy opened the presents.

For the plural case, Križ & Spector 2021 have developed an alternative account that relies on a supervaluation principle applying to a set of ‘candidate meanings’ that involve stronger and weaker interpretations of the plural. One reason why this account is conceptually attractive is that, since the truth-value gap comes about ‘after’ composition, there is no need to specify gap projection rules. There are also subtle empirical differences from the Strong Kleene pattern (Križ & Chemla 2015) that seem to favor this approach.

However, since their approach does not make use of exh, it does not lead us to expect an analogy with scalar strengthening as in (i)/(ii). I will discuss a way of extending this approach to exhaustification, so that the core projection facts motivating the presuppositional exhaustification approach are derived without using trivalent meanings in the composition. This provides the background for us to discuss the empirical pros and cons of both approaches, and potential ways of combining their core insights.

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)
Title: Non-Optimization and Locality in Phonology
Time: Monday, March 31st, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Drawing on recent proposals from Storme & Otilien (2022) and Lahrouchi & Ulfsbjorninn (2024), I discuss various linguistic patterns of Haitian Creole (HC) to illustrate how different grammatical architectures account for “null alternations” and apparent “non-optimizing” behavior in the language. For instance, in HC the alternation between the two forms of the definite determiner, la and a, has traditionally been analyzed as a case of phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy: la surfaces after consonant-final stems, while a appears after vowel-final stems. However, it is often pointed out that this distribution fails to align with phonotactic optimization, as it results in marked VV and CC sequences that contrast with the language’s strong preference for CV syllables. The la ~ a alternation resists resolution when treated in isolation; instead, it forces us into a broader look at the nature of grammatical representation and the theoretical constructs invoked to explain the interaction of phonetic silence and phonological locality. Therefore, we will turn to the broader landscape of null alternations, patterns in HC where phonological material is variably silenced depending on structural context. Along the way, we consider two competing approaches: a parallel OT architecture that invokes morphological optimization (Storme & Otilien 2022), and a representational framework rooted in skeletal licensing and floating segments (Lahrouchi & Ulfsbjorninn 2024). The la ~ a alternation, when situated among the broader set of null alternations in the language, offers a critical vantage point for evaluating competing theoretical commitments. While the theories to be discussed each capture important properties of the puzzles for which they were developed to explain, I argue that a phonological rather than morphological or “morphonological” account offers a better unified explanation for locality disruption and the structural conditions on segment realization in HC.

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Title: Pseudo-de re, generalized
Time: Thursday, March 6th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Let’s call an element of an attitude report “exportable” if it can be replaced with a co-extensional element salva veritate. In linguistic semantics, the long-standing analysis of exportable terms in attitude reports runs on acquaintance: the attitude holder is acquainted with the referent of the exportable term (under a guise/description). Serious problems for the acquaintance requirement have been known about since the 1970s. Some recent attempts to grapple with them have called for a wholesale replacement of the acquaintance-based semantics; others have called for an acquaintance-based semantics for some cases but not others. I present an argument for a theory of the second type, wherein there is indeed a non-acquaintance-based semantics available for exportable terms (“pseudo-de re”), which is indeed highly generalized, but which can in certain linguistic phenomena be productively contrasted with true acquaintance-based semantics.

Speaker: Ben Flickstein and Ezer Rasin (Tel Aviv)
Title: Towards a phonological feature system for birdsong
Time: Monday, February 10th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: A foundational assumption in theoretical phonology is that phonological representations are built from distinctive features, typically stated in articulatory terms. Those features define natural classes that phonological processes typically apply to or are conditioned by. Even though birdsong shares important properties with human phonology, the dominant approach in birdsong research has not yet explored the possibility that the sound patterns of birdsong could be tied to cognitive, articulatory-oriented features. This presentation of an ongoing research project reports on a preliminary attempt to create such a feature system for the song of canaries.

Course announcements in this post:

• More Advanced Syntax (24.955)
• Topics in Syntax (24.956)
• Topics in Semantics (MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R)
• Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981)

24.955: More Advanced Syntax

• Instructor: Elise Newman & Sabine Iatridou
• Wednesdays, 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

This class is a requirement for the syntax specialization and strongly recommended for those interested in the syntax-semantics interface.

It explores many topics, all of which have the property that they have not been taught in the 24.951/24.952 classes of the previous two years. Each topic will be covered in at most two class sessions. Registered students will be required to write three snippets. The first snippet has to be on a topic taught in the first 4 weeks, the second on a topic of the second 4 weeks, and the third on a topic taught in the last 4 weeks.

The topics we plan to cover include (subject to change):

• The Plural Pronoun Construction
• Polydefiniteness
• Allocutive agreement
• Asymmetric coordination
• Puzzles about the perfect
• Temporal adverbials
• Syntax of comparatives
• Expletives
• Ergativity
• V-initial languages
• Ne-que construction
• Imperatives
• Selection/subcategorization
• NP ellipsis and ne-cliticization
• Long distance agreement

This class is offered biannually, so if you are considering taking it, please note that the next time it will be offered will be in the ’26-’27 academic year.

24.956: Topics in Syntax

• Instructors: Peter Grishin & David Pesetsky
• Mondays, 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R: Topics in Semantics 

• Instructors: Athulya Aravind & Kathryn Davidson
• Thursdays 9:45-11:45AM
• Room: Harvard Boylston 303; MIT 32D-461

Experimental methodologies have increasingly been employed within the field of linguistics to collect data in service of theory building, especially understanding points of variation across languages, understanding the process of language acquisition, and understanding how linguistic representations interact with other aspects of cognition. In this course we’ll survey the field of experimental semantics and its interfaces with syntax and with pragmatics with an eye toward giving students coming in with foundational graduate-level background in theoretical linguistics a framework for reading current experimental literature in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and for developing their own experimental designs. We plan to explore experimental and developmental case studies from well-established areas of formal semantics, including presupposition and anaphora, connectives, quantification and modality, with the possibility of incorporating additional topics based on student interests.

24.981: Topics in Computational Linguistics

• Instructor: Adam Albright
• Tuesdays, 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

Computational modeling can usefully inform many aspects of phonological theory. Implementing a theory provides a more rigorous test of its applicability to different data sets, and requires a greater degree of formal precision than is found in purely expository presentations. By training models on realistic training samples, we can test whether a posited analysis can actually be learned from representative data, and we can observe what proportion of the data is actually accounted for by that analysis. Modeling also provides a direct means of testing whether a proposed formal device facilitates the discovery of generalizations, or whether it hampers learning by greatly increasing the size of the search space. Finally, modeling has played an increasingly important role in modeling gradient experimental data, since it provides a way of comparing human behavior with statistical properties of linguistic input, filtered through a possibly non-trivial learning procedure.

This class is intended to provide an introduction to the theory and practice of computational models of phonology.  We will discuss recent theoretical work informed by computational implementations, and tools for modeling phonological knowledge of various kinds.  Special attention will be paid to the relation between formal learning models and empirical data concerning early phonological acquisition.

January at MIT is a quiet month, without regular classes and regularly scheduled events — so you might not hear from us again until the new semester begins in February 2025.  Of course, we will report any interesting events as they happen, even before the start of the new semester.  Meanwhile, we wish you a Happy New Year, and hope to welcome you back to Whamit next semester.

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: Augmenting Vocabulary Insertion: From Monotonic to Output-driven
Time: Thursday, December 5, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: It has been argued that *ABA in root suppletion patterns can be reduced to the principle of monotonicity: given a partial order among feature bundles, if two feature bundles x and z are mapped to the same value, then any y between x and z in terms of the given order must also be mapped to the same value (Graf 2019; Moradi 2021). We show that Underspecification/Overspecification combined with Pāṇinian ordering as rules for Vocabulary Insertion are both inherently monotonic. In other words, previous works deriving *ABA using these approaches all implicitly share the monotonicity thesis.

However, given the independently motivated featural successive containment relations in the domains of Case (Nom ⊂ Acc ⊂ Dat) and Gender (Neu ⊂ Msc ⊂ Fem) in Germanic languages, we find monotonicity falls short in capturing attested paradigms, and therefore both Underspecification and Overspecification undergenerate. Monotonicity in the form as explicitly posited by Graf (2019) or implicitly assumed by many others may thus not be a desirable property for language. Our survey further suggests that the empirical picture instead aligns with an concept that’s properly weaker that monotonicity—Output-driven (Tesar 2014; Magri 2018a,b), which requires monotonicity not between any two feature bundles with the same output, but only between any feature bundle and the output it maps to.

We propose an optimization-based approach to Vocabulary Insertion which allows for and penalizes feature addition and deletion, with penalties tied to specific features. Realization of a feature bundle is determined by minimizing the penalty incurred to reach a feature bundle associated with a dedicated Vocabulary Item. We argue it generates—and only generates—output-driven mappings, fitting the empirical picture.

Speaker: Oddur Snorrason (QMUL)
Title: Pseudo-ABA patterns in pronominal morphology (Middleton 2021)
Time: Thursday, November 21, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: I‘ll be presenting Middleton‘s (2021) paper on the pseudo-ABA patterns of morphology found in pronominal forms. Apparent ABA patterns in languages like Babanki, Malayalam, Yoruba and Tok Pisin challenge proposed containment relationships for prominal morphology (see Harbour 2016, Middleton 2020). In this paper, Middleton shows how the problematic data can be dealt with in an analysis which adopts spanned exponents (Svenonius 2012), while null allomorphy and impoverishment analyses overgenerate.

Dear friends of MIT Linguistics,

Sadly, we have been on hiatus for some weeks.  We are excited to share the news that will now be publishing a number of backdated issues to catch up with all we’ve been doing at MIT Linguistics in the meantime — and that we are now back! That said, January is always a quiet month at MIT (no regular classes, reading groups, or talks), so you might not hear from us for a while once again.  But once the new semester starts in February 2025, you will be hearing from us regularly, as before.

-the Editors

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)
Title: Sulemana (2024) on Passives without Morphology
Time: Thursday, October 10th, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: For this week’s Morphun, I’m looking forward to presenting a cool recent paper by an alum of our department, Dr. Abdul-Razak Sulemana, who investigated passive constructions without morphology in Buli (Gur, Ghana).  Despite lacking passive morphology, Sulemana argues that Buli exhibits true passive constructions with implicit arguments. We will explore the key evidence used in support of this analysis, including:

1. Semantic interpretation of implicit agents
2. A-movement of internal arguments
3. Compatibility with by-phrases

Speaker: Chelsea Tang (MIT)
Title: Overapplication in Reduplication in Gikuyu: Evidence for Back-Copying?
Time: Monday, October 7th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Back-copying is an overapplication phenomenon where the reduplicant creates an environment for a phonological process to apply, after which the base “back-copies” from the reduplicant. Many scholars (McCarthy, Kimper, and Mullin 2012; Kiparsky 2010; Inkelas and Zoll 2005, among others) have argued that this phenomenon does not exist, thus presenting an overgeneration problem for Parallel Optimality Theory (OT) as proposed by McCarthy and Prince (1995). This presentation offers evidence from Gĩkũyũ that back-copying (possibly) exists. If confirmed by native speakers, this data will pose a serious challenge to both serialist and cyclic theories of reduplication. The attested back-copying patterns will also provide strong empirical support for Parallel OT.

Speaker: Alma Frischoff and Ezer Rasin (MIT and Tel Aviv University)
Title: On the absence of crucially-simultaneous phonological interactions in natural language
Time: Thursday, October 10th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Theories of phonology should be able to generate attested types of interactions between phonological processes – including opaque interactions – and at the same time explain why certain conceivable types of interactions are unattested. We draw attention to three universals regarding unattested opaque interactions, which have been identified and defended in previous literature. These universals are expected in a rule-based theory of phonology where rules must apply serially and can never apply simultaneously. We propose to unify the three universals under a general universal called No Simultaneity, which states that there are no crucially-simultaneous phonological interactions in natural language. We then argue that this universal has important implications for theories of phonology, by showing that certain phonological theories that aim to generate opaque interactions in parallel are too permissive and over-generate unattested interactions, contrary to recent proposals that opacity is not as tied to serialism as previously thought.

The Understanding Obviation workshop was held at McGill University from October 4-6 (co-organized by MIT alum Jessica Coon - PhD ‘10). MIT Linguistics was well represented in the workshop with the following talks:

• Peter Grishin (PhD ‘23 and current post-doc) and Elise Newman (faculty) presented a talk based on joint work with Giovanni Roversi (current graduate student) entitled: Obviation in Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey: Dependent case?
• Jessica Coon (PhD ‘10) - with Stefan Keine, and Juan Vázquez Álvarez presented a talk entitled: Animacy and obviation in Ch’ol

The workshop was a great success and was full of interesting crosslinguistic questions and parallels (and perhaps not-so-parallels). Congratulations to all presenters for their work!

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 29th iteration of the Sinn und Bedeutung conference, held between 17-19 September in Noto, Italy. Current students, faculty, and alumni presented talks and posters (posters mentioned for current students only, more at conference website):

• Danfeng Wu (PhD ‘22): Why “not numeral NP” requires “but” but not “not many NP”
• Sam Alxatib (PhD ‘13) - with Andreea Nicolae: FC with discourse referents: the curious case of ‘any’
• Jad Wehbe, Omri Doron (current graduate students): Diagnosing the presuppositional properties of global and embedded implicatures
• Jad Wehbe (current graduate student): On the scope of together
• Despina Oikonomou (PhD ‘16) - with Vina Tsakali, Alexandra Samarentsi, Benedict Vassileiou: Temporal interpretation in Directive Speech Acts: A competition between imperative and 2nd-person subjunctive in Greek
• Wataru Uegaki (PhD ‘15) - with Anne Mucha, Mary Amaechi, Tim Jantarungsee: Disjunction with additives
• Omri Doron (current graduate student) - with Omri Amiraz: Definite plurals in comparatives
• Patrick G. Grosz (PhD ‘11) - with Mailin Antomo, Lea Fricke, Tatjana Scheffler: Lying and commitment with (not-)at-issue emojis
• Orin Percus (PhD ‘97) - with Mora Maldonado: Another look at contrafactive predicates: The case of Spanish ‘creerse’
• Keny Chatain (PhD ‘21) - with Benjamin Spector: Readings of pronouns across connectives are sensitive to monotony
• Paul Marty (PhD ‘17) - with Omri Amiraz, Patrick Elliott, Guillermo Del Pinal, Jacopo Romoli: Homogeneity in non-monotonic contexts
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (current graduate student): Redundancy under Discussion (Poster)
• Johanna Alstott (current graduate student): On “very”-intensified superlatives (Poster)
• Haoming Li (current graduate student): The case for the strong and conditional analysis of permission (Poster)
• Anastasia Tsilia (current graduate student): (In)direct evidential futures in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian (Poster)
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (current graduate student): Unifying the French evidential construction on di(rai)t que (Poster)

The following department members also presented talks in post-event workshops:

In the workshop: Does semantics have a too many tools problem?

• Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (current graduate student): Worlds, times and the fate of ontological symmetry
• Amir Anvari (faculty): Indefinites as Indexed Definites 
• Adèle Hénot-Mortier (current graduate student): “One tool to rule them all”? An integrated model of the QuD for Hurford sentences

In the workshop: Evidentials in non-canonical speech acts

• Michela Ippolito (PhD ‘02) - with Crystal Chen: `Gosh, how X is that?!’ The case of Exclamative-Interrogatives
• Danfeng Wu (PhD ‘22): Corrective markers ‘bing’ and ‘you’ in Mandarin Chinese

Congratulations to all presenters for their work!

In the series organized by Michel DeGraff entitled Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel, earlier announced here:

Speaker: Camelia Suleiman (Michigan State University)
Title: Palestinian Women in Higher Education in Jerusalem: Between Nationalism and Neoliberalism
Time: October 9, noon-2pm
Location: Room E51-095

How do Palestinian women students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem resolve the tension between Jewish nationalism and neoliberalism? Based on ongoing ethnographic sociolinguistic research in the daily lives of Palestinian women, I find that students manage these tensions through the performative aspects of language. My analysis demonstrates critical consciousness of their collective identity.

Prof. Suleiman’s visit is co-sponsored by MIT’s MindHandHeart and by MIT Women’s and Gender Studies.

For suggested readings in preparation of Prof. Suleiman’s visit and for additional information about the seminar, please click here for the full description.

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)
Title: Pronouns, DPs, and Omnivorous A-movement
Time: Tuesday, October 1st, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Some of us hope that one day we can reduce all instances of Movement to Agree. About Agree, we know that “omnivorous” patterns exist, where a probe will skip a more local goal to target one further away, if the less local goal has some special feature that the probe is interested in. If Movement is Agree, we should therefore expect “omnivorous” movement patterns, where out of two goals, a more featurally special one is favored for movement over a closer one. This is pretty much exactly what goes on in typical Ā-context: in object questions, C move the wh-object and skips the closer (non-wh) subject. And indeed, we’re used to thinking that Ā-movement can be non-local, but A-movement is strictly local. Given enough featural distinctions, however, there’s no principled reason why we shouldn’t expect omnivorous movement patterns to hold in the realm of pure A-movement as well (not even a little bit mixed A/Ā). I argue that a particular corner of Äiwoo grammar works exactly like this. Movement to spec,TP in this language favors pronouns over lexical DPs: T will skip a closer lexical DP goal to rather move an object pronoun. This also teaches us something about why and how syntax treats pronouns and full DPs differently, and I suggest that at least in this language, any explanations based on “greed” (“this pronoun needs to move because it’s deficient”) or any kind of “licensing” don’t work.

Speaker: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg)
Title: Structuring Concealed Questions
Time: Wednesday, October 2nd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Concealed Questions (CQs) are DPs that can be naturally paraphrased as embedded questions, e.g., “I know [Ann’s birthday]” <=> “I know [what Ann’s birthday is]”. This talk, like most of the literature on CQs, is focused on two puzzles identified by Heim (1979): (i) the ambiguity of quantified CQs, and (ii) the ambiguity of nested CQs. I build on Romero (2005) and Frana (2017) to advance a novel account of these ambiguities that synthesizes these works’ main insights into a general theory of quantification over individual concepts. A key feature of my proposal is that the ambiguities identified by Heim are due to the internal structure of the NPs within CQs.

Speaker: Eyal Marco (Tel-Aviv University)
Title: Optimal Paradigms: A challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic
Time: Monday, September 30th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In this talk we will reevaluate Optimal Paradigms (OP), an extension to Optimality Theory proposed by McCarthy (2005). In OP, candidates are full inflectional paradigms and faithfulness constraints can require uniformity between all members within a candidate. According to OP, prosodic templates are not grammatical entities, and morphosyntactic categories like noun and verb are not available to the phonology. Instead, systematic phonological differences between categories are derived by special constraints that require uniformity between all members of an inflectional paradigm. One of the original cases McCarthy used to showcase OP with, comes from Moroccan Arabic. McCarthy proposed that a noun-verb asymmetry in the distribution of schwa in Moroccan Arabic can be predicted by OP using the different paradigm structures of nouns and verbs in the language. We will reevaluate this proposal using new fieldwork data from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, an endangered variety of Arabic that is closely related to Moroccan. We will see that if adjectives are added to the picture, OP can no longer predict the distribution of schwa in the different categories. The conclusion is that OP does not eliminate the necessity of templates or category reference in phonology, disputing the main original motivation for the theory.

Speaker: Andre Batchelder-Schwab (Boston University)
Title: Undocumented Whistled Languages in Africa
Time: Thursday, October 3rd, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Although a few dozen whistled languages are attested across the world, it seems that sub-Saharan Africa could easily double that number, including Akan-Twi, Kinande, isiXhosa, TshiVenda, and many more. While many of these systems conform to expected typologies, some could contribute evidence towards theories about speaker/hearer syntactic heads, sonority scales, and intelligibility. The presentation will end with a discussion on current directions in research on whistled language, and possible uses in orthography and tone acquisition.

Speaker: Irene Heim (MIT)
Title: A better dissertation
Time: Wednesday, September 25th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: I will revisit the transition from the second chapter to the third chapter of my 1982 dissertation “The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases”. My purpose is to isolate and throw light on some of the individual ideas in the dynamic package deal. I will not address (let alone remedy) any empirical problems (such as bathroom sentence, weak readings, proportion problem).

Prerequisites: Familiarity with the technical core and conclusion of chapter II of Heim 1982 (i.e., sections II.2, II.3, and II.8). Familiarity with how trivalent truth functions account for presupposition projection. The handout will be technically self-contained but not an introduction to this background material.

Speaker: Edward Flemming
Title: Generating and parsing f0 contours using a model of f0 production
Time: Monday, September 23rd, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: I will present ongoing work aimed at developing a framework for formulating phonetic grammars of tone realization that can derive complete fundamental frequency (f0) trajectories from phonological specifications.

The proposed framework consists of two main components: A model of f0 production that maps time-aligned tone targets to f0 trajectories, and a set of weighted constraints that select the optimal targets for a given phonological representation. The constraints can evaluate properties of both the underlying targets and the resulting f0 trajectory.

In addition to generating f0 contours, the model of f0 production can also be fitted to observed f0 contours to infer the underlying f0 targets, effectively parsing the f0 contour. This proves particularly valuable when analyzing tones with targets that are difficult to locate because they correspond to a turning point in the f0 contour that is not a local maximum or minimum (often referred to as ‘elbow’ targets).

This analytical approach will be illustrated through a study of variation in the realization of the Mandarin rising tone as a function of speech rate.

Speaker: Peter Grishin, Cora Lesure, Elise Newman, Norvin Richards, J. Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: What’s new with the Passamaquoddy Working Group?
Time: Thursday, September 26th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Passamaquoddy is an endangered Algonquian language spoken in parts of Maine, USA and New Brunswick, Canada (the dialect spoken in Canada is called Wolastoqey). In this Ling-Lunch, members of the Department’s Passamaquoddy Working Group—a coalition of faculty members, postdocs, and students interested in investigating the language and improving its vitality through pedagogy—will present some preliminary results of a recent fieldwork trip. Group members will discuss a variety of topics, including the syntax of the inverse and how it relates to control, different kinds of movement and its triggering of certain verb types, the syntax-semantics of container constructions, and more. Their findings not only improve our understanding of Passamaquoddy, but also inform linguistic theory in general. And hopefully some of you will be enticed to join us and explore some of these (or other) topics!

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Title: Pro drop and the morphological structure of inflection
Time: Tuesday, September 17th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A central problem for pro drop theory is how to account for the distribution of argumental null subjects. A paradigmatic approach, in which the whole paradigm determines whether a language can have null subjects or not, undergenerates in that it does not predict the existence of partial pro drop languages. An approach in which the licensing of null subjects is determined per context overgenerates in that it is not obvious why e.g. English does not have null subjects in at least the 3rd person singular. This talk aims at repairing the overgeneration problem for contextual approaches. By contrasting the Romance pro drop languages with the Germanic languages and Standard French, we argue that only the latter express tense and agreement with the same underlying morpheme, which therefore contains features (tense) that are incompatible with the subject it would have to license: it is featurally overspecified. The question is then what determines the choice between a bi- or monomorphemic expression of tense and agreement, and we will argue that reasonable assumptions about the acquisition of morphological systems makes the right cut.

Speaker: Wenkai Tay (UCL)
Title: Compound vs phrasal resultatives: the view from Mandarin Chinese
Time: Wednesday, September 18th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this talk, I will argue against a uniform syntactic analysis of V-V compound resultatives and V-de phrasal resultatives in Mandarin Chinese. I propose instead that V-V resultatives are built in morphology while V-deresultatives are built in syntax. My proposal predicts that V-V and V-de resultatives will exhibit distinct behaviour with respect to a number of processes. (i) V-de resultatives are accessible to syntactic operations while V-V resultatives are not. (ii) Since obligatory arguments must be projected in a syntactic structure, V1 must project its arguments in V-de resultatives but not in V-V resultatives. Furthermore, it seems that these differences in argument structure between compound and phrasal resultatives are observed in languages other than Mandarin. These differences cannot be captured within a theoretical framework that makes no reference to the notion of a “word”. Therefore, to the extent that it is on the right track, my proposal provides evidence for an architecture of the grammar in which morphology and syntax are distinct subsystems.

Speaker: Runqi Tan (MIT)
Title: Direction of Coarticulation in Retroflex Fricative – a case study from Mandarin
Time: Monday, September 16th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Abstract: In many Australian and Dravidian languages, retroflex and apical alveolar stops only contrast after vowels (e.g. Steriade 1995, 2001). This is because the primary cues to the contrast between retroflex and apical alveolar stops are located in the VC transitions (Anderson 1997), thus this contrast preferentially appears after a vowel, where the sounds are more perceptually distinguishable (Steriade 1995, 2001). The fact that the primary cues are realized on the preceding vowel follows from the fact that the retroflex stop has a stronger coarticulatory effect on the preceding vowel than the following vowel (Steriade 1995, 2001, Hamann 2003, Tabain et al. 2020). However, it is the following high front vowel that assimilates to retroflex sounds in Mandarin, a language with retroflex fricatives and affricates (Li & Zhang 2017), suggesting a stronger coarticulatory effect on the following vowel than the preceding vowel. In articulation, the characteristic flapping-out movement of retroflex stops does not happen to retroflex fricatives (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996), which makes it possible for retroflex fricatives to have coarticulation on the following vowel. These observations lead to the hypothesis that the direction of coarticulation in retroflex fricatives differs from retroflex stops. This study conducted a phonetic experiment to test this hypothesis. The experiment explored F3 transitions in a pair of Mandarin fricative /s/ and /ʂ/. The lowering effect of F3 by /ʂ/ is the primary cue to the contrast between retroflex and alveolar sounds (Hamann 2003). Ten native Mandarin speakers (age from 20 to 30, 5 male speakers and 5 female speakers) were asked to read 15 VCV minimal pairs in a carrier sentence “wo du __ gei ni tiŋ” (I read __ for you to hear), where the C was /s/ or /ʂ/, and the two vowels in VCV were identical. Due to Mandarin CV syllable structure, in VCV structures, VC is necessarily between syllables and CV is within syllables. The stop study also allows C to be onset, which means that VCV also comes from two syllables, which is comparable to fricative study. F3 was measured in four positions in each VCV stimuli: midpoint of the first vowel (V1F3), endpoint of the first vowel (C1F3), beginning of the second vowel (C2F3) and midpoint of the second vowel (V2F3). The effect of place of articulation on F3 on left and right side of the consonant was calculated and compared by fitting a linear mixed effect model with consonant F3 as dependent variable, vowel F3 as independent variable, C as a fixed effect, and a random slope for sibilant place. The lowering effect of F3 is found on both sides of the retroflex fricative and does not differ significantly between the left and right side. This result confirms that the direction of coarticulation in Mandarin retroflex fricative /ʂ/ differs from that in retroflex stops. This difference leads to the prediction that retroflexion contrast in fricatives should not follow the same typology as retroflexion contrast in stops, as a result, different rankings of the markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints are expected for the two types of retroflex consonants. Keywords: retroflex fricative, coarticulation, phonetic cue.

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)
Title: Presupposing practice
Time: Thursday, September 19th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: I will discuss reformulations of the notions of presupposition and accommodation, themselves based on a non-standard model of meaning, as developed in The Politics of Language (Beaver & Stanley, Princeton University Press, 2023). The goal is to develop a general model of transmission and change of ideology, including language practices, a model that can help explain how terrifying or divisive practices can be innocuously normalized, reinforced, and spread.

Building on work of Lynne Tirrell and others, the background to the theoretical developments includes cases of people, or entire peoples, referred to as if they were monsters, snakes, cockroaches, lice, parasites, or even, in the case of a concentration camp warden Victor Klemperer reported on, industrial raw materials. Standard tools of semantic theory were not designed with such issues in mind. I argue that a generalization of the notions of presupposition and accommodation can carry some of the weight.

The reformulation of presupposition hinges on three definitions:

1. Associative resonance: p(feature| instantiation of practice) − p(feature)
2. Effect probability: The probability that a certain feature of the context is an effect of an action instantiating a practice, p(instantiation of practice caused feature).
3. Presuppositional resonance: Associative resonance − Effect probability

The main goal of the LingLunch talk will be to discuss these definitions, their relationship to prior work on presupposition (and formal semantic theory more generally), and their application to difficult issues like presuppositions of divisive practices.

A secondary goal of the talk is to discuss an extension of accommodation that complements the changes in the notion of presupposition. Hearers accommodate not merely propositions, but practices, developing an increased tendency to behave in line with the practice. For example, if politicians and bureaucrats discussing a public health problem focus on the costs of alternative technologies that would potentially remediate the problem, their marginalization of human suffering carries a presupposition that it is reasonable to frame the issue in purely technocratic terms. What is accommodated is a tendency to treat a human life as a commodity. In response to sexist jokes, one may accommodate tendencies to discriminate based on gender.

In standard accounts of accommodation, the driving force is a driving desire to create common ground in the face of ignorance of a speaker’s assumptions. In the model I will discuss, however, accommodation is driven by a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance and find harmony, and these are in turn largely driven by a need to fit in with in-groups, and to mark oneself as distinct from out-groups.

MIT Linguistics research affiliate and alumn Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14) is organizing a careers workshop series for linguists. The careers workshop will meet every other Tuesday at 5pm in room 32-D831, starting this Tuesday. All are welcome. Currently planned topics are below; Spring topics will include: resumes, networking, applying and interviewing, immigration considerations. Additional topics may be added based on audience request.

MIT alumn Pritty Patel-Grosz’s (PhD ‘12) work on dance in Gibbons has been accepted for publishing in the biology journal Primates. Pritty’s co-authored work offers a linguistically informed view of Gibbons’ dance behavior, showing it forms groupings based on isochronous rhythm.

The pre-print version can be found here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.29.610299v1.full

The New York Times also offered a piece based on the work, found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/science/gibbons-dancing-apes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Kk4.dsYX.XXFLiwNd-UiD&smid=url-share

Congratulations to Pritty and her collaborators!

In the series organized by Michel DeGraff entitled Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel, earlier announced here:

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)
Title: “Neutrality helps the oppressor”: how accommodation can become complicity with a radical agenda
Time: September 18, noon-2pm
Location: Room E51-095

Abstract:

In this election season, amid bloody global conflicts and the existential threat of climate change, we are all called upon to take sides. Let us say that public discourse is polarized if large subsets of society are unable to recognize the legitimacy of the perspectives embodied by other people’s speech. Then today we find ourselves in an extreme situation. We are witness both to polarization, in which groups diverge from each other, and to asymmetric polarization, in which one group (say a group centered on conspiracy theories) diverges rapidly from prior norms. And despite that chaos, we find some who claim, self-righteously, not to have taken sides, to be, in some sense, above the fray. I think here not only of Fox News’ preposterous claim to be “fair and balanced”, but also of the NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s recent assertion that he, and hence his newspaper, has “no interest in wading into politics.”

Elie Wiesel began his Nobel prize address, from which my title quotation is drawn, imagining a conversation with the child he had been, a child sucked into the bewildering terror of the holocaust. Here is a little more of the famous quote:

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Wiesel can be read as suggesting that neutrality is not merely ill-advised, but impossible: everything we say reflects affinities and disaffinities with the groups who surround us, and even the silent implicitly take sides. Building on my recent book “The Politics of Language”, with Jason Stanley, I will explore the idea that there can be no true neutrality. The thought here is that language, far from being neutral, inevitably reflects social affinities and associated ideologies. On this view, supposing one’s speech to be neutral is not evidence of objectivity, but of failure to recognize the legitimacy of other perspectives. The archetype here is not national media, for which few people take the claim of neutrality seriously, but bureaucratic language, supposedly neutral speech which can be the ultimate tool of an autocratic oppressor, or of any large organization that has no direct interest in the well-being of those it interacts with. I will consider the processes that lead to extremes of speech and ideology, whether extremes to the left, extremes to the right, or, incongruously oxymoronic though the phrase may seem, extremes of neutrality.

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT)
Title: On “very”-intensified superlatives
Time: Wednesday, September 11th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Existing literature treats “very” as a prototypical modifier of gradable adjectives (Wheeler 1972; Klein 1980; von Stechow 1984; Kennedy & McNally 2005, a.o.). Focusing on cases like “Sarah is very tall,” these accounts propose that “very” is a standard-booster: while “Al is tall” is true iff Al’s height meets the contextual standard, “Al is very tall” is true iff he meets a higher standard. This talk concerns a previously unanalyzed use of “very”: namely, the productive occurrence of “very” with superlatives (“the very best applicant,” “the very most important day of my life”). On the basis of data with plural superlatives, I propose that “very” in superlative DPs is the same as the “very” we see with positive forms. After arguing for this unified analysis, I show that past theories of “very” and “-est” cannot generate “very X-est.” To fix things, I give a new theory of “very” built on (a) a new theory of comparison classes; (b) Fitzgibbons et al.’s (2008) claim that “-est,” like the positive morpheme “pos,” invokes a standard-degree. The upshot is that “pos” and “-est” not only similarly invoke a standard but have a modifier in common.

Speaker: Adam Przepiorkowski (University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, MIT)
Title: Towards a Minimalist Theory of Coordination
Time: Thursday, September 12th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: To say that linguists do not agree on the syntactic structure of coordination is to say very little. Are phrases such as Lisa and Bart endocentric or exocentric? If they are endocentric, are they headed by one of the conjuncts (e.g., Lisa), or by the conjunction (e.g., and)? If they are headed by the conjunction (Conj), is their category ConjP? Or is it perhaps the case that the conjunction takes over some of the features of – “agrees with” – one of the conjuncts, so that Lisa and Bart is effectively an NP rather than a ConjP? Each of these options is implemented in a number of linguistic analyses.

Existing accounts often ignore – or try to explain away – coordination of unlikes: unlike categories (e.g., Bart is a rascal and proud of it), unlike cases (in languages such as Polish), and unlike grammatical functions (e.g., What and when to eat to stay healthy?). In this talk, I’ll argue that direct coordination of unlikes is real and that it provides arguments for the essentially exocentric nature of coordination. I’ll also recall arguments for the flat structure of n-ary coordinations, such as Lisa, Bart, and Maggie. Taken together, these aspects of coordination provide evidence for the existence of a general – not just binary – SetMerge operation in language. I’ll offer some initial thoughts on the nature of this operation, to be more fully developed during my stay at MIT in the coming months.

Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)
Title: Complementizers and Verb Fronting with Doubling in Haitian Creole
Time: Tuesday, September 10th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: For this Syntax Square, we will investigate the syntax of Haitian Creole and the interaction of the ki/ke complementizer alternation (1) with Verb Fronting with Doubling constructions (VFD, Glaude and Zribi-Hertz, 2012) (2). HC shows the following subject-object asymmetry where the form of the complementizer varies according to whether the subject or object undergoes wh-movement (Koopman, 1982; Law, 1995).

As we ease into the new academic year, here’s what some of us got up to this summer:

• May 21: Asherov, Fox and Katzir in Linguistics and Philosophy
  Alumnus and current postdoctoral associate Daniel Asherov (PhD ‘23) as well as current linguistics section head Danny Fox and Roni Katzir (PhD ‘08) have a new paper published in the journal Linguistics and Philosophy. The paper’s title is “Strengthening, exhaustification, and rational inference” and is available on open access here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10988-023-09406-0. Congratulations to the authors!
• May 28-30: Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 34) was hosted by the Linguistics department at the University of Rochester. MIT Linguistics was well-represented by current students and recent alums:
  • Ruoan Wang: Tiered honorification in Eastern Indo-Aryan: [HON]-less, and also presuppositionless
  • Yurika Aonuki: Comparatives and differential measure phrases without -er in Gitksan
  • Enrico Flor: Coarse modality with Italian magari 
  • Tamari Berulava (incoming PhD student) and Clemens Mayr: Bare plurals in articleless languages as weak definites
  • Vincent Rouillard (PhD, 2023; MIT post-doc 2023/24): A note on any and simplification
  • Tatiana Bondarenko (PhD, 2022): Javanese veridicality mismatches: Q-to-P reduction amid uniformity
  • Itai Bassi (PhD, 2021): Pathological questions, focus, and unacceptable ellipsis
  • Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (PhD, 2023), Enrico Flor (dissertating student): Quantification Uncovered
  • Andreea Nicolae, Aron Hirsch (PhD, 2017), Anamaria Falaus: Exceptives under negation: Strengthening the case for p-Exh
    
• May 28 & 29: David Pesetsky @ the Romanian Academy of Sciences
  At the beginning of the summer, David Pesetsky gave two talks at the Romanian Academy of Sciences.  On May 28, he gave a talk on the topic “Is there an LLM challenge for Linguistics?” to the Academy itself, and the next day he participated in a celebratory conference honoring the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy, with a talk on “Dissimilation: Shrinker of Clauses”.
• May 31: A number of recent PhDs received their diplomas and ceremonial hoods at MIT’s graduate commencement ceremony in May. Renewed congratulations to Christopher Yang, Daniel Asherov, Fulang Chen, Boer Fu, Vincent Rouillard, Cora Lesure, Peter Grishin, and Filipe de Salles Kobayashi! 
• June 4—6: The 27th International Symposium on Malay and Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL 27) was organised by the National University of Singapore. Current students Omri Doron, Keely New, and Ruoan Wang gave presentations on their recent and ongoing field work on Jakarta Indonesian. The conference was co-organised by alum Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD, 2014). Almost as important as the conference was the delightful local cuisine, as pictured.
• 
• June 27 & 28: Workshop on Speech Act Related Operators at ZAS, Berlin
  This workshop, organized by Clemens Mayr and Tue Trinh (PhD ‘11), featured contributions by Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Danny Fox, Shigeru Miyagawa, Omri Doron, Jad Wehbe, Keny Chatain (PhD ‘21), Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98), Marie-Christine Meyer (PhD ‘13), Roni Katzir (‘08), and Luka Crnič (PhD ‘11).
• July 4: Fox & Katzir in Theoretical Linguistics
  A new paper on LLMs and linguistic cognition was published by our colleague Danny Fox and alum Roni Katzir (PhD ‘08) in the journal Theoretical Linguistics. The paper is entitled “Large Language Models and theoretical linguistics” and discusses the validity of LLMs as theories of human linguistic cognition. You can access the paper here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/tl-2024-2005/html. Congratulations to Danny and Roni!
• July 13-26: CreteLing
  The 6th Crete Summer School of Linguistics took place in Rethymnon at the University of Crete campus. MIT’s Sabine Iatridou was a co-director and an organizing committee member. Sabine also co-taught a class on Polydefiniteness during Week 1 of the school. MIT Linguistics was also well-represented by a number of faculty and alumni who (co-)taught courses as well as graduate students who TAed for classes.
  - Adam Albright taught a course entitled Exceptions
  - Athulya Aravind co-taught a course entitled Language Acquisition: Developmental Issues in Semantics
  - Ora Matushansky (PhD’02) co-taught a course entitled Realizational Morphology and Pieces of Inflection
  - Kai von Fintel co-taught a course entitled Enough! The Linguistics of Sufficiency
  - Paul Kiparsky (PhD ‘65) co-taught a class entitled Language Change
  - David Pesetsky co-taught a class on Ellipsis with Kyle Johnson (PhD ‘86)
  - Shigeru Miyagawa co-taught a class on The Morpho-Syntax and Semantics of the Altaic Languages
  - Ezer Rasin (PhD ‘18 and current visiting professor) & Donca Steriade taught a class on Phonological Opacity and Grammar Architecture
  - Six current MIT Linguistics graduate students were TAs for classes during the school: Adéle Mortier, Bergül Soykan, Johanna Alstott, Bingzi Yu, James Cooper Roberts, and Hani Na’eem
• 
• August 10—19: Passamaquoddy field trip
  The MIT Passamaquoddy group went on a field trip to Maine from August 10-19. They worked with native speaker informants in Sipayik, Motahkomikuk, and Indian Township. Among said informants was MITILI alumnus Roger Paul. Below are some pictures.
  
• Michel DeGraff reports steady progress this summer on the English version of a book manuscript for MIT Press, now under review, with the working title: “Our Own Language: Linguistics and Education for Decolonization, Liberation and Nation-building in Haiti and Beyond”. Work on the Kreyòl version will start in the fall once the reviews are in. Michel also forwarded links to various articles and presentations of his, including a talk at the Collège de France (6/7/2024) and an Inside Higher Ed piece (6/13/2024).

Maša Močnik defended her dissertation (“Strange attitudes on top”) on August 5. Her committee was Kai von Fintel (chair), Amir Anvari, and Danny Fox. About her dissertation, Kai writes:  ”In her extraordinarily rich investigation, Maša analyzes the interaction of several kinds of attitude predicates with embedded modal operators (epistemic, bouletic). In the first chapter, she studies the Slovenian doxastic possibility attitude ‘dopuščati’ (which lexicalizes the meaning of “consider it possible”) and the distribution of epistemic modals in its complement. In the second chapter, she explores the distribution of expressions of epistemic modality in the complement of desire predicates. In the third chapter, she extends and deepens earlier joint work with Rafael Abramovitz on the Koryak attitude verb ‘ivək’ and how its variable force/variable flavor arises, sometimes in interaction with modal meanings in its complement. In all three chapters, she deploys a brilliant combination of insights from modal logic and its application to natural language, recent philosophical work on (local) information-sensitive modality, and detailed empirical investigations of multiple, unrelated languages.”

Congratulations Maša!!

On August 19th, Yeong-Joon Kim brilliantly and successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Phonetic faithfulness in phonological opacity”! Congratulations, Yeong-Joon!!

Here’s the abstract:

This dissertation presents a novel approach to phonological opacity, which is grounded in new findings regarding substantive restrictions on the patterns of opaque interactions. The central thesis posits that phonological opacity functions to preserve the phonetic properties specified in the input of a phonological operation. Specifically, it argues that inputs are enriched with phonetic auditory features, and surface opacity emerges as a result of processing these enriched inputs. This proposal can be detailed as follows. First, processes that become opaque are initially biased by certain phonetic markedness conditions. Second, these phonetic biases, encoded in the phonetically enriched inputs, are mapped onto the nearest phonologically contrastive sounds to satisfy the requirement of phonetic faithfulness, resulting in surface phonological opacity.
This hypothesis yields a testable prediction: only phonetically natural processes, which possess an appropriate phonetic markedness condition, can become opaque. The results of typological surveys of 87 counterfeeding and 65 counterbleeding interactions across languages support this prediction, revealing that opacified processes are subject to a narrow range of markedness conditions, such as coarticulatory assimilation (e.g., palatalization) and durational adjustments (e.g., segmental weakening). Other types of phonological processes, particularly non-natural ones, which are unlikely to have appropriate phonetic markedness conditions, are rarely, if ever, opacified. This asymmetry in the patterns of phonological opacity underscores that opaque interactions are not independent of phonetic substance.

In addition to this main finding, it is also shown that the current proposal offers additional advantages in explaining phonological opacity. First, it successfully accounts for various non-typical opaque interactions, such as feeding opacity and stress misapplications, alongside counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions. The proposal also integrates various phonological phenomena, such as compensatory lengthening, coalescence, and incomplete neutralization, within the framework. Second, the proposed model suggests that learners can successfully acquire and reproduce opaque patterns. Learning simulations using a weighted constraint version of the proposed model demonstrate that intermediate hidden structures, such as phonetically enriched inputs, can be learned based solely on surface patterns when the mappings between abstract inputs and surface representations are known. This challenges the conventional notion that opaque patterns are more difficult to learn than transparent phonology.

Speaker: Marta Massaia (Utrecht University)
Title: Mapping the Left Periphery of Similarity construction in Germanic: Dutch dialects as case study
Time: Tuesday, May 14th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Similarity constructions in Germanic can be introduced by different elements that can be subsumed under four main types: like-, as-, so-, and how-elements. Especially in non-standard varieties, these elements can co-occur in what seems to be a strict order that holds cross-Germanically. I argue that this order can be explained if we take similative clauses to be prepositional relative clauses and these elements to be part of the head complex raising to the edge of the similative (in line with a raising analysis à la Kayne 1994). To support this idea, I will first provide data from a micro-comparative perspective (Dutch dialects), and then provide the meso-comparative perspective (English, Dutch, German, Swedish and Norwegian).

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)
Title: A Lenition Approach to Consonant Gradation in Nganasan
Time: Monday, May 13th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Nganasan (Szeverényi, Várnai, and B. B. Wagner-Nagy 2002; Endrédy et al. 2010; B. Wagner-Nagy 2018) is a Samoyedic language which exhibits a set of alternations commonly described as “Consonant Gradation”. What distinguishes these alternations from alternations seen in other languages is the environments which control them: whether the consonant in question is the onset of an open or closed syllable, or whether the consonant in question is in foot-initial position or not. In this presentation, I will argue that by using an effort-based lenition approach (Kirchner 1998) and by taking into account some diachronic changes (Castrén 1855; Mikola and B. Wagner-Nagy 2004), we can 1) analyze the alternations as a case of lenition similar to similar cases seen in other languages, and 2) provide principled reasons as to why the alternations are the ones that we see. In the end, what really distinguishes Nganasan from other languages which exhibit lenition is the blocking of lenition in one particular environment.

Speaker: Ruoan Wang (MIT)
Title: Tiered honorification in Eastern Indo-Aryan
Time: Thursday, May 16th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Longstanding tradition in the literature uses [HON] to analyze tiered honorification systems of Indo-Aryan. This work explores an analysis outside that tradition, using Wang’s (2023) presuppositional account which does not make use of [HON]. I make a crucial modification to Wang (2023) and show how it can explain the diachronic and synchronic patterns of Indo-Aryan honorification.

This weekend, visiting Professor Jon Rawski gave invited talks at the CUNY Computational Linguistics Lecture Series, and the Workshop on Theoretical Phonology (WTPh) in Montreal.

Speaker: Charlie Yan (QMUL)
Title: On the locality profile of verb doubling in Mandarin Chinese
Time: Tuesday, May 7th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Within Mandarin Chinese root clauses, verb doubling effects are attested in either a clause-medial or clause-initial position (Cheng 2007; Meadows and Yan 2023; a.o.). I treat this contrast as VP-fronting to a lower or higher position in the clausal spine. Crucially, I show in this talk that cross-clausal VP-fronting to the lower, clause-medial position is only possible out of a limited class of complement clauses, unlike VP-fronting to the clausal periphery. I offer an approach to such movement restrictions based on the Williams Cycle (Williams 2003, 2013; Poole 2022), and predictions about VP-fronting across multiple levels of embedding.

Speaker: Xinyue Zhong (MIT)
Title: Tone sandhi in Mandarin-English bilingual speech
Time: Monday, May 6th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: When bilingual speakers mix languages in their speech, two phonologies come into contact in real time, which raises the question of how potential incompatibilities between the two phonologies are resolved. This study investigates one such potential incompatibility concerning how Mandarin-English bilinguals handle Mandarin tone sandhi when the trigger is a word in English. Existing research (Cheng 1968, Gao and Wu 2022) suggests that tone sandhi can be triggered by English words based on pitch similarity. Nevertheless, my previous experiment (2021) additionally showed that English consonant clusters can block tone sandhi in places where sandhi is expected to apply based on pitch similarity.

Two hypotheses were proposed to explain this blocking effect: 1) an “illusory” vowel or low tone is associated with consonant clusters (cf. Dupoux et al. 1999), which interferes with the expected pitch patterns, or 2) the fact that consonant clusters are banned in Mandarin phonotactics prevents English syllables with clusters from participating in Mandarin phonological processes. A new production experiment was conducted this semester where two Mandarin tone sandhis, the Tone 3 sandhi and the bu sandhi, are tested with select English words embedded in otherwise Mandarin sentences. The results showed that neither of the hypotheses is fully consistent with the patterns in speakers’ sandhi production under the assumption that English syllables receive Mandarin tones in the tested sentences. The findings so far suggest that closer inspection of the phonetic properties of the English syllable triggers is needed, and that we might need to adjust our assumptions about what conditions tone sandhi in Mandarin.

Speaker: Viola Schmitt (MIT/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Title: Possible worlds and ontological symmetry
Time: Thursday, May 9th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: The main point of this talk is a negative claim: I will argue that possible worlds differ from other objects via which construct meanings in terms (i) reference and (ii) plurality formation (i.e.., contra ontological symmetry, Schlenker 2006). Based on this claim, I will outline a puzzle, namely, why worlds should be constrained in this way and why — in the modal part of the language — quantification is seemingly dissociated from reference and plurality formation.

Speaker: Yosef Grodzinsky (The Hebrew University)
Title: High behavioral and neural selectivity in the processing of downward entailingness, and its theoretical implications
Time: Friday, May 10th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: (with I-An Tan)

A 50-year-old discovery, that Downward Entailing (DE) operators incur greater processing costs than their Upward Entailing (UE) counterparts (Just & Carpenter, 1971; henceforth the Monotonicity Effect) led to a series of psycho- and neuro-linguistic studies. These explored the manner by which DE operators license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). We took several steps: first, we conducted behavioral studies that showed that the Monotonicity Effect is highly robust and replicable, demonstrably independent from generic psychological factors such as word frequency, length, on-the-fly learning, delayed verification, and more (Deschamps et al., 2015; Agmon et al., 2023, passim). Second, an fMRI study localized the Monotonicity Effect anatomically in a small and neuroanatomically coherent region that is adjacent to, but excluding, the left hemispheric Brodmann Areas 44,45 (famously known as Broca’s region, Grodzinsky et al., 2020).

These studies served as backdrop against which we conducted our next investigation: Once the Monotonicity Effect was indexed behaviorally and anatomically, we could use these indices to determine the role of DE-operators as NPI licensors. NPI licensing conditions have long been debated, with syntactic and pragmatic factors weighing in. We conducted a series of behavioral studies with English and Hebrew speakers, hoping to obtain evidence for a precise characterization of these licensing conditions. We tested sentences with 2 DE operators, hosted in Homer’s (2020) flip-flop environments, and in a series of controls. To enable a coherent interpretation of our results, we defined a direct mapping from DE-domains to processing costs. We found that (i) the Monotonicity Effect is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; and (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments (Gajewsky, 2005; Tan et al., 2024).

Finally, we tested the same materials in fMRI (Tan et al., in prep.). Despite difficulties, we not only replicated previous results, but also, provided a new perspective on the neural bases of DE-ness. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, and conclude with some speculations about the cognitive functions of the new brain area our studies uncovered.

Speaker: James Cooper Roberts (MIT)
Title: A Kalinian perspective on internal reduplication and its consequences
Time: Thursday, May 2nd, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: The true identity of infixes was a topic of much speculation in some corners of morphology. However, it was not until Kalin (2022) that we saw any hard evidence to inform an analysis. Considering cross-linguistic evidence from allomorphy, Kalin concludes that infixes are indeed (underlyingly) prefixes or suffixes. That is, infixes begin their lives at the edge of the root and are pushed to their pivot inside of the root. In her eyes, infixation is a finely timed process where exponent choice must precede infixation, which in turn must precede prosodification.

Kalin’s proposal is an exciting one, but there is one noteworthy gap in her proposal. In a Distributed Morphology framework, reduplication is accomplished by a special morpheme often glossed as RED. This morpheme is phonemically underspecified, instead consisting of a set of copying instructions which duplicate segments from a root. If we assume that internal reduplication is likewise a case of infixation, and RED enters the morphosyntax the same way any other morpheme does, when does this copying occur? Furthermore, is this order universal, or is there variation cross-linguistically? In a survey of genetically-diverse languages, Roberts (2023) finds that there is in fact cross-linguistic variation on when reduplication occurs relative to infixation. From this perspective, local internal reduplication can be thought of as a case where copying happens after infixation, and non-local internal reduplication is a case where copying happens before infixation.

However, proponents of Optimality Theory and related phonological frameworks may take issue with the assumptions of Roberts (2023) and Kalin (2022). For one, there is good reason to conclude that infixation is at least sometimes the result of phonological optimization rather than an arbitrary morphological process (e.g., McCarthy (2003)). Furthermore, reduplication can be thought of simply in terms of a correspondence between an output and itself. In a constraint-based framework, the facts of internal reduplication as they currently stand can be analyzed with independently-motivated constraints. Ergo, critics may rightfully wonder whether the theoretical machinery employed in Roberts (2023) (time of reduplication, “direction” of copying, etc.) is really necessary to account for the data.

In this presentation, I discuss these competing analyses in detail. I begin with an overview of Kalin (2022) and a detailed summary of Roberts (2023). I then discuss the analytical cost of such an approach to internal reduplication, and what we gain from it. This is followed by a summary of OT approaches to infixation and reduplication as both separate and combined phenomena, and I conclude with a discussion on the predictions of the two theories and how future work could inform the debate.

Speaker: Gianluca Porta (Ulster University)
Title: Causing extraction
Time: Tuesday, April 30th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A well-known distinction between arguments and adjuncts is that only the former allow extraction. A number of reasons for the island status of adjuncts have been proposed (e.g. Haung’s (1982) CED). Recent experimental studies challenged the categorical island status of adjuncts. In this talk I will present data that suggest that there can be extraction from them, and I will propose a theory to account for the data. I will show that an adjunct becomes transparent when there is a relationship of causation between the adjunct (the causing event) and the matrix clause (the caused event). I will apply this theory to two types of adjuncts: English temporal clauses and purpose clauses. While these clauses differ in a number of ways, they offer similar insights w.r.t. to what makes an adjunct transparent.

Speaker: Jon Rawski (MIT) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: Tensor Product Representations of Phonological Constraints and Transformations
Time: Monday, April 29th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: A crowning achievement of connectionist modeling in phonology embedded symbolic structures using tensors as an intermediary to neural computation, and used optimization over such structures to compute well-formedness (a la OT, HG, etc). However, there has been considerable difficulty restricting these models to match the upper computational bounds of phonology (regular languages and functions) since almost every constraint-interaction formalism computes supra-regular patterns with ease, and many are either Turing complete or uncomputable. We will discuss our recent attempt to circumvent this gap, by directly embedding both (sub)regular constraints and transformations into the tensor calculus used by constraint-interaction models. We will use finite model theory to characterize objects like strings, trees, graphs, and even input-output pairs as relational structures. Logical statements meeting certain criteria over these models define various classes of constraints and transformations. The semantics of such statements can be compiled into tensors, using multilinear maps as function application for evaluation. We show how this works for varieties of First-order and Monadic Second-Order definable constraints and transformations, and compare to previous work on correspondence constraints using model theory.

Speaker: Tanya Bondarenko (Harvard)
Title: TBA
Time: Thursday, May 2nd, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: TBA

This past weekend, April 26-28, the 27th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 27) was hosted at the University of Toronto. Several current and former MIT linguists presented at the conference:

• Peter Grishin (Postdoc, PhD 2023): The Syntax and Semantics of Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey modals
• Line Mikkelsen, Emily Clem, Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018), and Ellen Thrane (unaffiliated): Apparent Cross-Clausal Agreement with Obliques in Kalaallisut is Prolepsis
• James Crippen (McGill) and Jessica Coon (PhD 2010): Linguistics for Indigenous Language Study: A Course in Development
  Marta Donazzan, Hamida Demirdache (PhD 1991), Ana Lucia Müller, and Hongyuan Sun: On the Interpretation and Analysis of Covert Tense: Evidence from Karitiana

Speaker: Isabella Senturia (Yale)
Title: On the Spectra of Syntactic Structures
Time: Tuesday, April 23rd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This talk explores the application of spectral graph theory to the problem of characterizing linguistically significant classes of tree structures. As a case study, we focus on three classes of trees, binary, X-bar, and asymmetric c-command extensional, as well as different types of syntactic movement, and show that the spectral properties of different matrix representations of these classes of trees provide insight into the properties that characterize these classes. More generally, our goal is to provide another route to understanding the structure of natural language, one that does not come from extensive definitions and rules taken by extrapolating from the syntactic structure, but instead is extracted directly from computation on the syntactically-defined graphical structures. We also discuss implications of this work for generative capacity and for the Minimalist program.

Speaker: Logan Swanson (Stony Brook)
Title: Phonotactic Learning with Abductive Principles
Time: Monday, April 22nd, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: A foundational learning problem in phonology is phonotactics: discovering the constraints which govern what configurations of sounds are licit in a particular language. These constraints are generally formulated over some kind of substructure, which could be segmental, feature-based, or autosegmental. These substructures form a partial order, with simpler structures contained within more complex ones.

In this talk I will present the Bottom-Up Factor Inference Algorithm (BUFIA), an algorithm which leverages this underlying structure to learn surface-true phonotactic constraints from positive data (Chandlee et al., 2019). In this sense, BUFIA offers a general form for phonotactic learning, since it can operate over any choice of representation and use any abductive principle to decide when to add constraints. While Rawski (2021) examined several possible constraint selection principles, my work has shown additional kinds of abductive pressures that can guide the search, including execution of the search path itself in addition to other constraint selection criteria.

I will discuss how the BUFIA framework provides insight into the impact of these factors on learning, and give a demo of the software implementation.

Speaker: Yiyang Guo (University of Cambridge/Harvard University)
Title: Event counting, eventuality, and aspect
Time: Thursday, April 25th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Counting in the domain of events can exhibit a two-level nesting structure, i.e., the event level and the occasion level (Cusic 1981), as illustrated by the use of stacked time-adverbials in English (Andrews 1983; Ernst 1994; Cinque 1999) and two types of verbal classifiers in Mandarin Chinese (Deng 2013; Donazzan 2013; Zhang 2017). In Mandarin Chinese, event counting interacts with eventuality types and aspect. In this talk, I will provide two main observations:

(i) Countability of events hinges on eventuality types. Specifically, statives cannot be counted, activities allow counting at both the occasion level and the event level, while achievements and accomplishments can only be counted at the occasion level.

(ii) Counting expressions display difference in their compatibility with aspect. They are incompatible with the progressive marker -zhe, compatible with the perfective marker -le, but non-uniformly compatible with the experiential perfect marker -guo.

To account for the distribution of counting expressions, I will propose an atom-based analysis of event-counting (cf. Bach 1986; Krifka 1989; Landman 2006) under the framework of neo-Davidsonian event semantics (Parsons 1990; Carlson 1984; a.o.).

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)
Title: Unexpected Syncretisms: A Look at the Nganasan Case and Subjective Agreement Paradigms
Time: Thursday, April 18th, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: Nganasan (Szeverényi, Várnai, and B. B. Wagner-Nagy 2002, B. Wagner-Nagy 2018) seems to have a near-exact, cross-paradigmatic syncretism between the NOM exponents of the Case Paradigm and 3rd Person exponents of the Subjective Agreement (The relevant syncretic exponents are highlighted):

Nganasan (Reduced) Case Paradigm
(B. Wagner-Nagy 2018, pg.191-193)

Nganasan Subjective Agreement Paradigm:
(B. Wagner-Nagy 2018, pg.229)

*In the grammar, ACC.DU and GEN.DU have a “ghost” consonant at the end.

I will argue for the following three things:

1) NOM.DU /-Kəj/ and 3rd.DU /-gəj/ are in fact the same exponent, meaning that we can argue that NUM is the morphosyntactic feature behind the syncretism and that there is no contextual allomorphy (Bonet & Harbour 2012) between nominal and verbal stems in the CONTEXT of NOM and 3SG.

2) The apparent syncretism between NOM.SG, ACC.SG and GEN.SG /-∅/ is superficial in nature since phonological phenomena such as Syllabic Gradation and Epenthesis clearly distinguish word-paradigms involving NOM.SG /-∅/ from word-paradigms involving ACC.SG and GEN.SG /-∅/.

3) The apparent syncretism between NOM.PL and GEN.PL /-ʔ/ is also superficial for similar reasons, but in light of the typology of epenthesis and vowel harmony (Finley 2008), GEN.PL /-ʔ/ is better understood as being /-Vʔ/, where V is a vowel that participates in vowel harmony.

Finally, one can see similar syncretisms in the Case and Subjective Agreement Paradigms of Tundra Nenets (Nikolaeva 2014, pg. 57, 59, 61, 78) and Forest Enets (Siegl 2013, pg. 121-124), suggesting that this cross-paradigmatic syncretism is more widespread in the Samoyedic language family.

Speaker: Janayna Carvalho (UFMG)
Title: Generic null impersonals in Brazilian Portuguese and structure removal
Time: Tuesday, April 16th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this presentation, I explore some sentential properties of generic null impersonals in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In particular, I look for an explanation for two of their properties: a) their restricted modal readings; b) their apparent ban on sequence of tense readings. I argue that these two disparate properties are due to the removal of part of the functional sequence of these clauses, due to a conflict between two probes – C and T – that could potentially value the external argument in these sentences.

Speaker: Sarah Payne (Stony Brook University)
Title: Marginal Sequences as a Window into Phonotactic Acquisition
Time: Thursday, April 18th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Most current theories of phonotactic learning (e.g., Hayes & Wilson 2008, Chandlee et al. 2019) assume a close relationship between attestation and licitness. Under such accounts, a sequence is licit only if its subcomponents (e.g., sequences of phones or feature bundles) are all attested in the input; illicit sequences are thus those that contain some unattested subcomponent. Under such theories, however, what is the status of marginal sequences (e.g., English ?[#sf])? Constraint-based views posit that marginal sequences are illicit but attested, making them an exceptional subclass of illicit sequences. However, marginal sequences pattern much more closely with licit sequences than illicit ones in terms of repairs in borrowings and in terms of production and perception errors, suggesting that they may instead be an exceptional subclass of licit forms. I argue for a theory of the phonotactic grammar in which attested sequences are divided into productive/licit ones and unproductive/marginal ones. I present a syllable-based computational learning model that learns a binary classification of attested forms into marginal or licit. When evaluated on English complex onsets, I show that this model matches well with human judgments, outperforming the model of Hayes & Wilson (2008) while accounting for the unique behavior of marginal sound sequences.

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT)
Title:Fixing Engdahl’s Type-Shifter and Heim’s Unary Which
Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Engdahl’s (1986) account of functional readings of sentences like (1) involved having the pronoun herself bound upstairs by a covert binder E, given in (2), while having a totally impoverished trace (i.e., just “t”, without any restrictor) with a complex index; that is, “tf(x) “. The E operator also does the job of shifting the restrictor to type ⟨ee, t⟩, without which the functional reading wouldn’t be possible. Heim (2019) pointed out that having the pronoun bound upstairs like this cannot derive ϕ-feature agreement between the pronoun and the antecedent quantifier, in this case, no girl, and binding theoretic effects like *Which picture of herself1 did no girl’s1 father submit?. Motivated by this reason, she proposed to have an LF like the one in (3), where which is unary (because it attaches directly and only to the question skeleton) and polymorphic (because it needs to be able to quantify over ⟨e, e⟩-type functions). Moreover, she proposed to have the whole restrictor picture of herself is in situ, getting syntactically bound by no girl, thereby avoiding the ϕ-featural and Binding Theoretic issues.

Speaker: Dóra Takács (MIT)
Title: Vowel-zero alternations in Hungarian
Time: Monday, April 8th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: There are a closed class of about 500 stems in Hungarian that are subject to vowel-zero alternations if they are followed by a potentially vowel-initial suffix (Siptár & Törkenczy 2000). Early proposals (Vago 1980, Törkenczy 1992, Siptár & Törkenczy 2000, Abrusan 2005) mostly focused on whether this process is a result of epenthesis, metathesis or syncope . Some patterns among the consonants in these exceptional stems have been previously noted in the literature, but these observations were not integrated in the previous analyses. In this talk I show how stem-internal vowel-zero alternation in Hungarian interacts with voicing assimilation, affrication and gemination and use these interactions to support the claim that this process is in fact a result of syncope.

On Friday, 22 March 2024, James Cooper Roberts (first year student) presented his work on a computational investigation of the productivity of medials in Passamaquoddy at the Seventh Workshop on Computational Methods for Endangered Languages (ComputEL-7). This workshop was colocated with 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2024) in St. Julian’s, Malta.

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: *ABA in Multidimensional Paradigms: A Harmonic Grammar-based account
Time: Monday, April 1st, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In piece-based and realizational models of morphology, a fundamental question concerns the assignment and conditioning of phonological content to morphemes represented as feature bundles. This talk shows the limitations of Underspecification (Halle 1997; Bobaljik 2012) and Overspecification (Caha 2009; Starke 2009) approaches (henceforth US and OS) in deriving ABA patterns of contextual allomorphy in multidimensional paradigms (Christopoulos & Zompì 2022; Caha 2023). Our proposal essentially combines US and OS (cf. Ackema & Neeleman 2005; Wolf 2008; Müller 2020) and equates exponent choice to finding the ‘shortest path’ for each feature bundle to a legitimate exponent under a Harmonic Grammar framework. We further discuss the typology of ABA patterns of root suppletion and show that the proposed model makes appropriate restrictions on accidental homophony and derives the correct typology. Lastly, we suggest that our proposal yields output-driven maps in the sense of Tesar (2014), which boosts the learning of morphological paradigms.

Speaker: Fangning Ren (University of Cambridge)
Title: Approaching Mandarin wh-topicalization/focalization: D-linking effect
Time: Tuesday, April 2nd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This talk mainly provides two findings and the proposed analyses: (i) To form a content question, Mandarin ex-situ wh-nominals are invariably D-linked (Pesetsky 1987), whereas all wh-nominals can stay in situ regardless of their D-linking status; (ii) Mandarin wh-ex-situ creates both gapped dependencies and resumptive dependencies, with the former showing A’ diagnostics not the latter. Comparing three types of Mandarin wh-nominals: which-complexes, what-complexes and the what-simplex, I propose their varying degrees of D-linkability (in a morphosyntactic sense) are determined by their ability to realize the higher D head in a split-DP structure, which maps to the discourse (Roberts 2001, Guardiano 2012; Roberts 2017). In terms of the syntactic nature of the two dependencies created by Mandarin wh-nominal reordering, I argue that the resumptive one involves a base-generated wh-hanging-topic that introduces a null copular construction containing a reduced co-varying restrictive-relative head (Safir 1986, Kallulli 2012), whereas the gapped one involves wh-focus-movement. This is corroborated by the asymmetry they show in terms of parasitic-gap licensing, CNPC sensitivity, and the WCO effect.

Speaker: Yurika Aonuki (MIT)
Title: Minimum-standard predicates as resultatives and measure phrase interpretations
Time: Wednesday, April 3rd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this practice talk for WCCFL, I will propose a compositional analysis of verbal predicates in Japanese that have been treated as minimum-standard gradable adjectives (GAs) (e.g., Kubota 2011; Sawada and Grano 2011). I demonstrate that the verbs in these predicates are inchoative-state verbs (Kiyota 2008) and argue that their GA-like behaviours provide novel empirical support for a state-based analysis of GAs (Wellwood 2015).

What have been treated as minimum-standard GAs, e.g., katamui-tei- ‘tilted’, allow absolute MPs (1). This property, in contrast with the lack of absolute MP readings with relative GAs (2), has played a major role in Japanese degree semantics.

(1) Poster-ga 5mm katamui-tei-ru poster-nom 5mm tilt-tei-npst ‘The poster is 5mm tilted.’ (2) Kono ki-wa 8m taka-i this tree-top 8m tall-npst ‘This tree is 8m taller.’ *‘..8m tall.’

However, these minimum GA-like predicates are morphologically Verb + aspectual marker -tei- (Oda 2008). I present the first compositional analysis of (1) in which the MP measures a result state.

Speaker: Heidi Duressi (MIT)
Title:An analysis of the Albanian verbal paradigm with with multiple exponence and paradigm contrast
Time: Monday, April 1st, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Albanian verbs are typically analyzed to be broadly split into 2 categories: those with roots ending in vowels (Class 1) and those with roots ending in consonants (Class 2) (Newmark, Hubbard, & Prifti 1982; Camaj, 1984). There are certain segments (alternating between j and n) that are present in the indicative present forms of some verbs in Class 1, but not those of Class 2. There have been attempts at further characterizing these alternations (Trommer 2013) but there is no complete explanation of why they surface in the person/number combinations that they do. The goal of this talk is: 1) to present an analysis of this phenomenon, which combines ideas of multiple exponence, as suggested and used by (Matthews, 1974; Müller, 2006; Müller & Trommer, 2007), with paradigm contrast (Rebrus & Törkenczy, 2005; Hall, 2007) and 2) to explore the implications of this analysis for the general Albanian verbal paradigm.

Speaker: Noa Bassel (UMass)
Title: Complex anaphors
Time: Thursday, April 4th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Anaphors with a complex morphological structure are attested across many different languages and show recurring traits in meaning and distribution. Despite extensive research into these phenomena, there is no broadly-accepted definition of the primary grammatical function(s) of complex anaphors. This talk will evaluate various definitions from previous literature, with the goal of defining complex anaphors in a way that would explain their cross-linguistic properties: morphological complexity, binding effects, and homophony with focus-intensifiers (e.g., The queen HERSELF came to our party).

Speaker: Amanda Rysling (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: What it takes to comprehend (a) focus
Time: Friday, April 5th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: Over the past half-century, psycholinguistic studies of linguistic focus have found that comprehenders preferentially attend to focused material and process it more “deeply” or “effortfully” than non-focused material. But psycholinguists have investigated only a limited subset of focus constructions, and we have not come to an understanding of how costly focus is to process, what factors govern that cost, or why the language comprehension system behaves in the way that it does, and not others. In this talk, I discuss the problem for language comprehenders presented by the category of focus, and present evidence that focus processing is generally costly, but this cost can be attenuated by the presence of contrastive alternatives to a focus in the context before that upcoming focus. Evidence from the processing of second-occurrence foci demonstrates that comprehenders seem to work harder than our general models of sentence processing would posit that they should in comprehending given focused material. These findings add to our understanding of what it means to be good enough or efficient in language processing, delineating conditions under which comprehenders do (not) find apparently important material to be worth processing deeply or effortfully.

Speaker: Keely New (MIT)
Title: There’s no deletion in meN-deletion
Time: Tuesday, March 19th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In Indonesian/Malay, there is an optional verbal prefix meN- which is widely taken to be the subject voice marker since it correlates with subject voice SVO word order, and when it is present, only the subject may be A’-extracted. In object voice OSV word order, meN- is obligatorily absent, and only the object may be A’-extracted. The well-known “meN-deletion” generalisation is, therefore, that movement of the object over the verb in Indonesian/Malay results in deletion of meN (Saddy 1991, Fortin 2006, Aldridge 2008, Cole et al. 2008, Sato 2012, Georgi 2014 among others). Under such a perspective, the optional absence of meN- in subject voice is derived from a separate process from the obligatory absence of meN in object voice. Most analyses remain silent on the optionality of meN in subject voice. In this talk, I argue against a view where “meN-deletion” is triggered by movement of a DP across the verb. Drawing from data in Jakartan Indonesian, I propose that the choice between flavours of functional Voice/v head is one-to-one with the overt presence/absence of meN- prefix on the verb. In doing so, I argue that word order in Indonesian/Malay is but an epiphenomenal correlate of voice in the language.

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)
Title: Exclusive disjunction in bilateral logic: Hurford Disjunctions as evidence for split connectives in natural language
Time: Wednesday, March 20th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: “Disjoint Hurford Disjunctions” (DHD; Amir Anvari, p.c.) are a novel class of examples of deviant disjunctions that resemble Standard Hurford Disjunctions (SHD; Hurford, 1974), but don’t present any classical entailment (or overlap) relation between the two disjuncts:

(1) SHD: # John lives in Paris, or he lives in France.

(after Hurford, 1974)

(2) DHD: # John lives in Paris and he’s married, or he lives in France and he’s single.

(Amir Anvari, p.c.))

In order to unify (1) and (2) under the ‘Hurford disjunction’ label, we have to make certain assumptions about how conjunction and disjunction work, and examples like (2) might therefore be particularly revealing of what type of logic is at play in language and reasoning. In this talk I will extend Bilateral State-based Modal Logic (BSML) from Aloni (2022) with an exclusive disjunction (ED). ED will be “classically” defined as supporting the disjunction of its disjuncts and rejecting their conjunction. Crucially, in BSML, supported disjuncts and rejected conjuncts are defined in a split way, and have therefore an ‘independent life’ from one another (for instance, to reject (A ⋀ B) you need to be able to reject A and B independently). I will claim that ED - implemented in a system that rules out zero models by default (i.e. BSML* from Aloni, 2022) - is a better predictor of assertability conditions of disjunction in natural language compared to both the classical logic and the standard BSML definitions of disjunction. First, equipping BSML* with ED provides a unified and direct semantic explanation to both standard Hurford Disjunctions and “Disjoint Hurford Disjunctions”. Second, ED yields the correct ‘uniqueness’ interpretation for sentences with multiple disjuncts, which has been a major challenge for past proposals of natural language disjunction as inherently exclusive. I will conclude the talk with possible challenges to the present system by showing that (i) conjunctions are not always split and we need a device to capture these cases (possibly along the lines of subject matter, from Truthmaker semantics (Fine, 2017)) and that (ii) assuming ED as the standard meaning for disjunction actually clashes with some results in Aloni (2022) (wide scope free choice) and Degano et al. (2023) (absence of exclusivity in production tasks). Time permitting, I will briefly sketch in-progress solutions to solve the conflicts.

Speaker: Yeong-Joon Kim (MIT)
Title: Overapplication opacity as a consequence of phonetic faithfulness
Time: Monday, March 18th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: This study contributes to the understanding of opacity by identifying substantive restrictions on counterbleeding interactions and proposing a novel analysis tied to these typological generalizations. A typological survey of counterbleeding-on-environment instances reveals an asymmetry in the types of opaque processes involved, with assimilation and consonant-induced vowel processes being the most common. A novel account of phonological opacity is suggested to deal with this asymmetrical distribution of the opacified processes. The basic idea for explaining this observed asymmetry is that most opaque interactions have a functional rationale, that of preserving phonetic properties of lexical entries (e.g., Flemming 2008). The approach can also account for overapplication opacity in feeding interactions, such as self-destructive feeding in Japanese, which is problematic for classical Optimality Theory.

Speaker: Ksenia Ershova (MIT) and Nikita Bezrukov (UPenn)
Title: Moving away from antilocality: A defense of very local movement
Time: Thursday, March 21st, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Most syntactic research assumes that syntactic dependencies are subject to locality constraints: agreement and movement cannot cross certain elements (bounding nodes, phase boundaries, elements which bear the same features, etc.). A growing body of work also argues that there are antilocality constraints which impose a lower bound on syntactic dependencies – movement, and perhaps Agree, must cross a certain type of boundary. Focusing primarily on Spec-to-Spec Antilocality (Erlewine 2016 et seq.), which states that movement from Spec,XP “must cross a maximal projection other than XP”, we argue that such constraints are unlikely to be part of Universal Grammar. The argument is three-fold. First, we briefly discuss the trajectory of antilocality theories and argue that they were originally proposed as responses to theoretical idiosyncrasies which don’t extend beyond the frameworks that they are couched in. Second, we focus on one of the most discussed empirical motivations for antilocality theories – constraints on subject extraction – and suggest that this data can be analyzed in other ways, while antilocality approaches fall short in explaining the patterns. And finally, we present a case study of possessor relativization in West Circassian which demonstrates that Spec-to-Spec Antilocality makes the wrong empirical prediction: very local movement exists.

Speaker: Shota Momma (UMass Amherst)
Title: A theory of structure building in speaking
Time: Tuesday, March 12th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Partly due to our free will, our ability to produce sentences is notoriously hard to study. Existing theories of sentence production are not very good at capturing how speakers assemble structurally complex sentences that involve syntactically interesting phenomena. In this talk, I attempt to fill this gap by developing a theory of sentence production that integrates well with theories of syntax. This model aims to capture the production of sentences involving various syntactic phenomena, including raising, control, and wh-movement dependencies, and suggests a close parallelism between locality domain for syntactic computations and planning units in sentence production. The proposed theory makes counter-intuitive predictions about the time-course of sentence formulation as well as one of the most well-studied phenomena in sentence production: structural priming. I present experimental evidence confirming those predictions.

Speaker: Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh) & Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: When to revisit? investigating (un)ambiguity in temporal clauses
Time: Wednesday, March 13th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Ever since the seminal work of Geis in the 1970s, it has been known that temporal adverbial clauses in English (and a number of other languages) show the same kind of ambiguities as also observed in wh-questions and (even more relevantly) relative clauses, so that a sentence like “She arrived just when I predicted she would arrive” can mean either that her arrival coincided with my act of predicting, or with the time given in the prediction. This follows fairly directly from an analysis of such temporal adverbial clauses as a type of free relative clause denoting a definite description of a time, which can be formed syntactically by A’-movement of a temporal operator, or whatever analysis is given to such long-distance dependencies. Here we’d like to report on joint work in progress (Caroline Heycock, Elise Newman, Rob Truswell) where we investigating cases of temporal clauses where long-distance movement seems to be either excluded or at the least heavily disfavoured, and exploring the possibility that the data motivate a distinction between temporal clauses that are descriptions of time intervals and those that are descriptions of events.

Speaker: Levi Driscoll
Title: Ludika: Playing with Feet
Time: Monday, March 11th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: We present a description and formal analysis of a novel English-based ludling called Ludika. Starting from clear cases with direct cues to foot structure, we argue that meaningless bits are affixed to the right edge of surface English feet in Ludika. We then use Ludika as a diagnostic of foot structure in more ambiguous contexts such as initial stressless light syllables (po‘tato). Evidence from Ludika aligns with Kiparsky’s (1979) characterization of these initial stressless syllables as unstressed degenerate feet, rather than syllables adjoined to feet in a recursive structure (Jensen 2000, Davis & Cho 2003, Kager 2012) or stray syllables (Ito & Mester 2009). We also leverage phrasal data to illustrate that function words in phrases behave just like feet elsewhere in Ludika, suggesting that they are neither stray syllables in phonological phrases (Selkirk 1996) nor syllables adjoined to content words as part of a recursive prosodic word structure.

Speaker: Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)
Title: A blocking effect in Hindi-Urdu
Time: Friday, March 15th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: In this talk, I will present a blocking effect in Hindi-Urdu that could be characterized as Poser blocking, namely a word winning over a phrase. This blocking arises in the context of deverbal adjectives and its analysis has implications for the representation of adjectives as a syntactic category and the structure of verbal derivations in Hindi-Urdu.

Many languages have specialized morphology that can verbalize adjectives. In English, for example, -en can combine with a number of adjectives (e.g. flatten, redden). Hindi-Urdu lacks verbalizing morphology of this sort but it has another device that allows for productive verbalization of adjectives. This very productive device involves the light verbs ho ‘be’ and kar ‘do’. There is, however, a restriction on the application of this very productive device: the class of deverbal adjectives cannot be verbalized via the light verb strategy. I propose that we can see verbalization as being blocked by the existence of equivalent lexical verbs; hence the characterization in terms of Poser blocking.

However I do not derive this effect by appealing to the notion of Poser blocking as a primitive. Instead I explore a derivational system where the `blocked’ cases are simply not derived; instead the derivational process delivers the corresponding lexical verbs. The derivational system I set up has a surprising feature: a semantically contentless categorizing head needs to be treated as a last resort element that is inserted countercyclically.

Phonology Circle will meet on March 4, 5-6.30pm, in the 8th floor conference room for a logistical meeting. Be there or be square!

On February 22, 2024, our fifth-year grad student Ido Benbaji-Elhadad gave an invited talk at the interdisciplinary colloquia series organized by the Linguistics Department at Tel Aviv University. 

Title: Specific-opaque readings and the temporal interpretation of noun phrases

Abstract: Szabó (2010,2011) argues that in addition to their de dicto, de re and third readings, DPs in intensional contexts can have a fourth, specific-opaque reading in which their determiner scopes above an intensional operator while their restrictor is nevertheless interpreted opaquely, in the intensional environment created by the operator. Szabó provides examples of specific-opaque readings relative to the three main intensional operators, namely, attitudes, modals and tense, as evidence that natural language makes available a general, unrestricted mechanism to derive such “split” readings for DPs in intensional environments. We focus on specific-opaque readings relative to modals and tense and show that neither supports that conclusion; i.e., that both are restricted in meaningful ways and should be derived without a general mechanism. The discussion serves to highlight the ways in which modal and temporal operators differ with respect to the availability of the specific-opaque reading for DPs in the intensional environments that they create, providing new evidence that worlds and times differ in the kind of mechanisms that introduce them to the semantic composition.