Whamit!

The annual ballot of the Linguistic Society of America is now open and members have until November 5, 2022 to cast their votes. There are a series of proposed amendments to the LSA Constitution and Bylaws and the LSA’s website provides some comments from members pro and contra. The ballot also includes the slate of candidates for various positions in the Society:

• Marlyse Baptista (University of Michigan) for
  Vice-President/President Elect
• Shelome Gooden (University of Pittsburgh) for Language
  Co-Editor
• Four candidates for two at-large seats on the Executive Commitee:
  • Melissa Baese-Berk (University of Oregon)
  • Michel DeGraff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  • Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto)
  • Michal Temkin Martinez (Boise State University)

Speaker: Janek Guerrini (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS)
Title: Genericity in similarity
Time: Thursday, September 29th, 12:30pm - 1:50pm

Abstract: In this talk, I offer an account of similarity constructions involving ‘like’, such as ‘be like’ and ‘look like’. I argue that these constructions have two key properties. (1) The first is that similarity predication amounts to predication of overlap of salient properties: I analyse ‘John is like Mary’ as ‘John shares relevant properties with Mary’. This is motivated by the fact that there seem to be grammatical devices that single out precisely what properties are relevant, e.g. ‘With respect to personality, she’s just like her father’. (2) The second key feature of similarity talk is, I argue, that it involves inherent generic quantification. This explains a range of data: first, it accounts for the reading of indefinites embedded in ‘like’ Prepositional Phrases: ‘John looks like a lawyer’ is almost equivalent to ‘John looks like a typical lawyer’. Second, it accounts for narrow-scope and almost conjunctive readings of disjunction in the scope of ‘like’: ‘Mary looks like a lawyer or a judge’ is almost equivalent (on its most accessible reading) to ‘Mary looks like a lawyer and Mary looks like a judge’.

Peter Grishin, Cora Lesure, and Norvin Richards spent the weekend of September 10-11 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, at the Wolastoqey Elder and Youth Gathering (“Nankomiptasu: Wolastoqewiyik Carry Language to Future Generations”).  We heard presentations related to language revival and maintenance, including discussions of several exciting projects that are under way; we also had a chance to spend time with the elders as they sat around a table telling stories in Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey late into the night.  Many thanks to Roger Paul (MS ‘20) for telling us about this event!

Let us all give a big welcome to the incoming cohort, ling-22! 

Runqi Tan: I’m from China. My research interests started with modelling phonological form and structure with optimization models, and I’m fascinated by the general principles that shape the language systems. I enjoy spending time with friends, reading science, history, biography, watching cartoons and going to musicals and concerts.

Taieba Tawakoli

Ukhengching Marma

Congratulations to Frank Staniszewski, who successfully and excellently defended his dissertation on August 25, 2022, titled Modality and Time in Logical Context! 

The dissertation develops a theory of neg-raising that unifies the phenomenon with existing theories of free choice and negative polarity items. The empirical focus is on “until”-phrases and on the neg-raising predicates “want”, “should”, and “be supposed to”. Predictions of the formal account are then examined in a language acquisition experiment.

Many congratulations to Christopher Baron, who successfully and excellently defended his dissertation on August 15, 2022, titled The Logic of Subtractives, or, Barely anyone tried almost as hard as me!

The dissertation analyzes the elements “almost and “barely”, proposing a formal analysis in which they are subtractive modifiers of quantifiers that via exhaustification result in exceptive meanings. The resulting theory is then used to examine the compositional structure of comparative and equative constructions as well as numeral constructions.

Speaker: João Costa (Minister of Education, Portugal; and Professor of Linguistics, Nova University of Lisbon)
Title: Language Acquisition and Education Policies
Time: Friday, June 10th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract:

After several decades of findings in the field of generative approaches to language acquisition, this research has still not had an impact on the definition of education policies. Sometimes this is because linguists are too far away from the debates on education, sometimes because education policies are not aware of the full potential of the findings for more effective and relevant policies.

After an overview of current global debates on the “whats”, “whos” and “hows” of education, I will argue that linguists and linguistics matter.

About the speaker:

João Costa has had a unique and brilliant double scientific and political career both as a linguist specializing in syntax and language acquisition and as a leader in research-driven educational innovation currently serving as the Minister of Education in Portugal. Dr. Costa received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Leiden in 1998 (and in 1995 was a visiting student at MIT Linguistics), and is a renowned researcher in formal linguistics, language acquisition and development, and educational linguistics. He is the author of several books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He has served as Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and President of the Scientific Council of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. He has also served as a member of the Scientific Council of the National Reading Plan, the National Commission of the International Institute for the Portuguese Language, and the Consulting Council of the Camões Institute. He was also President of the European Association of Linguistic Students (SOLE) and the Portuguese Linguistic Association.

In March 2022, Dr. Costa was named Minister of Education in the Socialist Party government led by Prime Minister António Costa. From 2015, he served as Secretary of State for Education in the two previous Socialist governments. The Minister of Education formulates, conducts, enforces and assesses the national policy on the education system, in the context of pre-school education, basic education and secondary education, and extra-schooling education. The Minister of Education also articulates the national education policy and the national vocational training policy under the scope of the national policies for fostering the population’s qualification.

https://www.portugal.gov.pt/en/gc23/ministries/education/minister

This week, some of MIT speak at WCCFL40 (online @Stanford, May 13-15)! 

• Honorifics without [HON]: A presuppositional account
  Ruoan Wang 
• The size of morphemes in Mandarin: Perspectives from tonal UR learning
  Boer Fu 
• Possession without possessives (but with verbs): The view from Äiwoo
  Giovanni Roversi (alternate talk) 

Speaker: Patrick Elliott (MIT)
Title: Partee conjunctions and free choice with anaphora
Time: Wednesday, May 11th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: In this talk, I’ll explore the interaction between epistemic modality and anaphoric information. To set the stage, consider two seemingly uncontroversial assumptions typically made about possibility statements. (i) possibility modals close off anaphoric information (1), and (ii) possibility modals are holes for presupposition projection - in order to accept (2) we must accommodate the existence of a bathroom.

(1) ?There might be a bathroom and it’s upstairs. (2) The bathroom might be upstairs.

I’ll argue that neither assumption holds up under scrutiny, on the basis of ‘Partee conjunctions’ - conjunctions of possibility statements which alternately pattern with conjunction (3) or disjunction (4) with respect to anaphora. In order to account for this data, I’ll develop a new account of epistemic modals in a Strong Kleene update semantics.

(3) It’s possible there’s a bathroom, and it’s possible it’s upstairs (cf. there’s a bathroom and it’s upstairs). (4) It’s possible there’s no bathroom, and it’s possible it’s upstairs (cf. either there’s no bathroom or it’s upstairs)

We’ll explore an application of the resulting system to the problem of free choice with anaphora, illustrated in (5). I suggest that the observed FC inferences can’t easily be captured by theories stated in terms of disjunctive simplification. Instead, I’ll sketch a conservative extension of Goldstein’s (2019) dynamic theory, incorporating the insights provided by Partee conjunctions.

(5) It’s possible that either there’s no bathroom or it’s upstairs. -> It’s possible that there’s no bathroom. -> It’s possible that there’s a bathroom upstairs.

Speaker: Boer Fu (MIT)
Title: The size of morphemes in Mandarin Chinese: perspectives from phonological learning
Time: Thursday, May 5th, 12:30pm - 1:50pm

Abstract: It is a long-held belief that every Mandarin Chinese syllable, transcribed by a character, is a meaning-bearing unit. It follows that any disyllabic word is combined of two meaning-bearing units, or two morphemes. I challenge this view by examining the process of phonological learning of tone 3 sandhi, in which a disyllabic word with the underlying /T3 T3/ surfaces as [T2 T3]. Using a novel AABB reduplication diagnostic, I show that many disyllabic words that are purported to have undergone tone 3 sandhi actually are learned as non-sandhi words by native speakers. I argue that compositionally opaque words are prone to being learned as identical to the surface form, because learners cannot establish meaningful morphological alternation for the first syllable. The results indicate that many individual syllables in disyllabic words are not meaning-bearing units at all, but are instead just parts of a disyllabic morpheme. It also points to the possibility that Chinese characters are not used to transcribe meaning, but merely tools to transcribe sounds.

Speaker: Ofra Magidor (Oxford)
Title: Accounting for Copredication: Dual Nature vs. Property Versatility
Time: Friday, May 6, 3:30pm
Location: 32-155

Abstract: Copredication occurs when a sentence receives a true reading despite the fact that, prima facie, it ascribes categorically incompatible properties to a single entity. For example, ‘Lunch was delicious but took hours’ can have a true reading even though it seems that being delicious is only a property of food, while taking hours is only a property of events. Similarly, ‘The red book was written by Tolstoy’ can have a true reading, even though it seems that being red is only a property of physical copies, while being written by Tolstoy is only a property of informational texts. In this talk, I compare two of the central contemporary approaches to the problem: Dual Nature approaches (defended among others by Asher, Chatzikyriakidis & Luo, and Gotham), according to which books, for example, are hybrid objects incorporating both physical and informational components; and the Property Versatility approach (defended by Liebesman and Magidor) according to which nouns such as ‘book’ or ‘lunch’ may receive multiple readings, but the properties expressed in copredicational sentences apply to a wider range of objects than is often assumed.

Many attend GLOW45 at Queen Mary University of London this week!

Eunsun Jou: Korean addressee honorification as cyclic agree at Force: Comparison with Magahi [abstract]

Speaker: Canaan Breiss (MIT)
Title: When bases compete: experimental and computational studies of Lexical Conservatism
Time: Monday, April 25th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: (This talk is a sequel to the presentations given on 4/4 and 4/11) In this talk I examine the interaction of the phonological grammar and the lexicon through the lens of Lexical Conservatism (Steriade, 1997). This is a theory that addresses how the distribution of bases (existing stem allomorphs in a morphological paradigm) influence the way those paradigms accommodate novel members. The idea is that a phonological alternation only applies to novel words if there is an existing base form present elsewhere in the paradigm that offers the needed phonological material. Thus compénsable, for “able to be compensated”, undergoes stress shift (that is, *cómpensable) because the existing word compénsatory contains the compéns- allomorph. In contrast, *inúndable, for “able to be inundated” is judged worse than ínundable, since there is no existing base that can provide the stressed vowel (there is no form in inúd-). Using experimental data from English and Mexican Spanish, I demonstrate that this dependency between paradigm structure and phonological process application generalizes to entirely novel words in a probabilistic manner. Further, contrary to previous assumptions, I find that all stem allomorphs in a paradigm play a role in determining the form of the novel word, rather than only those that could reduce the markedness of the novel form (per Steriade (1997), Steriade & Stanton (2020)). I propose a novel grammatical model where allomorphs in the lexicon exert analogical pressures on novel words, which are cross-cut by phonological markedness constraints.

Speaker: Harvey Lederman (Princeton)
Title: Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope
Time: Thursday, April 28th, 12:30pm - 1:50pm

Abstract: Among philosophers, Fregeanism and sententialism are widely considered two of the leading theories of the semantics of attitude reports. But these theories have received much less recent attention from linguists. This talk will aim to bridge this divide. I’ll present a new formal implementation of Fregeanism and sententialism, with the goal of showing that the theories can be developed in sufficient detail and concreteness to be serious competitors to theories which are more popular among semanticists. I’ll start by offering a modern treatment of quantifying in for Fregeanism and sententialism, in the style of Heim and Kratzer (1998), and then show how these theories can— somewhat surprisingly—account for “third readings” (Fodor, 1970) on the model of the “Standard Solution” from possible-worlds semantics (von Fintel and Heim, 2002). The resulting Fregean/sententialist proposal has a distinctive attraction: it treats data related to counterfactual attitudes (Ninan, 2008; Yanovich, 2011; Maier, 2015; Blumberg, 2018)—which have proven challenging to accommodate in the setting of possible worlds semantics—straightforwardly as third readings.

This week, our very own Adele Mortier is giving a talk at LFRG as practice for her upcoming conference talk at GLOW!

Speaker:  Adele Mortier (MIT)

Date and time: Wednesday 4/20, 1-2pm

Place: 32-D461

Title: It’s Tough to be Pretty: semantic relatedness between tough- and pretty-predicates

Abstract: Tough (1a) and pretty (1b) predicates are two classes of predicates that can take an infinitival clause as complement.
(1) a. Suzi is tough to please. (TC)
(1) b. Roses are pretty to look at. (PC)
The main contrast between the two classes is that tough-constructions allow an “it-variant” (2b)[Rosenbaum, 1967]; while pretty-constructions do not.
(2) a. It is tough to please Suzi. (it-TC)
(2) b. * It is pretty to look at roses. (it-TC)
Another difference is that, unlike pretty predicates, tough-predicates do not seem to take their subject as a semantic argument (3):
(3) Joseph is tough to please. =/=> Joseph is tough.

In this talk, we argue that the matrix subject in TCs is in fact, a proper semantic argument of the tough-predicate, as already suggested by [Bayer, 1990] and [Fleisher, 2015]. We call this argument the reference argument, and understand it as the causer of the toughness of the event denoted by the embedded clause. We argue that this analysis of “tough” can be extended to it-TCs, by showing that English and French it-TCs are not pure expletive constructions but rather extraposed constructions, whereby the reference argument (“it”) refers to the embedded clause (“it”-extraposition, [Rosenbaum, 1967]). We then establish that tough and pretty have the same basic argument structure, modulo some reversal of the argument order: tough takes its subject as reference and states the toughness of the event denoted by the embedded clause, while pretty takes the embedded clause as reference and states the prettiness of its subject. Assuming that pretty imposes an individual-restriction on its subject, this account allows to explain the ungrammaticality of it-PCs.

In brief, our approach develops a more fine-grained and unified semantics for tough and pretty, avoiding lexical ambiguity as posited by [Keine and Poole, 2017] in the case of TCs. It also allows to explain the (un)availability of an it-variant in those constructions. The existence of a reference argument in TCs ends up providing additional support for a base-generation account of tough-constructions.

Speaker: Sigwan Thivierge (Concordia University)

Title: Phases as phi-intervention

Time: Thursday 04/21 12:30-2pm

Location: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96062313339 (gathering in 32 D-461)

Abstract:
This talk focuses on the notion of phases in syntactic theory, and offers a reanalysis of certain phases as instances of (phi-)intervention. Under the standard view, phases are syntactic structures that are opaque to operations originating outside of the phase. I will argue that certain instances of phasehood derive from the ‘phase’ head bearing a phi-probe: the phi-features on the probe intervene for agreement, which results in phase-like effects. In this way, phases are reducible to a more general locality issue. The empirical data in favour of this claim comes from the Georgian agreement system. I show that subjects in Georgian are base-generated in different positions, depending on whether they fall under the basic agreement paradigm or the inverse agreement paradigm. In the basic, subjects are introduced above the ‘phase’ head and are the closest goal for Agree operations that originate outside the phase domain. In the inverse, subjects are introduced below the ‘phase’ head; in this case, the phi-features that are associated with the phi-probe on the phase head constitute the closest goal for Agree. These results suggest that phasehood is an epiphenomenon, and that the interior of the ‘phase’ is accessible even after the phase is complete.

Speaker: Bruna Karla Pereira (UFVJM)
Title: Silent nouns (TYPE, HUE, SIZE, and SURNAME) in Brazilian Portuguese nominal concord
Time: Tuesday, April 12th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: This talk aims to present a work in progress on nominal concord in BP structures, such as the following:

(1) a. “10 ovos caipira vermelhos” (10 eggs caipira red-PL / ‘10 red pasture-raised eggs’)
b. “10 ovos tipo jumbo brancos” (10 eggs type jumbo white-PL / ‘10 white jumbo-sized eggs’)
((1a,b) were taken from packaging labels of egg’s boxes in grocery stores of Belo Horizonte -MG, December 4th, 2021)
(1) a’. “10 ovos [(do TIPO) caipira] vermelhos” (10 eggs (of-the TYPE) caipira red-PL / ‘10 red pasture-raised eggs’)
(2) fitas [(do TIPO) cassete] médias (tapes (of-the TYPE) cassette medium-PL / ‘Medium cassettes’)
(3) camisas [(de TAMANHO) P] novas (t-shirts (of SIZE) S new-PL/ ‘new t-shirts S’)
(4) “50 máscaras [(do TIPO) adulto] descartáveis” (50 masks (of-the TYPE) adult disposable-PL / ‘50 disposable masks for adults’)
(5) “lavagem [(do TIPO) expresso]” (laundry-FEM (of-the TYPE) express-MASC / ‘express laundry’)
(6) saia [(de TOM) vermelho escuro] (skirt-FEM (of HUE) red-MASC dark-MASC / ‘a dark red skirt’)
(7) os (familiares [de SOBRENOME) Pereira] (the (relatives of SURNAME) Pereira / ‘the Pereiras’)

Most of the data were collected from written sources that intend to apply standard patterns of agreement, id est, the redundant plural marking in the constituents of the DP. That is why the morpheme ‘-s’ is marked in ‘ovos’ and ‘vermelhos’ (1a) as well as in ‘ovos’ and ‘brancos’ (1b). Being so, why is the word ‘caipira’ (1a) unmarked with the plural morpheme? Kayne (2005), Pesetsky (2013), and Höhn (2016) consider the existence of a null category to account for the apparent mismatch of agreement, respectively, in number in Italian and French, in gender in Russian, and in person in Spanish and Greek. Likewise, I assume that a nominal null category, in the DP, triggers the number agreement in DPs like (1). Following Kayne (2005) and Pereira’s (2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021) approach on structures with apparent mismatch of agreement in BP, I argue that (1a) projects a silent noun TIPO (TYPE), preceded by the preposition ‘de’, as illustrated in (1a’). Therefore, ‘caipira’ is inflected in singular, because it agrees in number with a singular silent noun TIPO. This same silent noun is overt in (1b). In this operation (PESETSKY; TORREGO, 2007), the adjective (probe), containing uninterpretable gender features, becomes valued [uF val] via agreement with the silent noun TIPO (TYPE), containing interpretable and valued gender features [iF val]. Likewise, (2) to (7) project the silent nouns TIPO (TYPE), TAMANHO (SIZE), TOM (HUE), and SOBRENOME (SURNAME). In these structures, the postnominal constituents in the brackets agree with the respective silent noun that precedes them in singular number (‘cassete’ (2), ‘P’ (3), and ‘Pereira’ (7)) as well as in masculine gender (‘adulto’ (4), ‘expresso’ (5), and ‘vermelho escuro’ (6)).

In sum, this analysis demonstrates that there is no “unagreement”, in the phrases at stake, but agreement between the adjective and a silent noun, in the DP-internal structure.

Speaker: Jad Wehbe (MIT)
Title: Plurality in the Lebanese Arabic double subject construction
Time: Wednesday, April 13th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: Abstract: Lebanese Arabic allows for double subject constructions (Mohammad, 1989; Aoun et al., 1994), where there is a lower conjunction in which the first conjunct co-refers with the higher subject (1). The double subject construction can only be used in a subset of the situations where standard coordination can be used. For example, it is odd with purely distributive predicates like tall and only allows for collective readings with predicates like lift the piano when both conjuncts denote atomic individuals, which mirrors the behavior of singular comitatives (Ionin and Matushansky, 2002). I argue that these restrictions provide evidence against lexical cumulativity as a universal (Krifka, 1992; Kratzer, 2007). I propose, building on Ionin and Matushansky (2002), that pluralization operators (for example * (Link, 1983) and ** (Krifka, 1989)) must be present in the syntax and obligatorily take scope above the vP. Furthermore, I argue that these operators are the only sources of cumulative inferences. This allows us to account both for the restrictions when the conjuncts are singular, and for the co-distributive readings that arise over the conjunction when the conjuncts are plural. Turning to the interpretations under negation, I show that the homogeneity effects that arise with standard coordination can’t be detected in the double subject construction. This provides strong evidence that the * operator is the only source of homogeneity in the individual domain (following Schwarzschild, 1994; Bar-Lev, 2018), arguing against approaches that take homogeneity to be a lexical property of predicates (e.g. Križ, 2015).

(1) Karim    ra:ħ    howwe  w            Hadi   ʕa-l        maktabe.
     Karim    went   him        and        Hadi   to-the    library
     ‘Karim and Hadi went to the library together.’

Speaker: Canaan Breiss (MIT)
Title: When bases compete: experimental and computational studies of Lexical Conservatism
Time: Monday, April 11th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: (This is a continuation of the presentation given on 4/4)

In this talk I examine the interaction of the phonological grammar and the lexicon through the lens of Lexical Conservatism (Steriade, 1997). This is a theory that addresses how the distribution of bases (existing stem allomorphs in a morphological paradigm) influence the way those paradigms accommodate novel members. The idea is that a phonological alternation only applies to novel words if there is an existing base form present elsewhere in the paradigm that offers the needed phonological material. Thus compénsable, for “able to be compensated”, undergoes stress shift (that is, *cómpensable) because the existing word compénsatory contains the compéns- allomorph. In contrast, *inúndable, for “able to be inundated” is judged worse than ínundable, since there is no existing base that can provide the stressed vowel (there is no form in inúd-). Using experimental data from English and Mexican Spanish, I demonstrate that this dependency between paradigm structure and phonological process application generalizes to entirely novel words in a probabilistic manner. Further, contrary to previous assumptions, I find that all stem allomorphs in a paradigm play a role in determining the form of the novel word, rather than only those that could reduce the markedness of the novel form (per Steriade (1997), Steriade & Stanton (2020)). I propose a novel grammatical model where allomorphs in the lexicon exert analogical pressures on novel words, which are cross-cut by phonological markedness constraints.

Speaker: Ana Arregui (UMass Amherst)

Times and locations of the minicourse:

-  Wednesday 4/13 2-3pm in 32‑D461
-  Friday 4/15 11-1pm in 2-132

TITLE: Has the future happened?

We usually make the assumption that, contrary to the past, the future has not happened yet. There is something intuitive about this, and the intuition is reflected in various ways in the semantic literature that deals with the interpretation of future markers in language. How exactly this intuition should be taken to affect the interpretation of future markers is not a straight-forward question. Indeed, whether is not a straightforward question either. The goal of this mini-course will be to review some of the arguments in this literature and try to walk away with a clear(er) sense of which aspects of the discussion are relevant for a natural language semanticist.

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Title: Uncentered attitude reports
Time: Thursday 04/14, 12:30pm - 1:50pm
Place: 32-D461

Abstract:
One of the major discoveries in attitude semantics over the last thirty years has been the fact that certain types of attitude reports require interpretation de se. This finding has prompted a move among semanticists to treat attitude verbs as uniformly quantifying over centered worlds (typically modeled as triples of worlds, individuals, and times), rather than merely over possible worlds, and likewise a move to treat attitude complements as uniformly denoting sets of centered worlds, rather than mere sets of possible worlds. Thus, for instance, “A believes P” is true iff P holds of all triples <x,t,w> such that A believes that she might be x in w at t. Proponents of a De Se Uniformity Thesis of this type include Schlenker (1999), Ogihara (1999), von Stechow (2003), Anand (2006), Pearson (2015), and Grønn and von Stechow (2010). In this talk I present evidence against the De Se Uniformity Thesis, drawing from my fieldwork on Nez Perce (Sahaptian). I show that dedicated de se devices (shifty 1st person indexicals, relative tenses) are possible in one type of attitude report in Nez Perce, but not in another type, and argue that the difference between the two types of attitude report crucially reflects the semantics of the attitude verb and its complement. I argue in particular that some attitude complements provide sets of centered tuples, whereas others provide merely sets of possible worlds.

Link to paper: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-uncentered-attitudes.pdf

Speaker: Ana Arregui (UMass Amherst)
Title: Revisiting indexical pronouns
Time: Friday, April 15th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract: In this talk I will focus on some ‘deviant’ interpretations of indexical pronouns, discussing cases of descriptive indexicals noted by Nunberg (1993) as well as impersonal you. My goal is to explore parallelisms in reference to individuals across possible worlds as well as across situations within the same world. My hypothesis is that we can learn something about ‘deviant’ indexicals if we allow for similar modes of identification across and within possible worlds.

We are happy to announce that next week Stephanie Shih will give not only a colloquium talk, but also a minicourse!

Speaker: Stephanie S. Shih (University of Southern California)
Time: April 7th and 8th, 12:30-2pm 
Location: Fourth floor Seminar Room (32-D461)

EVALuating the relationship between phonology and statistics

In this minicourse, I take up two seemingly parallel threads in current phonological research. The first: the surface optimizing grammars that have become the mainstay theoretical approach in phonology. And the second: the staple methodological statistical tools—namely, regression modeling—that the field has increasingly embraced with the rise of experimental and corpus-based evidence as the empirical material that we analyze. We will talk about how the design and goals of these two approaches, which are usually cast as theory vs. methodology, actually dovetail, both in current day work as well as in the history of the field. The goals will be to reconcile the conceptual parallels between optimizing grammars and statistical models, and to consider what the convergence of the two mean for phonological theory.

A big welcome to Bruna Pereira (Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri), who joins us as a visitor this month on her sabbatical!  

Bruna Karla Pereira carried out her Ph.D. (2011) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) with a full year as a visiting graduate student (2010) at the University of Cambridge (UK), under Ian Roberts’ supervision. In addition, she developed her post-doctoral research (2016), as a visiting scholar, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), under Shigeru Miyagawa’s supervision. In her Ph.D., she was interested in the Minimalist Program, especially in the cartography of syntactic structures and its implications for the analysis of light adverbs, such as ‘lá’ in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In her postdoc, she investigated universals in nominal agreement that determine the DP-internal distribution of the plural morpheme in order to account for structures of BP with apparent “mismatch” of agreement including possessives, wh-determiners, cardinals, and silent nouns. During her education, she was awarded funding from CNPq, FAPEMIG, and CAPES. Concerning her teaching experience, after having worked at the Universidade Federal de Lavras (2011-2013), with a temporary contract, she is currently a permanent professor at the Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri (2013 onwards) where she has been conducting research on Syntax with emphasis on Generative Grammar. Her CV is available both in Portuguese and English, respectively, at the following links: http://lattes.cnpq.br/2671430917722911 and https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4958-8621.

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)
Title: Definite Spans and Blocking in Classifier Languages
Time: Tuesday, April 5th, 1pm - 2pm

Where: 32-D461, or on zoom, ask organizers for details 

Abstract: Giovanni will be leading a discussion of Peter Jenks’ (2018) “Definite Spans and Blocking in Classifier Languages.” https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5tt1j4pj

Abstract of paper: This paper presents a novel analysis of definite noun phrases in numeral classifier languages without definite articles. The motivation for this analysis comes from the classifier-modifier construction (CMC) in Thai, in which a predicative modifier can license a bare classifier, resulting in a definite interpretation. I argue that the definite readings are due to a null choice-functional determiner (Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997), which takes the modifier as its complement (Kayne 1994). I propose that the modifier licenses the bare classifier, otherwise prohibited, because head raising relative clause structures bleed the environment for a D-Clf-N span to be realized as a bare noun (Brody 2000, Svenonius 2012, a.o.). I argue that this coalescence-based account of definite noun phrases, specifically definite bare nouns, is an improvement on accounts based on head movement (Cheng and Sybesma 1999) or semantic type-shifting (Chierchia 1998). This analysis correctly derives the generalization that languages allowing definite bare classifiers do not allow definite bare nouns in most cases, captures Chierchia’s nominal typology without resorting to semantic variation, and opens up new accounts for the apparent optionality of functional morphology in analytic languages.

Speaker: Canaan Breiss (MIT)
Title: When bases compete: experimental and computational studies of Lexical Conservatism
Time: Monday, April 4th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: In this talk I examine the interaction of the phonological grammar and the lexicon through the lens of Lexical Conservatism (Steriade, 1997). This is a theory that addresses how the distribution of bases (existing stem allomorphs in a morphological paradigm) influence the way those paradigms accommodate novel members. The idea is that a phonological alternation only applies to novel words if there is an existing base form present elsewhere in the paradigm that offers the needed phonological material. Thus compénsable, for “able to be compensated”, undergoes stress shift (that is, *cómpensable) because the existing word compénsatory contains the compéns- allomorph. In contrast, *inúndable, for “able to be inundated” is judged worse than ínundable, since there is no existing base that can provide the stressed vowel (there is no form in inúd-). Using experimental data from English and Mexican Spanish, I demonstrate that this dependency between paradigm structure and phonological process application generalizes to entirely novel words in a probabilistic manner. Further, contrary to previous assumptions, I find that all stem allomorphs in a paradigm play a role in determining the form of the novel word, rather than only those that could reduce the markedness of the novel form (per Steriade (1997), Steriade & Stanton (2020)). I propose a novel grammatical model where allomorphs in the lexicon exert analogical pressures on novel words, which are cross-cut by phonological markedness constraints.

Speaker: Stephanie S. Shih (University of Southern California)
Title: Lexically-conditioned phonology as multilevel grammar
Time: Friday, April 8th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract: This talk takes up two interrelated issues for lexically-conditioned phonological patterns: (1) how the grammar captures the range of phonological variation that stems from lexical conditioning, and (2) whether the relevant lexical categories needed by the grammar can be learned from surface patterns. Previous approaches to category-sensitive phonology have focused largely on constraining it; however, only a limited understanding currently exists of the quantitative space of variation possible (i.e., entropy) within a coherent grammar. In this talk, I present an approach that models lexically-conditioned phonology as cophonology subgrammars of indexed constraint weight adjustments (i.e., ‘varying slopes’) in multilevel Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar. This approach leverages the structure of multilevel statistical models to quantify the space of lexically-conditioned variation in natural language data. Moreover, the approach allows for the deployment of information-theoretic model comparison to assess competing hypotheses of what the phonologically-relevant lexical categories are. Two case studies are examined: part of speech-conditioned tone patterns in Mende (joint work with Sharon Inkelas, UCB), and lexical versus grammatical word prosodification in English. Both case studies bring to bear new quantitative evidence to classic category-sensitive phenomena. The results illustrate how the multilevel approach developed here can capture the probabilistic heterogeneity and learnability of lexical conditioning in a phonological system.

Speaker: Ido Benbaji and Yash Sinha (MIT)
Title: Counting pairs: the logic of Hindi co-compounds
Time: Wednesday, March 30th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract:
A noun phrase consisting of a numeral n and a conjunction of two nouns can denote either n or 2n individuals; e.g. ten men and women can refer to a collection of ten people, including both men and women (the mixed reading), or to a collection of ten men and ten women (the doubled reading) (Dalrymple 2004). The doubled reading has been accounted for by positing a mechanism for numeral doubling (semantic or syntactic), by which a numeral preceding conjunction can be interpreted on each of the conjuncts (Champollion 2015, a.o.). We argue that numeral doubling cannot be the only mechanism to generate doubled readings based on the behavior of Hindi co-compounds, which only admit doubled readings with a constrained set of coordinations. We further claim that the co-compounds which give rise to the doubled reading, denote sets of pairs, that are treated by numerals as atomic elements, resulting in a doubled reading.

The 4^th Crete Summer School of Linguistics, or ‘CreteLing’, will take place from July 16 to July 29, 2022 at the University of Crete in Rethymno, Greece.

As in other years, a number of current faculty, as well as current and former students will be involved.

Current MIT faculty Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Shigeru Miyagawa and Norvin Richards will be teaching classes, along with alumni Karlos Arregi, Kyle Johnson, Jonah Katz, Paul Kiparsky, Idan Landau, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Doug Pulleyblank, Philippe Schlenker and Juliet Stanton. They will be joined by many wonderful colleagues from around the world.

Besides the wide range of courses offered across four parallel sessions, the summer school will feature two workshops: ‘Super linguistic dialogues across scientific boundaries’, organized by Pritty Patel-Grosz, and ‘(Covert) Modality’, organized by Tim Stowell and Roumyana Pancheva. 

For more information, as well as the application form, please consult the school’s website: https://linguistics.philology.uoc.gr/cssl22/.

Speaker: Boer Fu (MIT)
Title: UR Underlearning of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi Words
Time: Monday, March 14th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: The process of tone 3 sandhi in Mandarin Chinese results in a case of neutralization. Words with the tonal UR of /T3 T3/ and those with /T2 T3/ are both pronounced as [T2 T3] in the SR. This leads to a phonological learning question: can speakers of Mandarin learn the correct /T3 T3/ UR from the [T2 T3] SR? In order to find out which UR speakers have learned for disyllabic words with [T2 T3] SR, I have developed a forced AABB reduplication diagnostic, in which /T2 T3/ and /T3 T3/ words have different reduplicated forms. A survey of the judgement of six speakers has shown that certain disyllabic words listed as “T3 T3” in the dictionary are prone to being “underlearned” as /T2 T3/ by speakers. Specifically, compositionally opaque “T3 T3” words with an available T2 alternative are the ones likely to be “underlearned” as /T2 T3/. The Mandarin data suggest that not only do speakers require evidence from morphophonological alternation to learn phonological mapping, but also that the alternation has to be identifiable by the learner.

Speaker: Peter Grishin (MIT)
Title: How to agree with the lowest DP
Time: Tuesday, March 15th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: In Passamaquoddy (Eastern Algonquian), there is an agreement marker (the “peripheral suffix”) that sits in C, c-commanding all the arguments of the verb, and demonstrably indexes the lowest clausemate DP after A-movement—for instance, in direct configurations, it’ll index the object, but in inverse configurations (involving A-movement of the object over the subject; Bruening 2001, 2005, 2009), it’ll index the subject. This poses a striking puzzle for standard probe-goal models of agreement (Chomsky 2000, 2001, a.m.o.) which all share the property of locality: a probe will agree with the closest matching accessible goal. Not here!

I propose a morphological solution to the puzzle: the peripheral suffix has agreed with all the accessible matching goals in its domain, and when it comes time to spell out the probe, we chose the newest feature bundle that the probe has acquired—we can call this “Expone Outermost”. I assume that Expone Outermost is a probe-specific morphological rule that specifies what you are to do when spelling out a terminal that has multiple distinct feature bundles on it, situating it in a broader typology of “repairs” for feature gluttony (Coon and Keine 2021): e.g. spelling out all the features individually, spelling out a portmanteau form, or choosing the most-specified feature bundle to spell out. I implement this analysis for Passamaquoddy in an Interaction-Satisfaction model of Agree (Deal 2015, to appear), analyzing the peripheral agreement as an insatiable probe with the specification [INT:φ, SAT:–] which solves the problem of feature gluttony by Expone Outermost.

Expone Outermost expands the typology of possible agreement systems—is this move justified? I argue that it is: by varying interaction and satisfaction conditions while keeping Expone Outermost constant, we predict various kinds of interesting agreement systems—and these agreement systems are attested. Narrowing the interaction condition to [INT:PART] results in a probe that indexes the lowest first or second person DP—this is attested in Aqusha Dargwa (Nakh-Dagestanian). Narrowing the interaction condition to [SAT:AUTH] results in a probe that always agrees with the lowest DP, unless there’s a first person intervener, in which case it agrees with the first person DP—this is attested in Lak (Nakh-Dagestanian). Finally, we predict that if there are contexts where we Impoverish the outermost features on the probe, the inner features should get a chance to “expose themselves”—we find this pattern in Karitiâna (Tupí-Guaraní) antiagreement, where Ā-extracting the object prevents you from realizing the features of the object, resulting in otherwise unattested subject agreement.

Speaker: Aynat Rubinstein (HUJI)
Title: Mood in relative clauses: on goal-orientation and choice
Time: Wednesday, March 16th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: This talk presents recent work by Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Paula Menéndez-Benito, and myself, about the distribution and interpretation of mood in relative clauses in Spanish. Relative clauses present a challenge for theories of mood semantics, which have largely been designed to account for subjunctive/indicative selection in the complements of attitude verbs (Farkas 1985; Giorgi and Pianesi 1997; Giannakidou 1997; Quer 1998, 2021; Villalta 2006; Portner 2018). In relative-clause objects of extensional verbs there is no obvious source for the modality. We propose that a unified analysis is nevertheless possible, putting together two lines of research: the analysis of mood as a modal operator (Kratzer 2016; Mari and Portner to appear; Portner and Rubinstein 2020) and the analysis of modal indefinites as projecting modal domains from volitional events (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito 2017). Our investigation leads us to new observations about the licensing of subjunctive mood in Spanish relative clauses and to a better understanding of what may broadly be called goal-oriented modality.

Speaker: Michelle Yuan (UCSD)
Title: Deriving VSO in San Juan Piñas Mixtec (and some puzzles along the way)
Time: Tuesday, March 8th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: (in collaboration with Gabriela Caballero and Claudia Juárez Chávez)

In this talk, I present in-progress research on the syntax of San Juan Piñas Mixtec (Tò’ōn Ndā’ví, though henceforth SJPM here), a previously undocumented variety of Mixtec spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico and in diaspora communities in California. This work is part of a larger collaborative project documenting and analyzing SJPM, as well as developing linguistic resources to be used for language reclamation purposes.

Like other languages of the Oto-Manguean language family, SJPM displays VSO word order; in SJPM, VOS may arise in very limited contexts (e.g. there is no pseudo noun incorporation that I am aware of). As such, SJPM is useful in evaluating approaches to verb-initiality cross-linguistically. I demonstrate that verb-initial word order in SJPM does not involve V0-movement (contra Macaulay 2005 and Ostrove 2020 on other Mixtec varieties)—rather, it is derived by object-stranding VP-movement. I then evaluate how the object comes to be “stranded” in VP-raising VSO configurations. Since Massam (2001), a common approach is to derive VSO from object shift followed by remnant movement of the VP (see also Lee 2006, Medeiros 2013, Collins 2017, a.o.). However, many recent proposals have instead sought to derive VSO/VOS without remnant movement, instead drawing on the prosodic status of different object types (Clemens 2014, 2019, Clemens & Coon 2018, Richards 2016, van Urk to appear). I argue that the prosodic approach is untenable for SJPM, and provide some evidence for the object shift/remnant movement approach, though residual issues still remain.

Speaker: Agnes Bi (MIT)
Title: Mandarin tone identification in whispered speech
Time: Monday, March 7th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: Phonetic contrasts are represented via multiple acoustic dimensions and signaled by multiple cues simultaneously. In the case of tones, it has been long established that fundamental frequency F0 serves as their primary cue (Gandour 1978, Yip 2002), and F0 information is sufficient for successful tonal identification (Abramson 1978). On the other hand, many studies have shown that secondary cues still contribute substantially to the identification process, and that listeners seem to be sensitive to a weighted combination of various acoustic dimensions (Di Paolo and Faber 1990, Wassink 2006, Zellou, Scarborough, and Kemp 2020, a.o.). In this project, I am interested in how much information listeners can extract from the secondary cues alone. More precisely, when listeners are deprived of a key dimension of cues, how do they utilize the remaining acoustic features? I will report findings from an experiment conducted over IAP that looks into the identification of Mandarin tones in whispered speech. The results seem a little mysterious, if not counterintuitive, and I would like to get some help with how to make sense of them.

Speaker: Sigwan Thivierge (Concordia University)
Date and time: Thursday March 10, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461, https://mit.zoom.us/j/96158811570

Title: TBD

Abstract: TBD

Speaker: Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam)
Title: Neglect-zero effects at the semantics-pragmatics interface
Time: Friday, March 11th, 2:30pm - 4pm

Abstract: In Free Choice (FC) inferences, conjunctive meanings are derived from dis- junctive modal sentences contrary to the prescriptions of classical logic [Kam73, Zim00, Fox07, Alo07]:

(1) Positive FC

a. You may go to the beach or to the cinema. —> You may go to the beach and you may go to the cinema.

b. ◊(a ∨ b) —> ◊a ∧ ◊b

[Alo21] presented a formal account of FC inferences in a Bilateral State- based Modal Logic (BSML). The novel hypothesis at the core of this proposal is that FC and related inferences are a straightforward consequence of a tendency in human cognition to neglect models that verify sentences by virtue of some empty configurations (neglect-zero) [BSK19]. There are two different ways to implement neglect-zero in BSML: (i) syntactically, using the [ ]+-enrichment function from [Alo21]; and (ii) model-theoretically, ruling out the empty set from the set of possible states (BSML∗). These two implementations both derive FC inferences and their cancellation under negation, but differ for example in their predictions with respect to the debated case of Negative FC (only derivable in BSML∗):

(2) FC cancellation under negation [AO06]

a. You are not allowed to eat the cake or the ice cream. —> You are not allowed to eat either one.

b. ¬◊(a ∨ b) —> ¬◊a ∧ ¬◊b

(3) Negative FC [MRSB21]

a. It is not required that Mia buys both apples and bananas. —> It is not required that Mia buys apples and that Mia buys bananas.

b. ¬◻(a ∧ b) —> ¬◻a ∧ ¬◻b

In the talk I will compare the predictions of these implementations with those of recent alternative accounts [Gol19, BLF20] and then argue in favor of a hybrid approach where neglect-zero can cause two kinds of effects:

(i) cancellable global effects (modelled by BSML∗);

(ii) more robust effects triggered by the conventional meaning of certain ex- pressions (modelled by obligatory local applications of [ ]+-enrichments)

Speaker: Madeline Bossi (UC Berkeley)
Date and time: Wednesday March 2, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Title: Higher order ignorance in Kipsigis epistemic indefinites

Abstract: Epistemic indefinites are indefinite pronouns or determiners that convey speaker ignorance with respect to the witness to the indefinite. Cross-linguistically, the ignorance effects associated with epistemic indefinites come in two flavors; first order ignorance conveys that the speaker doesn’t know which individual witnesses the indefinite, while higher order ignorance conveys that the speaker is ignorant about some relevant property of the witness. In the existing literature, these different types of ignorance effects are often linked to different analyses of the epistemic indefinites; in particular, first order ignorance is often linked to domain widening semantics, whereas higher order ignorance is often linked to choice functional indefinites. In this talk, I draw on original field data to show that epistemic indefinites in Kipsigis (Nilo-Saharan; Kenya) can convey higher order ignorance but don’t transparently warrant a choice functional analysis. Kipsigis epistemic indefinites are scopally flexible, which is predicted on a domain widening analysis but poses challenges for a choice functional one. However, they are also compatible with singleton domains of quantification, as predicted to be possible on a choice functional account but impossible on a domain widening one. This unique set of properties calls into question the link between the domain widening vs. choice functional analysis of an epistemic indefinite and the type of ignorance conveyed. Against this backdrop, I offer a new analysis for Kipsigis, according to which use of the epistemic indefinite is only licensed when there is some salient property that holds of one possible witness to the indefinite but not of another. Ignorance effects—including first order and higher order ignorance—are then derived pragmatically via competition with other Kipsigis indefinites.

Speaker: Emily Drummond (UC Berkeley)

Date and time: Thursday March 3, 12:30-1:50pm

Location: 32-D461, https://mit.zoom.us/j/97228947368

Title: Syntactic ergativity in Nukuoro

Abstract: The typology of ergative systems is constrained in several well-known ways, including i) Dixon’s (1994) generalization that no language is syntactically ergative without being morphologically ergative; and ii) Mahajan’s (1994, 1997) generalization that no ergative language has SVO word order. Based on primary fieldwork, I show that Nukuoro (Polynesian Outlier; Micronesia) is a counterexample to both of these generalizations, showing a pattern of syntactic ergativity without morphological ergativity in addition to having basic SVO word order. Despite this unusual cluster of properties, I argue that the Nukuoro extraction restriction can be explained using a familiar mechanism, namely systematic object inversion for nominal licensing (e.g., Coon et al. 2014; Ershova 2019). To account for Dixon’s generalization, I propose that ergative extraction restrictions are sensitive to abstract ergative Case, both in Nukuoro and cross-linguistically, as predicted by nearly all going analyses of such restrictions (Deal 2016, Polinsky 2017). Furthermore, I suggest that Nukuoro pre-verbal subjects are base-generated in the left periphery and control an empty category in Spec,vP, making SVO word order possible despite a restriction on ergative extraction. 

Speaker: Elizabeth Coppock (BU)
Date and time: Wednesday February 23, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Title: Triangle Equivalences

Abstract:  Denominator phrases like “per ton” can combine either with expressions denoting particular degrees, as in “$100 per ton”, or with expressions denoting measure functions, as in “cost per ton”. As we see regularly when we look at translations of “per” into other languages, there is a systematic pattern of equivalences involving these two options:

Speaker: Peter Grishin (MIT)
Title: Omnivorous agreement for third person in Algonquian
Time: Wednesday, February 23rd, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: A common view is that third person is underspecified (Harley and Ritter 2002, a.m.o.): first and second person have features that third person doesn’t (e.g. [PART]), but third person doesn’t have any features that first and second lack. This kind of featural representation beautifully captures the default nature of third person: for instance, things like expletives and default agreement are invariably third person in language after language after language.

I want to show that, unfortunately, this view is untenable (see also Nevins 2007). Third person must have a feature that first and second person lack, because there is omnivorous agreement for third person. In Menominee, Innu-aimûn, and Plains Cree, the peripheral agreement suffix (standardly analyzed as a probe in C; Halle and Marantz 1993, Branigan and MacKenzie 1999, a.o.) shows the following pattern: it always agrees with the highest accessible third person DP, skipping over first and second persons. In fact, it doesn’t ever agree with first or second person DPs at all. In order to capture this behavior, the probe in C needs to be relativized to a feature that third persons have but first and second persons lack.

What should this feature be? I want to have a discussion with the audience about the ramifications this has for our feature theory. Do we just want to add an extra privative feature [3] to the standard set of privative features [PART, AUTH, ADDR]? Or do we want binary features, with third persons specified [–PART]? Additionally, if we have third person features, how do we capture the defaultness of third person crosslinguistically? I am not an expert here—y’all’s input is warmly requested. Let’s think through these issues together!

Speaker: Madeline Bossi (UC Berkeley)

Date and time: Thursday February 24, 12:30-1:50pm

Location: 32-D461, https://mit.zoom.us/j/94474505971

Title: Negative bias and pragmatic reasoning in Kipsigis belief reports

Abstract: Much work has explored how belief reports of the form x V-att p function pragmatically not just as reports of x’s internal state, but as devices for indicating the status of p with respect to the Common Ground (CG). In addition to the well-studied case of factive verbs, which presuppose p, recent work has explored negatively biased belief verbs, which suggest that p cannot or should not be added to the CG (e.g. Kierstead 2013, Hsiao 2017, Anvari et al. 2019, Glass 2020). Drawing from original fieldwork, I show that the negatively biased belief verb pɑr ‘think’ in Kipsigis (Kalenjin; Kenya) is best modeled as contributing, in addition to its basic belief semantics, an instruction for CG management: p is not to be added to the CG. Together with context-sensitive pragmatic reasoning, this instruction explains the curious case of a verb that can be used both to suggest that p is false and to remind the addressee that p is true.

Michel DeGraff’s Webinar for the Linguistics Society of America, this Friday, February 18, 2022, noon-2pm, is about our social responsibility as linguists.

Title: “Impure linguistics for self-purification and direct action”.

Registration information:

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2022/02/04/february-webinar-%E2%80%9C-impure-linguistics-self-purification-and-direct-action%E2%80%9D-michel

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman (Queen’s University)
Title: Morphological realization and multiple valuation
Time: Tuesday (February 15th) and Thursday (February 17th), 12:30pm - 2pm both days
Place: 32-D461 or Zoom

Abstract: Current theories of Agree assume quite commonly that probes can be valued by more than one goal in some syntactic configurations. But on the morphological side, the realizations available to multiple valuation are far from uniform: a multiply-valued head may realize only its most “marked” values, may realize all values via a portmanteau morph, may realize all values via two or more morphs, or even (in a small number of cases) may be ungrammatical unless both values can be realized by a single syncretic form.

In this mini-course we’ll explore cases where morphological syncretism seems to be able to “rescue” structures where a single item receives conflicting feature valuations, and what such cases tell us about both the syntactic representation of valued features and the process of morphological realization. In particular, we’ll examine the proposal from Bjorkman (2016) and Coon & Keine (2020) that resolution-via-syncretism arises only when conflicting features happen to be spelled out via the same Vocabulary Insertion rule, and explore whether this account can extend to cases where accidental morphological identity (arising from phonological neutralization) appears sufficient for resolution. Our primary empirical focus will be on resolution via syncretism in Finnish (Zaenan and Karttunen 1984) and Hungarian (Szamosi 1976), contrasted with portmanteau agreement in Hungarian (Bárány 2015) and Anishinaabemowin (Oxford 2019, Hammerly 2020).

No advance readings are required, though I have attached Szamosi 1976 as to my knowledge it is not available online.

(Please see the announcement email for the reading material.)

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman (Queen’s University)
Title: Verb doubling and the architecture of realization
Time: Friday, February 18th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Place: 32-155 or Zoom

Abstract: In this talk, I look at verb doubling phenomena and how they bear on questions concerning the architecture of post-syntactic realization, particularly the timing of linearization, prosodification, and verb doubling. In addition to widely discussed cases of verb doubling that arise from movement (with more than one copy of a moved verb being pronounced), I consider cases of verb doubling in Ingush (Nakh-Dagestanian) and Breton (Celtic) that appear instead to be motivated entirely by the need of an otherwise-unsupported clitic for a host. Comparing these classes of verb doubling, I make two related arguments. First, the profile of verb doubling is best accounted for in a model of linearization that involves a constraint-based evaluation of candidates, rather than a deterministic linearization algorithm. Second, linearization proceeds in parallel with the mapping from syntactic hierarchy to prosodic structure, but prior to Vocabulary Insertion, allowing doubling to arise as a trade-off between optimal linearization and prosodic well-formedness. Finally, I discuss the implications of the proposed architecture for multiple exponence in morphology, for the somewhat different typology of multiple copy realization as a consequence of nominal movement, and for broader questions concerning whether syntactic structure is visible to various proposed post-syntactic operations, or to Vocabulary Insertion itself.

We are very excited for Sherry Yong Chen, a graduate student in her fifth year, who has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant by the National Science Foundation!! The grant will support her dissertation project on “Non-uniformity in presupposition projection: developmental and psycholinguistic evidence”. Athulya Aravind, who directs our Child Language Acquisition Lab where the research will be carried out, is the faculty Principal Investigator on the grant.

Here’s the official abstract:

“Human language allows us to distinguish the main new information we intend to communicate from background information we take for granted, i.e., our presuppositions. For example, ‘again’ in ‘I won again’ suggests that it was already established that the speaker had won previously. A hallmark of presuppositions is the fact that they are preserved under logical operators like negation: a sentence like ‘I didn’t win again’ continues to suggest a prior victory. The issue of how presuppositions interact with their surrounding context – how presuppositions project – has been a central and hotly debated topic in the study of natural language meaning. This dissertation project aims to contribute to this debate by examining presupposition projection in sentences where theories diverge. The project approaches this empirical terrain from an innovative angle, turning to online processing and child language acquisition, which can shed new light on the logical and inferential systems that underlies human semantic competence. The project includes the training and mentoring of undergraduate researchers.

The project will carry out a series of psycholinguistic experiments with adults and children, with the goal of distinguishing between two classes of theories: (i) theories that predict that the presuppositions of conditionals and conjunctions should vary based on the position of the presupposition-carrying expression, and (ii) ones that predict uniform presuppositions across the board. Study 1 probes adults’ real-time processing of presupposition projection, with the goal of identifying behavioral signatures of presupposition projection. Study 2 turns to child language, where the influence of confounding pragmatic factors is minimized. Finally, Study 3 probes in more detail how other, non-linguistic factors influence judgments about presuppositions.”

Speaker: Norvin Richards (MIT)
Title: Bans on extraction of ergatives
Time: Tuesday, February 8th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: A number of ergative languages ban A-bar extraction, or at least certain kinds of A-bar extraction, of ergative nominals (some Mayan languages, Kalaalisut (West Greenlandic), Chukchi, etc.). This will be a new attempt to derive this effect and its distribution.

We will probably only get through the first part, which will be about languages which ban both wh-movement and relativization of ergatives, and will crucially invoke the idea of Affix Support from Contiguity Theory. We will see that when ergative languages have morphology indicating transitivity, Contiguity Theory allows us to predict whether ergative extraction will be possible from the nature of the transitivity morphology.

The second part of the talk, which we will surely not get to, will be about languages that specifically ban relativization of ergatives. I’ll argue that this kind of ban is about a particular kind of relative clause—again, a kind whose properties can be diagnosed from its morphology.

Speaker: Linmin Zhang (NYU Shanghai)
Title: Post-suppositions and wh-questions: Intervention effects revisited
Time: Friday, February 4th, 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Abstract: In this talk, I investigate a novel, post-supposition-based account for intervention effects of wh-questions, i.e., the degradedness or uninterpretability of certain wh-questions containing focus items (e.g., only) or quantifiers (e.g., exactly 3 girls), as illustrated in (1) (see also Beck 2006, Li and Law 2016) as well as (2) and (3).

(1) Focus intervention in Chinese wh-questions that contain only (zhǐyǒu)

a. zhǐyǒu [Zhāng-Sān]F dú-le yǔyìxué shū.
   only Zhāng-Sān read-PFV semantics book
   'Only Zhāng Sān read a book (or books) on semantics.'
   [With only (zhǐyǒu)]

b. * zhǐyǒu [Zhāng-Sān]F dú-le shénme shū?
   only Zhāng-Sān read-PFV what book
   Intended: ‘what book(s) did only Zhāng Sān read?’
   [only …wh ↝ degraded]

c. shénme shū zhǐyǒu [Zhāng-Sān]F dú-le?
   what book only Zhāng-Sān read-PFV
   'What book(s) did only Zhāng Sān read?'
   [wh …only ↝ natural]

d. Zhāng-Sān dú-le shénme shū?
   Zhāng-Sān read-PFV what book
   'What book(s) did Zhāng Sān read?'
   [Without only: Chinese is a wh-in-situ language]

(2) a. Exactly 3 girls are above 6 feet tall. b. *How tall are exactly 3 girls?

(3) a. Exactly 3 girls read exactly 5 books. [✓ distributive, ✓ cumulative] b. How many girls read exactly 5 books? [✓ distributive, # cumulative] c. *How many books did exactly 3 girls read?

To account for these degraded wh-questions, I start with the interpretation of focus items and quantifiers in declarative sentences, examining how they affect the process of semantic composition. I argue that all these items that create intervention effects in wh-questions are triggers of post-suppositions in declarative sentences (see Brasoveanu 2013), bringing delayed evaluations. On the other hand, I propose that wh-questions (e.g., who did she kiss) are parallel to definite descriptions (e.g., the one she kissed) and also work in a post-suppositional fashion. Specifically, the semantic contribution of wh-words (e.g., who) is twofold: introducing a discourse referent, and then imposing tests of maximality as delayed evaluations. Intervention effects are considered due to an order conflict in semantic derivation, resulting from two distinct sources of post-suppositions.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, December 7, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings; sessions are also live-streamed then uploaded at http://facebook.com/mithaiti/videos for asynchronous participation. NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please email degraff@MIT.EDU so that we can work out adequate arrangements.

For our last session this Tuesday, December 7, we’ll explore one more facet of the global, political and legal dimensions of linguistics and education for social justice.  We are fortunate to have as guests three formidable activists who have achieved key victories on the front of linguistic justice at the United Nations:  two human-rights lawyers (Ellen-Rose Kambel and Deena Hurwitz) and one Ambassador (Dominique Dupuy), all of whom are deeply committed to linguistic rights as human rights.  See their abstracts below:

Linguistics and social justice:
The perspective of Haiti’s Ambassador at UNESCO

Dominique Dupuy (Ambassador of Haiti at UNESCO) 

December 7, 2021, 2–5pm EST

Seminar: “Linguistics & social justice” (24.S96 @ MIT Linguistics)

In this interactive (last) session of this seminar on linguistics and social justice, Ambassador Dominique Dupuy will invite participants to “brase lide” (i.e., stir ideas) on how and why linguistic justice has been at the heart of her mission at Haiti’s Permanent Delegation to the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO) since January 2021.

Upholding Haitians’ human rights and dignity is the core motivation and main objective behind every action taken by Ambassador Dupuy and her team at Haiti’s Permanent Delegation at UNESCO as they interact with UNESCO’s leadership and the countries’ delegations that share the UNESCO space.

 In Ambassador Dupuy’s practice, her promoting and defending linguistic rights is based on the fundamental rationale that “Tout moun se moun” (i.e., on the basis that “every human being has human rights”). “Tout moun se moun” is, thus, a key principle in her mission at UNESCO on behalf of Haiti, as illustrated in her speech at UNESCO on May 27,2021 (in English and Haitian Creole) on language and development.

Ambassador Dupuy will invite participants to analyze specific examples of the somewhat unexpected places where linguistic injustice might undermine UNESCO’s mission and its field operations. She will also invite us to examine some recent victories that have stemmed from her opening up channels of communications with the General Direction in charge of Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism. Through these channels, she and her UNESCO colleagues are addressing certain discrepancies between UNESCO’s policies and its in-country programs.

Dupuy will conclude with a discussion of some ongoing challenges and prospects in this battle for the universal respect of human rights on a global scale… 

Language Friendly Schools and
children’s right to not be punished for using their mother tongue at school

Dr. Ellen-Rose Kambel and Deena Hurwitz, JD

December 7, 2021, 2–5pm EST

Seminar: “Linguistics & social justice” (24.S96 @ MIT Linguistics)

Every day, millions of children receive education in a language that they do not speak at home and do not understand well. Many are reprimanded for just exchanging a few words with fellow students in their home language. Sometimes they are not allowed to sit together with a classmate who speaks the same home language. Or the school may have a rule that, when they are “caught” speaking their home language, they must stay during lunch break and write lines (“I will not speak language X”). In the Netherlands, where the Rutu Foundation is based, it’s not just the students who are penalized; non-Dutch parents are often required to speak only Dutch with their children when they take them to the classroom.

In 2019, the Rutu Foundation initiated the Language Friendly School programme. The aim is to ban these harmful practices and to ensure that all children have access to, and can learn in, a language-friendly environment. It is a two-pronged approach: we raise awareness that children have a right to be educated with respect for their cultural identity including their native languages (Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child) and we offer schools the opportunity to apply for the label “Language Friendly School” and join a global network of schools where all languages are welcome and valued.

Our approach is starting to bear fruit. There are now 17 Language Friendly Schools in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Saba (Dutch Caribbean) and China, with more schools waiting to join. And this year, we reached an important milestone when the United Nations Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed its concern that multilingual children with a foreign, migrant or minoritized background are prevented from, or punished for, using their home languages in Dutch schools.

Background readings:

• Hurwitz & Kambel (2020). Redressing language-based exclusion and punishment in education and the Language Friendly School initiative
• Rutu Foundation (2021): UN: Dutch schools must welcome mother tongues
• Kambel & Le Pichon (2021): Schools join the Language Friendly School Network to support students’ identities

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, November 23, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings.  NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please email degraff@MIT.EDU so that we can work out adequate arrangements.

This Tuesday, November 30, 2021, we discuss Kriolu both in Cabo Verde and in Boston in the context of efforts toward equity in education, with guidance from Marlyse Baptista and Abel Djassi Amado:

Cabo Verdean Creole (Kriolu) in Education:

Variation, equity and representation

Marlyse Neves Baptista
(Linguistics, University of Michigan)

Abel Djassi Amado
(Political Science & International Relations, Simmons University)

November 30, 2021, 2–5pm EST

Seminar: “Linguistics & social justice” (24.S96 @ MIT Linguistics)

This presentation will introduce some of the complex cognitive processes involved in Creole formation and development. This first section will be used as a backdrop for challenging the hegemonic perspectives from which Creole languages have been portrayed in the past (see DeGraff, 2003). The second section will discuss some of the strides that have been made in Cabo Verde in using Kriolu in primary and secondary schools and in higher education. The third section will illustrate the full extent of language variation in Cabo Verdean Creole (based on field work data), as such variation bears on how to represent the language in education. The fourth section will discuss the rise of Kriolu’s visibility and legitimacy on social media. The fifth section will discuss how the Cabo Center for Applied Research is contributing to the inclusion of Kriolu in the Boston Public Schools, adding to the efforts that community members have invested in the past.  We will conclude with a discussion of current challenges and next steps.

Speaker: Kyle Hammet Blumberg & Simon Goldstein (Dianoia Institute of Philosophy)
Title: A Semantic Theory of Redundancy
Time: Thursday, December 2nd, 12:30pm - 13:50pm

Abstract: Theorists trying to model natural language have recently sought to explain a range of data by positing covert operators at logical form. For instance, many contemporary semanticists argue that the best way to capture scalar implicatures is through the use of such operators. We take inspiration from this literature by developing a novel operator that can account for a wide range of linguistic effects that until now have not received a uniform treatment. We focus on what we call redundancy effects which occur when attitude verbs and modals imply that certain bodies of information are unsettled about various claims. We explain three pieces of data, among others: diversity inferences, ignorance inferences, and free choice inferences. Our account yields an elegant model of redundancy effects, and has the potential to explain a wide range of puzzles and problems in philosophical semantics.

Speaker: Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst)
Title: Learning Hidden Phonological Generalizations
Time: Friday, December 3rd, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract: Language acquisition proceeds on the basis of incomplete, ambiguous linguistic input, and one source of this ambiguity is hidden phonological structure. Due to recent developments in computational modeling of phonological learning, there now exist numerous approaches for learning of various kinds of hidden phonological structure from incomplete, unlabeled, and noisy data. These computational models make it possible to connect the full representational richness of phonological theory with noisy, ambiguous corpus data representative of language learners’ linguistic experience to make detailed and experimentally testable predictions about language learning and generalization. In this talk, I briefly review these computational developments and then discuss two ongoing projects that utilize these mutually-informing connections between computation, phonological theory, and experimental data to test hypotheses about the abstract representations that underlie phonological knowledge.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, November 23, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings.  NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please email degraff@MIT.EDU so that we can work out adequate arrangements.

This Tuesday, November 23, 2021, our destination is Shetland. Viveka Velupillai will take us there to help us deepen our discussion and understanding of language revitalization for social justice — in the context of Shaetlan speakers:

Beyond linguistic repression at 60°N:

Growing acceptance of diversity in Shetland
Prof. Dr. Viveka Velupillai

Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany / Shetland

viveka.velupillai@anglistik.uni-giessen.de

November 23, 2021, 2–5pm EST

Seminar: “Linguistics & social justice” (24.S96 @ MIT Linguistics)

Shaetlan is the language spoken in Shetland alongside English. Its main input languages are the now extinct Scandinavian Norn, the language once spoken by the Norse settlers, and Scots; but the strategic position of the archipelago means that it has been a place of contact and multilingualism for centuries. It is still highly distinct from other varieties of Scots and is strongly tied to the local identity; as such, it forms part of the intangible heritage of Shetland.

Despite this, it has never been accepted as a variety in its own right, but has seen a long history of stigmatisation and domination by English. While Shaetlan has an established literary tradition, it has never been accepted and used as a medium of instruction in schools. It is, at the moment, an endangered language, with declining intergenerational transmission coupled with the vicious circle of lack of recognition precluding standardisation (in turn precluding its acceptance as a medium of instruction), and the lack of standardisation precluding recognition.

However, there are encouraging signs of growing acceptance. The widespread and growing use of Shaetlan in digitalk is having a normalisation effect, which in turn is leading to a greater acceptance of Shaetlan as a written language. The present project, A grammar of Shaetlan – Pre-oil and contemporary, which documents and describes Shaetlan from a typological perspective, has gained widespread interest: for the first time speakers are shown that their language is systematic and structured (rather than a haphazard and inferior version of English), and that they are in fact bilingual (rather than producers of a kind of inferior and slightly quaint speech). The online outlet for the project, I Hear Dee*, which posts about the project findings bilingually in Shaetlan and English, has also led to great interest and overwhelmingly positive response. This has brought about a sense of pride and empowerment among speakers, to the effect that local teachers have started using Shaetlan in their teaching, despite the lack of official recognition and materials. The growing sense of the value of linguistic diversity may help bring Shaetlan into schools and stem, if not turn, the endangered status of Shaetlan.

* Instagram: http://instagram.com/iheardee  / Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iheardee

Speaker: Adam Albright (MIT) & Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: Discussion: Rasin and Katzir (2016, 2020)
Time: Monday, November 15th, 2pm - 3:30pm

Abstract: (This is a continuation of the discussion that took place on 10/25)

We will discuss two recent papers by Ezer Rasin and Roni Katzir. Rasin and Katzir (2016) On Evaluation Metrics in Optimality Theory (LI 47) describes an application of the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL) as an evaluation metric for OT. MDL is a framework that rewards analyses that can encode the analysis and data as compactly as possible. In the original formulation of OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), grammars are total rankings of a universally fixed set of constraints (CON), so do not differ in size in any interesting way; Rasin and Katzir propose to allow language-particular constraint sets, and show that MDL learning can favor grammars and lexicons that restrictively characterize the data. Rasin and Katzir (2020) A conditional learnability argument for constraints on underlying representations (J. Linguistics 56) examines more closely the way in which the MDL approach achieves a restrictive grammar. It argues that the evaluation metric favors analyses that include constraints on underlying representations, contrary to the usual OT assumption of Richness of the Base.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, November 9, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings.  NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please email degraff@MIT.EDU so that we can work out adequate arrangements.

This Tuesday, November 16, 2021, Kevin Scannell will help us understand the potential of digital technology for deminoritizing, revitalizing and normalizing endangered languages — and other kinds of minoritized languages:

Language from Below:
Grassroots efforts to develop language technology for minoritized languages

Kevin Scannell
November 16, 2021, 2-5pm EST

Seminar: “Linguistics & social justice” (24.S96 @ MIT Linguistics)

Technology plays a key role in revitalization efforts in many language communities. Without the ability to use one’s native language on computers, mobile devices, social media sites, etc., speakers are forced to shift to a dominant language in contexts where computing plays an important role, most notably in schools and in the workplace.

Kevin Scannell is professor of mathematics and computer science at Saint Louis University.  He works with language communities around the world to develop computing resources that help them use their native language online, with a particular focus on Irish and the other Celtic languages. 

On Tuesday, November 16, he will share some success stories in developing language technology — both in his own work on Irish in Ireland, and in the work of his friends and collaborators on the Māori language in Aotearoa / New Zealand.

Successes in Ireland have been achieved in the face of some huge obstacles: little or no funding for these initiatives, general disinterest from the big tech companies, a very fast-moving software landscape, and technical challenges that arise when applying machine learning approaches to languages that lack sufficiently-large datasets for training.

For Irish, some of these obstacles have been overcome through a community-based, grassroots approach to tech development, and occasional (sometimes uneasy) collaborations with big tech. 

Kevin and colleagues’ work in Ireland can be viewed as part of a long history of language activism “from below.”

Title: Anchor displacement readings of X-marked epistemic modals.

Abstract: X-marking is well-known from the literature as counterfactual morphology or fake past. However, von Fintel and Iatridou (2007, 2020) have shown that this morphological marking is often used beyond counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. They have shown that X-marking has two different functions: (i) domain widening in the case of X-marked desire predicates and (ii) ordering source addition in the case of X-marked necessity modals. In this talk I go beyond the scope of von Fintel and Iatridou (2007, 2020) by investigating X-marked epistemic modals. I show that similarly to X-marked necessity modals X-marked epistemic modals have two possible readings: (i) a reading that is about possibilities in the actual world (wild guess reading) and (ii) a reading that is about possibilities in a world that is not the actual world (counterfactual reading). Furthermore, I present evidence from Hungarian that X-marked epistemic modals can have a third reading in some contexts. These special contexts are what we find in the so-called judge examples (cf.\ Egan et al. (2005), Stephenson (2007)) like in (1).

(1) Context: Chris and Burt are sitting by the window in a cafe.  When a bus goes by they see their friend Ann, who is angry with Burt, jumping behind a bush. Chris asks Burt why Ann did that. Burt responds:
I might be on that bus.

The Hungarian equivalent of these examples can contain either O-marking or X-marking. I claim that X-marking in these examples signals that the anchor of the modal is someone other than the speaker, while O-marking is neutral with respect to who the judge is. I hypothesize that there is a competition between the O-marked and X-marked forms of epistemic modals that leads to a strong preference for the X-marked forms when it is clear that the modal cannot be interpreted from the speaker’s perspective.

Hopefully by the end of the talk I have shown that by looking at the judge examples in morphologically rich languages we not only find evidence for a third reading of X-marked epistemic modals, but also for a third function of X-marking: anchor displacement. 

This past weekend, 5th-year student Sherry Chen (5th year student), Cindy Torma, and Athulya Aravind presented a talk at the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD46) entitled “Non-uniformities in the Development of Presupposition Projection in If-Conditionals”.

Most excitingly, Sherry received a Paula Menyuk award for top-rated, student-led abstracts (as well as a Diversity Travel Fellowship). Congratulations, Sherry!

Speaker: Peter Grishin (MIT)
Title: Passamaquoddy peripheral agreement agrees with the lowest DP
Time: Tuesday, November 9th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: The Algonquian verbal template has a slot traditionally termed “peripheral agreement”, as it sits at the linearly rightmost edge of the verb. In Passamaquoddy, this agreement slot has an unusual distribution: it agrees with the lowest 3rd person DP in the clause after A movement in number, animacy, and obviation. (Other Algonquian languages show different agreement patterns with peripheral agreement, most of which are less problematic than Passamaquoddy; see Xu 2020, 2021 for discussion.)

Following Bruening (2001, 2005, 2009), I assume that the external argument c-commands the internal argument in direct configurations, the internal argument A-moves above the external argument in inverse configurations, and that in a ditransitive the external argument and goal always c-command the theme. Peripheral agreement agrees with the single argument of an intransitive, the internal argument of a direct transitive, the external argument of an inverse transitive, and the theme of a ditransitive—in other words, the lowest DP in the clause after A movement. Additionally, given peripheral agreement’s position following tense, and its disappearance in clause types that are plausibly reduced in size (the subordinative), we’re urged to place it quite high in the clausal spine, e.g. C. The resulting picture: you A-move all the DPs into their requisite positions, then you merge C with the peripheral agreement probe, and then it probes down for the lowest DP, in blatant violation of standard assumptions about the locality of Agree.

With this puzzle in place, I discuss some possible (and impossible) avenues of attack to analyze this pattern, and open things up to the audience: please help me figure out what’s going on! Do we really have to rethink everything we know about Agree and the typology of agreement, or is there another option?​

Speaker: Dmitry Privoznov (MIT)
Title: Poka živoj, poka ešče ne umer (‘While alive, while yet not died’). Some puzzles and thoughts about poka
Time: Wednesday, 10/26, 1pm
Place: 32-D461

Abstract: This talk will present some puzzles concerning the distribution of the Russian complementizer poka ‘while’, and some preliminary thoughts about what these puzzles might tell us about the meaning of the perfective and the imperfective aspect. The meaning and restrictions on the distribution of the complementizer/particle poka ‘while’ have been discussed in the literature quite extensively (Khalizeva 1969, Brown and Franks 1995, Abels 2005, Iordanskaya and Melchuk 2007, Paducheva 2014, 2015). It has several uses and is usually assumed to correspond to several different particles/complementizers (Iordanskaya and Melchuk 2007). I will focus on the use of poka as a complementizer that embeds a temporal adjunct clause. The discussion will be centered around the follwing three puzzling facts.

First, it seems that in an “out of the blue” context the clause under poka must be imperfective and may not be perfective:

(1) a. Poka Marina šla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina walk.IMP.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘While Marina was walking home, Osya was cooking dinner.’
b. #Poka Marina prišla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina come.PFV.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘While Maria came home, Osya was cooking dinner.’

Second, if the clause under poka contains negation, both aspects are fine (2). Furthermore, at least the sentence in (2b) entails that the event of the negated poka-clause took place in the actual world (Marina came home).

(2) a. Poka Marina ne šla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina NEG walk.IMP.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘While Marina was not walking home, Osya was cooking dinner.’
b. Poka Marina ne prišla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina NEG come.PFV.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘Until Marina came home, Osya was cooking dinner.’
Lit.: ‘While Maria didn’t come home, Osya was cooking dinner.’

Third, the clause under poka could be perfective even without negation, but only if the verb in the poka-clause is an accomplishment and the main clause is also perfective:

(3) Poka Osja obegal vse magaziny v poiskax instrumentov, Marina otremontirovala plitu bez nix.
While Osya run.through.PFV.PST.M.SG all stores in search tools, Marina fix.PFV.PST.F.SG stove without them
‘While Osya ran through all the stores in search of the tools, Marina fixed the stove without them.’

In this talk I will follow an approach, according to which, poka only has one meaning throughout (1-3) and negation in its context is not “expletive”, but has its standard interpretation (Abels 2005, Tatevosov 2016, Tiskin 2017, 2018). I will discuss whether the facts in (1-3) could be derived from an assumption that poka forms a predicate over maximal time intervals (similar to a definite article with a maximality presupposition).

Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz (MIT) and Valentina Dedyk (Kamchatkan Institute for the Development of Education)
Title: Some Consequences of the Mere Syncretism of the Ergative and Instrumental in Koryak
Time: Wednesday, November 10th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: The Chukotkan languages are described as having a consistent ergative-instrumental syncretism. This is problematic for some versions of case containment (Caha 2009 et seq.), because the syncretism in question excludes the genitive, dative, and locative cases. It’s also been claimed that not only are the ergative and instrumental syncretic in these languages, but that they are in fact one and the same morphosyntactic category, a problem for the view that ergative is a dependent case in Chukotkan (Baker and Bobaljik 2017; Abramovitz 2021). In this talk, we first argue that the ergative and instrumental are both distinct syntactic categories and distinct morphological ones in Chawchuven Koryak. This is based on the novel observation that the ergative-instrumental syncretism is not found on 2nd-declension nouns and personal pronouns; in fact, we find a systematic paradigm gap in the instrumental case forms of those nouns. Based on this, we show that a curious mismatch between the pattern of case-marking on the subjects of nominalizations and non-nominalized verbs is accounted for: whereas the subjects of normal verbs are marked according to a dependent ergative pattern, the subjects of nominalizations are marked according to what seems to be an inherent ergative (?) pattern. Specifically, the case of the agentive subject of a nominalization is the instrumental, which is usually (though not always) syncretic with the ergative.
Then we get to some stuff that we don’t understand very well. First, how can we encode the fact that there is no instrumental form of second-declension nouns and personal pronouns, a gap that seems to be only expressible in paradigmatic terms, and is therefore predicted not to exist in theories like DM? Second, are inflectional classes (declensions) the right way to think about Koryak nouns, given that: 1) they are mostly (entirely?) predictable based on a noun’s denotation, and 2) most nouns that belong to the 2nd declension can also inflect like 1st declension nouns, with seemingly no change in meaning (pace Zhukova 1972)?

Speaker: Emily Hanink (University of Manchester)
Title:Mixed extended projections and the cline from nominalization to relativization
Time: Friday, November 12th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract: Within the literature on deverbal nominalizations, much attention has been paid to the possible “cut-off” points for verbal structure within so-called ‘mixed categories’ (Bresnan 1997) or ‘mixed extended projections’ (Borsley and Kornfilt 1999). While research has shown that, across languages, the amount of verbal structure may vary in nominalizations that characterize events (e.g. Alexiadou 2001), nominalizations that characterize ordinary individuals remain less understood in this respect.  Strikingly, Baker and Vinokurova (2009) argue that, in contrast to event-characterizing nominalizations, the verbal component of “subject” nominalizations is rather limited and does not show variation; constructions that are superficially similar but which contain more structure are in fact relative clauses in disguise. This talk contributes to the empirical landscape of this nominalization type through the investigation of subject nominalizations in Washo (isolate, United States). I argue that the verbal cut-off point is quite high in this construction (AspP), but that, despite displaying some relative clause type properties, it is still a case of true nominalization. The view that emerges from Washo (and a comparison with related constructions across languages) is therefore one in which individual-characterizing nominalizations do show variation in verbal structure, and in which the distinction between nominalization and relativization is more of a cline than a dichotomy.

Title: Poka živoj, poka eŝe ne umer (‘While alive, while yet not died’). Some puzzles and thoughts about poka
Abstract: This talk will present some puzzles concerning the distribution of the Russian complementizer poka ‘while’, and some preliminary thoughts about what these puzzles might tell us about the meaning of the perfective and the imperfective aspect. The meaning and restrictions on the distribution of the complementizer/particle poka ‘while’ have been discussed in the literature quite extensively (Khalizeva 1969, Brown and Franks 1995, Abels 2005, Iordanskaya and Melchuk 2007, Paducheva 2014, 2015). It has several uses and is usually assumed to correspond to several different particles/complementizers (Iordanskaya and Melchuk 2007). I will focus on the use of poka as a complementizer that embeds a temporal adjunct clause. The discussion will be centered around the follwing three puzzling facts.

First, it seems that in an “out of the blue” context the clause under poka must be imperfective and may not be perfective:

(1) a. Poka Marina šla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina walk.IMP.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘While Marina was walking home, Osya was cooking dinner.’
b. #Poka Marina prišla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina come.PFV.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘While Maria came home, Osya was cooking dinner.’

Second, if the clause under poka contains negation, both aspects are fine (2). Furthermore, at least the sentence in (2b) entails that the event of the negated poka-clause took place in the actual world (Marina came home).

(2) a. Poka Marina ne šla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina NEG walk.IMP.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘While Marina was not walking home, Osya was cooking dinner.’
b. Poka Marina ne prišla domoj, Osja gotovil obed.
while Marina NEG come.PFV.PST.F.SG home, Osya cook.IMP.PST.M.SG dinner
‘Until Marina came home, Osya was cooking dinner.’
Lit.: ‘While Maria didn’t come home, Osya was cooking dinner.’

Third, the clause under poka could be perfective even without negation, but only if the verb in the poka-clause is an accomplishment and the main clause is also perfective:

(3) Poka Osja obegal vse magaziny v poiskax instrumentov, Marina otremontirovala plitu bez nix.
While Osya run.through.PFV.PST.M.SG all stores in search tools, Marina fix.PFV.PST.F.SG stove without them
‘While Osya ran through all the stores in search of the tools, Marina fixed the stove without them.’

In this talk I will follow an approach, according to which, poka only has one meaning throughout (1-3) and negation in its context is not “expletive”, but has its standard interpretation (Abels 2005, Tatevosov 2016, Tiskin 2017, 2018). I will discuss whether the facts in (1-3) could be derived from an assumption that poka forms a predicate over maximal time intervals (similar to a definite article with a maximality presupposition).

Speaker: Vincent Rouillard (MIT)
Title: Temporal in-Adverbials: A Study of Polarity Chameleons
Date: Thursday, 11/04
Time: 12:30 — 1:50pm
Location: 32-D461

Temporal in-adverbials include expressions like “in three days”, which can occupy at least two syntactic positions. Surprisingly, where such expressions occur in the syntax determines whether or not these are negative polarity items (NPIs). These expressions can modify a VP, restricting the set of events in its extensions to those of a duration specified by the adverbial. As shown in (1) and (2), in-adverbials show no polarity sensitivity in these configurations.

(1) The workers built the house in three days.
(2) The workers didn’t build the house in three days, (they built it in two).

Another available syntactic position for in-adverbials has them modifying the perfect. In such configurations, in-adverbials seem to measure the duration of the Perfect Time Span, an interval introduced by the perfect (Iatridou et al. 2002). What (4) states is that at least three days have passed since the workers last slept. As shown by the contrast between (3) and (4), in-adverbials behave like NPIs in these environments.

(3) *The workers have slept in three days.
(4) The workers haven’t slept in three days.

Where in-adverbials display polarity sensitivity can be captured if we make two assumptions. The first is that these expressions have alternatives and obligatorily fall under the scope of an exhaustification operator (Chierchia 2013). The second is that whenever a contradiction is guaranteed to be derived from the logical material in an utterance, this results in ungrammaticality (Gajewski 2009). I show that the only syntactic configuration among (1-4) where in-adverbials are predicated to be bad is when they modify the perfect in upward-entailing environments. This is because only there does exhaustification always lead to a contradiction. In-adverbials therefore represent a strong argument in favor of a general theory of NPIs, where the grammaticality of these expressions is dependent on the logical relations that exist between a sentence that includes NPIs and the sentence’s alternatives.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, November 2nd, 2-5pm ET, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings.  NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please email degraff@MIT.EDU so that we can work out adequate arrangements.

This Tuesday, November 2nd, we’re welcoming two guests: Carol Rose Little on “doing linguistic work with and in Ch’ol” and William Scott on “standardization of minoritized languages”.

From definiteness to poetry: doing linguistic work with and in Ch’ol

Carol Rose Little, University of Oklahoma

This talk discusses applications of theoretical linguistics to the creation of pedagogical materials, capacity building and poetry translation with the Ch’ol language. Ch’ol is a Mayan language spoken by a quarter of a million people in southern Mexico and diasporic communities across North America. Although the language is still being passed on to children, most who speak it are never taught to read or write in the language, contributing to its minoritized status. Recently, there has been a growing interest in learning to read and write in Ch’ol—a desire further amplified by the fact that a Ch’ol poet, Juana Peñate Montejo, won the 2020 Premio de Literaturas Indígenas de América, an award that has been called the Nobel prize for literature in indigenous languages. In the first part of this talk, I discuss how the use of two corpora in Ch’ol led to theoretically informed descriptions of definiteness and how these descriptions are informing pedagogical materials (see also Little et al., Forthcoming). I also discuss how project members have given talks on this research entirely in Ch’ol to audiences in Mexico and the United States. In the second part of the talk, I discuss how my linguistic training has helped and informed translations of Peñate Montejo’s poetry from Ch’ol to English, recently published in Latin American Literature Today. I provide examples of the decisions I and my co-translator made in terms of translating certain structures (focus, topic), a special class of affect predicates, and even cases where we left in a Ch’ol word with a footnote in English.

Standardizing minoritized languages and the reproduction thesis: Does language activism necessarily create sociolinguistic hierarchies like those it seeks to disrupt?

William Scott, University of Oxford

In order to end linguistic exclusion, advocates of minoritized language communities often seek social institutions to be more accommodating of these languages. For example, they may seek a greater place for the language in schools, court systems, and the formal economy. To facilitate their effort in the face of resistance, it is natural for them to select one variant to perform these official functions, as opposed to trying to simultaneously promote several spelling systems or disjoint sets of technical vocabulary, etc. 

Through this selection, they have created a new “standard,” and thus in some respects made all other variants (“dialects,” “regionalisms,” etc.) nonstandard. As a result, some scholars claim that “in advocating for their linguistic rights, minority language movements tend to reproduce the values of dominant language ideology and, inadvertently, the inequalities and hierarchies these values entail.” (Jacquelina Urla et al, 2017 p 43). This ‘reproduction thesis’ (ibid) potentially poses a serious problem to such movements, which seek to break down sociolinguistic hierarchies, not create new ones. 

We will elaborate on the ‘reproduction thesis,’ its potential causes and implications, then explore several critiques that demonstrate how language advocacy movements can and do resist reproducing the sort of social inequalities that they are working to end.

Speaker: Patrick Niedzielski (MIT)
Title: Distributed Morphology is more powerful than Finite-State Morphology, but not much more
Time: Wednesday, November 3rd, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: Computational research in morphology has focused on finite-state technologies as grammatical descriptions (Beesley & Karttunen 2003), placing the computational power of the morphology on par with that of the phonology. At the same time, the rise of Syntax-All-The-Way-Down theories of morphology such as Distributed Morphology seem to complicate this picture, by making the syntactic component handle the word-formation aspects of the morphology. As the syntax is mildly-context sensitive (Shieber 1985), this would seem to place the computational power of the morphology on par with the more powerful syntax rather than the weaker phonology. To investigate this, we introduce a simple extension of Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997, 2001), called Minimalist Grammars with Complex Words (MGCWs), which enable us to reason formally about the set of words that head movement, Distributed Morphology’s primary word-formation operation, can build. We find that the generative capacity of head movement is precisely the class of linear context-free languages, which is strictly larger than the set of languages produced by finite-state morphology, but strictly smaller than the class of mildly context-sensitive languages the syntax is otherwise able to produce. This suggests even if morphological structure is built by the syntax, its power is still quite weak.

Speaker: Jonah Katz (West Virginia University)
Title: A prosodic-phonetic approach to intervocalic lenition
Time: Friday, November 5th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract: In this talk, I argue that a subset of cross-linguistically common lenition processes, such as spirantization, intervocalic voicing, and flapping, take place outside the narrow phonology, in a component of grammar that governs the fine-grained temporal dynamics of speech sounds and their interaction with prosodic structure. I review evidence that these lenition patterns are different from other processes sometimes referred to as ‘lenition’; that they do not manipulate phonological features; that they lie on a much broader continuum of prosodically-driven phonetic variation; and that they are driven primarily by subphonemic adjustments to duration and the temporal separation between prosodic units. With data from Campidanese Sardinian, I illustrate a schematic approach to modeling lenition as a language-specific property of phonetic implementation, operating on prosodic structure and the output of narrow phonology.

Speaker: Boer Fu (MIT)
Title: When is a compound not a compound? A tone sandhi diagnostic
Time: Wednesday, October 27th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: Due to the one-to-one mapping between syllables and morphemes in Mandarin Chinese, disyllabic words are usually described as a compound of two morphemes. I present evidence from a phonological process, tone 3 sandhi, to show that not all disyllabic words are learned as compounds by the speaker. The tone 3 sandhi rule takes any disyllabic words with the UR /3-3/and turns it into [2-3] in SR. I argue that learners do not always infer a /3-3/ UR from an [2-3] SR, and that many words listed as /3-3/ in the dictionary are actually stored as /2-3/ by the speaker. In particular, it is words that are not transparently compositional (e.g. animal and plant names, abstract nouns, place names) that are prone to this type of “mis-learning”. I show that a reduplication diagnostic on [2-3] SR items can tell us whether a disyllabic word is a compound or not.

Speaker: Giovanni Roversi (MIT)
Title: Possessives in Äiwoo as relative clauses
Time: Tuesday, October 26th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: I will present preliminary work on possessive structures in Äiwoo (Oceanic; Solomon Islands). I will argue that a possessive construction like “my dogs” really underlyingly is a relative clause from which the theme is being extracted, i.e. “the dogs [such that] I have (them)”. I will present converging evidence from agreement morphology, voice morphology, and syntax and word order facts, and I will argue that a relative clause-based analysis is able to both account for and capture a few facts/generalizations that would otherwise remain unexplained.​

Speaker: Adam Albright (MIT) & Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: Discussion: Rasin and Katzir (2016, 2020)
Time: Monday, October 25th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: We will discuss two recent papers by Ezer Rasin and Roni Katzir. Rasin and Katzir (2016) On Evaluation Metrics in Optimality Theory (LI 47) describes an application of the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL) as an evaluation metric for OT. MDL is a framework that rewards analyses that can encode the analysis and data as compactly as possible. In the original formulation of OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), grammars are total rankings of a universally fixed set of constraints (CON), so do not differ in size in any interesting way; Rasin and Katzir propose to allow language-particular constraint sets, and show that MDL learning can favor grammars and lexicons that restrictively characterize the data. Rasin and Katzir (2020) A conditional learnability argument for constraints on underlying representations (J. Linguistics 56) examines more closely the way in which the MDL approach achieves a restrictive grammar. It argues that the evaluation metric favors analyses that include constraints on underlying representations, contrary to the usual OT assumption of Richness of the Base.

Speaker: David Pesetsky (MIT)
Title: Clause Size Revisited: Kinyalolo’s Constraint as the engine behind Exfoliation phenomena
Time: Thursday, October 28th, 12:30pm–1:50pm

Abstract: In earlier work (Pesetsky 2019/2021), I argued that clauses of reduced size are derived from full and finite clauses in the course of the syntactic derivation, thus reviving a proposal from the first decade of research in generative syntax (abandoned on grounds that no longer hold water in contemporary syntactic models). I presented a set of derivational opacity arguments in favor of the derivational view: properties of reduced clauses including infinitivals that are difficult to explain if reduced clauses are born that way — but are natural and easy to explain as by-products of an early derivational stage in which they are full and finite. The overall approach also unified phenomena normally not viewed as related: grouping under one explanation the special behavior of subjects in nonfinite clauses with the so-called complementizer-trace effect observed under Ā-movement from finite clauses. I will review these results and take them to be sound.

At the same time, however, the specific proposal that I advanced to explain how clauses become reduced and why is a much less settled matter. In that earlier work, I proposed a rule of “Exfoliation” that applies whenever a movement-inducing probe contacts a goal across a CP clause boundary, and that goal does not occupy the edge of its clause. Exfoliation peels away the clausal layers between the goal and the CP edge as needed, thus permitting extraction. This proposal, however, required at least three kinds of additional innovations to do its job: (1) an anti-locality restriction that prevents the goal from simply moving to the desired edge; and (2) a toP distinct from TP, so that infinitives may be said to differ from finite clauses in whether TP had been stripped away, as well as a similar novel head between T and C, to explain the behavior of complementizer-trace effects in languages like French and Bùlì; and (3) an “Exposure Condition” that suppresses the pronunciation of these novel heads when Exfoliation does not take place.

This talk tentatively explores an alternative. I will ask whether subjects might not be obligatorily extracted by successive-cyclic movement through Spec,CP after all (so there is no anti-locality restriction — just the opposite!) — and whether it could be the configuration created by hyper-local movement itself that triggers clause reduction. On this view it is not movement across the clause boundary itself, but the necessary precursor, local movement to spec,CP, that mandates reductions of elements such as C and T in the clausal spine. As it happens, just such a proposal has been advanced in a partly (but not totally) different set of contexts by Kinyalolo (1991), Carstens (2003, 2005), Oxford (2020) and others: in configurations where two adjacent heads agree with the same element, one or the other of these heads characteristically reduces (“Kinyalolo’s Constraint”). I will explore a potential new narrative for clause reduction based on this idea. This alternative appears to eliminate all three of the extra assumptions listed above that are necessary on the Exfoliation approach — with additional dividends for the unification of anti-Agreement phenomena (Ouhalla 1993, 2005; Baier 2018; and others) with the broader picture.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, October 19, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings.  NB: We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment in our seminar. If you need assistance for accommodations or accessibility in order to fully participate, please email degraff@MIT.EDU so that we can work out adequate arrangements.

This Tuesday, Jo-Anne Ferreira will lead the discussion on:

Resistance and Revitalisation: French Creole in Trinidad & Tobago and Venezuela

Venezuela and Trinidad share a maritime boundary in the Gulf of Paria, and are only seven miles or eleven kilometres apart at the nearest point. The Gulf area has been a point of linguistic exchange between the two areas since pre-Columbian times with speakers of Amerindian (especially Warao, to this day), European (Spanish, French, and English) and Caribbean Creole (French-lexified and English-lexified) languages going back and forth. Neither was ever colonised by France, yet both share a French Creole and speakers and advocates in both spaces have been attempting to overturn past wrongs against sociolinguistically oppressed populations.

In multilingual but French and French Creole-dominated Trinidad of the 19th century, speakers of French and by extension French Creole were the targets of a “full‐scale policy of ‘Anglicisation’” developed and implemented by the British government in the 1840s to govern and control Trinidad, seen as linguistically unruly (Brereton 1993: 37). French Creole was mostly ignored by Venezuela until the Chavez government’s attempts to document and protect minority languages and cultures (Indigenous, Creole, European), affording language rights to all.

This presentation will focus on French Creole in western Trinidad and eastern Venezuela (mostly Estado Sucre in which the Paria Peninsula is located, although French Creole is also spoken in El Callao in Estado Bolívar), on the acts of resistance that have led to the survival of this language in hostile spaces, and on recent and current efforts to save and revitalise the language in both places. I will discuss how an official English-only policy and an unofficial Spanish-only policy affected education in both places, and represent a virulent and malevolent attack on language rights and language justice of large sectors of two populations, with long-term effects, and how revitalisation acts complement and fortify ancient acts of resistance against such injustice, planned or unplanned.

Speaker: Luke Adamson (Harvard)
Title: The locus of gender interpretation: A Reply to Yatsushiro and Sauerland (2006)
Time: Wednesday, October 20th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: Yatsushiro and Sauerland (2006) observe an ambiguity in German for a set of nouns with the feminine suffix -in, e.g. die beliebste Politikerin, which can be interpreted (referring to a woman) as ‘the most popular female politician’ or ‘the most popular politician’. They suggest that the two interpretations should be derived through variable placement of an interpretable feature [FEM], with the latter interpretation being derived when the noun’s gender is licensed through agreement with a higher instance of [FEM]. This type of agreement-based approach would have significant implications for the valuation of a noun’s gender if correct. However, we provide four arguments against this approach by examining evidence from comparative deletion, nominal Right Node Raising, nP ellipsis, and intermediate scope, and we sketch an alternative semantic account of the ambiguity.

Speaker: Trevor Driscoll (MIT)
Title: Voicing as a Diagnostic of Foot Structure
Time: Monday, October 18th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: There is a substantial body of literature that indicates that fortition targets foot-initial position and lenition targets foot-medial and foot-final position (Pierrehumbert & Talkin 1992, Byrd 1994, Dilley et al. 1996, Cho & Keating 2001, Keating et al. 2003). Foot-medial consonants appear lenis due to the absence of fortition, or simply by virtue of being foot-medial. I argue that lenition processes can be used to determine whether a pair of syllables is parsed together in a foot much as fortition can be used to locate an initial foot boundary. This provides phonologists an additional tool to diagnose various aspects of foot structure that are not always readily identifiable by stress assignment.
Little is known about the metrical structure of Hidatsa, a Siouan language spoken in North Dakota. A recent phonetic study finds that words bear a single stress on a quantity-sensitive iamb at the left edge of the word (Metzler 2021).

(1)   Initial LL   meɁépi    ‘grinder’      Initial HL    máːtsu      ‘berry’
        Initial LH  tsaɡáːɡa   ‘bird’            Initial HH   kóːxaːti    ‘corn’

The remainder of the literature on Hidatsa makes no reference to foot structure whatsoever, and the stress data from Metzler are not particularly informative about feet beyond the initial iamb. It is necessary to turn to other cues to learn more about feet in Hidatsa.
Harris & Voegelin (1939) note that underlyingly plain stops and affricates become voiced intervocalically. Although all stops become voiced between vowels, the duration of voicing in intervocalically voiced stops is determined by a stop’s position in the foot; stops in foot-medial position are significantly more voiced than intervocalic stops in other prosodic environments:

(2)                        Voicing (ms)     Voicing (%)       Fully Voiced (FV/Total)
       Initial  LĹ    88 ms                 90%                     46/60
       Stray             72 ms                 69%                     18/53
       p-value        < .001                 < .001                  < .001

In addition to demonstrating that voicing interacts with feet, I further show that a complete sketch of the metrical structure of Hidatsa can be given using voicing, with only limited assistance from more conventional indicators of foot structure such as stress.
Cues to foot structure other than stress are of particular interest in iambic languages. Kager (1993) and Hayes (1995) have famously debated whether asymmetrical iambs (LH) are grammatical, but foot typologies with and without (LH) make identical predictions for iambic stress. Foot-medial voicing in Hidatsa is able to distinguish between the two. Hayes’ foot typology predicts that there should be no contrast in voicing between LL and LH because both are acceptable iambs. The robust voicing found in foot-medial stops is absent in LH pairs, which suggests that LH is not a foot.

(3)                      Voicing (ms)        Voicing (%)     Fully Voiced (FV/Total)
        LL              86 ms                     87%                  104/151
        LH             78 ms                      73%                  34/84
        p-value     .01                           .001                   < .001

These results provide evidence against the canonical iamb, in support of Kager’s typology of feet.

Speaker: Omer Preminger (UMD)
Title: Natural language without semiosis
Time: Friday, October 22th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: Zoom (but those on campus can gather in 32-155 to attend the talk together)

Abstract: A traditional view holds that natural language is fundamentally semiotic, in that individual syntactic  terminals are Saussurean “signs” (Saussure 1916; Hjelmslev 1943): they are the locus where individual  units of form are paired with individual units of meaning. 

It has always been clear, however, that more needs to be said to make such a view work. For one thing,  it is likely that no two performances of the “same form” are literally identical. But even if we were to  artificially abstract away from phonetic detail, there would still remain the issue of allomorphy, and,  perhaps most pressingly, of alternations in which the resulting forms are not phonotactically predictable  (e.g. the alternation of the Korean nominative marker between ‑i and ‑ka). On the meaning side, we must  contend with things like systematic polysemy (cf. the artifactual and abstract senses of book in a sentence  like This book is old and crumbling but will affect your life like no other). But it is quite widely assumed,  in practice if not in theory, that given the right models of allomorphy and polysemy, a semiotic view of  natural language can be salvaged. One can see this de facto assumption at work every time anyone asks, “What does the word (or morpheme) w in this language mean?” or “How do you say meaning m in this  language?” These are questions that only make sense within a fundamentally semiotic framework. In other  words, a common working assumption (if not a theoretical one) is that natural language is composed of  signs after all, it’s just that the “forms” and “meanings” that are paired by these signs are more abstract  than one might have initially thought—in a way that provides the necessary leeway to capture phenomena  like allomorphy (up to and including suppletion) as well as polysemy. 

In this talk, I present arguments that even this weaker semiotic characterization is incorrect. I argue  that, with the possible exception of single-morpheme utterances (e.g. Ugh!), a proper model of the  competence of a native speaker contains no pairings of form and meaning whatsoever. Instead, speaker  competence involves: (i) an inventory of syntactic atoms, which are fully abstract (associated with neither  form nor meaning); (ii) a list of mapping rules from sets of atoms to forms (“exponents”); (iii) a list of  mapping rules from sets of atoms to meanings (“lexical meanings”). Importantly, lists (ii) and (iii) are  disjoint objects; they have nothing to do with one another, except in the sense that the competence system  associates derived structures (consisting of items from list (i)) with items from list (ii) as well as with items  from list (iii). But the relation is necessarily indirect and mediated in this fashion. 

It is worth noting that lists (ii) and (iii), in this proposed model, bear some resemblance to the  “Vocabulary” and the “Encyclopedia” in Distributed Morphology (DM; see, e.g., Marantz 1997, and  references therein). But DM is still a fundamentally semiotic theory: the unit associated with form, albeit in  a context-sensitive way, is still the individual syntactic terminal; and the unit associated with meaning is  again the individual syntactic terminal (again, with potential allowances for context-sensitivity, in  particular when it comes to idiomaticity; see Harley 2014a,b). I present a collection of linguistic properties  (some language-specific, and some quite general) that only make sense in light of a more radically non semiotic model, one in which the relevant mappings are mappings from sets of syntactic terminals to units  of form (“exponents”), and from sets of syntactic terminals to listed meanings (“lexical meanings”). I also  show why a framework like Nanosyntax (Starke 2009, Caha 2019), which also maps sets of terminals to  forms and meanings, falls short of these explanatory goals, due to its failure to properly dissociate syntax form mappings from syntax-meaning mappings (cf. lists (ii) and (iii), above).

Title: An argument against V-stranding VP-ellipsis from only in polar questions
Time: Thursday, 10/21, 12:30pm-13:50pm
Location: 32-D461 (with MIT COVID Pass or Tim Ticket, plus contact tracing information)
Abstract: This paper contributes to the debate over the (non-)existence of verb-stranding VP-ellipsis (VSVPE), providing a new argument against its existence from the behavior of focus particles in questions. Polar questions in Hebrew (as in many other languages (Holmberg 2016)) can be answered affirmatively by echoing the verb in the question. Hebrew verb-echo answers (VEAs) are often analyzed as declarative sentences whose arguments have been deleted by a combination of VSVPE and subject pro-drop (Doron 1990). We show that VEAs are unacceptable as answers to polar questions with the focus particle only, and argue that this remains a mystery on a VSVPE account, as the presence of only is compatible with both V-to-T movement and VP-ellipsis (the ingredients required for VSVPE). We then show that the data can be straightforwardly accounted for if VEAs are derived via Argument Ellipsis (AE); i.e. elision of the verb’s object based on parallelism with a linguistic antecedent, without verb-movement (which has been proposed for Hebrew in Landau 2018).

Title: Spelling Spell Out out. Discourse anaphora and syntactic structure
Time: Thursday, 10/14, 12:30pm
Location: 32-D461 (with MIT COVID Pass or Tim Ticket, plus contact tracing information)

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss the question of whether pragmatic phenomena are sensitive to syntactic structure or surface linear order. I will try to argue that at least discourse anaphora is sensitive to syntactic structure. In particular, the “direction” of discourse anaphora is determined by the derivational history of a sentence. I will adopt the so-called Spell Out theory, according to which, all specifiers and all adjuncts are spelled out (assigned a fixed meaning and phonological representation) before the main clause is constructed. The main empirical claim of the talk is that because all specifiers and all adjuncts are spelled out before they are merged with the rest of the sentence, any specifier and any adjunct creates a local context for its sister. As the result, an indefinite inside a specifier or an adjunct creates an accessible antecedent for any pronoun that this specifier/adjunct c-commands. This is called the Island Condition. In addition, I will discuss some other consequences of the proposed view for other semantic and pragmatic phenomena, including a surprising fact that only adjuncts and specifiers seem to serve as restrictors to adnominal and adverbial quantifiers, presupposition projection and temporal iconicity.

Title: When clauses are Weak NPIs: polarity subjunctives in Russian
Time: Wednesday, 10/13, 1pm
Location: 32-D461 (with MIT COVID Pass or Tim Ticket, plus contact tracing information)

Abstract: In this talk I investigate a class of verbs in Russian which take polarity subjunctives (Rivero 1971, Stowell 1993, Brugger & D’Angelo 1995, Giannakidou 1995, Giannakidou & Quer 1997, Quer 1998, Siegel 2009, Quer 2009, Giannakidou 2011, a.o.)—embedded subjunctive clauses whose acceptability depends on the properties of the environment. For example, in (1) we see that Russian pomnit’ ‘remember’ cannot take subjunctive clauses (morphologically expressed by the particle by that attaches to the complementizer) in an upward-entailing environment. However, when the embedding verb occurs under negation, in the scope of tol’ko ’only’ or in a question, both indicative and subjunctive complements are possible, (2)-(4).

(1) Mitja     pomnit,         čto        /*čto-by         Anja    kurila.
      Mitya    remembers   COMP    /COMP-SUBJ    Anya    smoked

      ‘Mitya remembers that Anya smoked.’

(2) Mitja     ne      pomnit,         čto        /čto-by         Anja    kurila.
      Mitya    NEG   remembers  COMP    /COMP-SUBJ  Anya    smoked
      ‘Mitya doesn’t remember that Anya smoked.’

(3) Tol’ko    Mitja   pomnit,         čto        /čto-by         Anja    kurila.
      only       Mitya  remembers  COMP    /COMP-SUBJ  Anya    smoked
      ‘Only Mitya remembers that Anya smoked.’

(4) Mitja     pomnit,        čto        /čto-by         Anja    kurila?
      Mitya    remembers   COMP    /COMP-SUBJ  Anya    smoked
      ‘Does Mitya remember that Anya smoked?’

Furthermore, when both kinds of complements are available, speakers often perceive a contrast in factivity between them: e.g., (2) with the indicative complement tends to imply that Anya did in fact smoke, whereas (2) with the subjunctive clause never has such an inference. These data give rise to two questions:

1) How are polarity subjunctives licensed? What verbs can they occur with and why?
2) Why do we see a factivity alternation when both kinds of complements are possible?

Here is how I will try to address these questions:

• I propose that clauses can be existential quantifiers, and take scope (including exceptional scope). Subjunctive clauses are weak NPIs which have to be licensed in Strawson Entailment-Reversing environments. As other weak NPIs in Russian, they are not acceptable in non-monotone environments.
• In my previous work I argued for two distinct meanings for čto-clauses: they can either denote predicates of individuals with propositional content (Kratzer 2006, Moutlon 2015, Elliott 2017, a.o.), or predicates of exemplifying situations. I show that polarity subjunctives in Russian occur only with verbs that can take CPs that denote predicates of exemplifying situations. I argue that this restriction arises because the semantics of CPs that denote predicates of contentful individuals makes the environment non-monotone and thus prevents subjunctive from being licensed.
• As for the factivity alternation, I argue that while sentences with subjunctive complements never have factive inferences, sentences with indicative clauses can also receive non-factive readings under certain circumstances. On my account, factive inferences are not presuppositions, but are entailments that arise when indicative clauses that are predicates of exemplifying situations take wide scope. The fact that subjunctives cannot take wide scope prevents them from getting factive inferences.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, October 5, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights” (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96). Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for information about Zoom link and readings.

Nicholas Natchoo will lead the discussion on:

“A language that binds/a language that divides: The Kreol Paradox in Mauritius”

Located in the South-West Indian Ocean region, the Republic of Mauritius is a multi-island nation state best known for its sandy beaches, economic success, political stability, and multiculturalism. Long uninhabited and without an indigenous population, the island was turned by the French into a plantation colony in the early 18th century. A Creole language (known locally as Kreol) emerged in the crucible of the slave plantation context, from the contact between enslaved Africans and Malagasy peoples, white settlers, and free people of color. The arrival of indentured laborers from South Asia (and to a lesser extent East Asia), following the British conquest in 1810 and the abolition of slavery in 1835, further added to the diversity of the island both culturally and linguistically. After the country obtained independence in 1968, and despite some violent ethnic clashes, this so-called “overcrowded barracoon” defied the odds to become an exemplar of multicultural peace. Many attribute this harmony to the Kreol language, which is viewed as the glue that binds the extremely diverse population together.

However, Mauritians have long held a complicated and ambivalent rapport with the Kreol language. A case in point, the introduction of Kreol Morisien (Mauritian Kreol) as an optional “ancestral” language in schools in 2012 has generated strong debates which go beyond the legitimate presence and use of Creole languages in education. The incorporation of Kreol Morisien in the school curriculum raises important issues that touch on notions which are largely taboo in Mauritian society, especially as they relate to questions of slavery and reparation. Indeed, the State’s decision to finally introduce the language as a formal school subject essentially resulted from a political maneuver which aimed at restoring a balance between the various constituents of the population within a multicultural curriculum. The latter seeks to represent all communities, including the mixed descendants of enslaved peoples (locally known as “Creoles”) who have historically been “abjected” in the social structure of Mauritius. The modality of Kreol’s introduction in the curriculum is perceived by some as an “ethnicization” of the national lingua franca and is considered as fundamentally incompatible with a conception of Mauritianness that is underpinned by ideas of postracialism. Furthermore, the introduction of Kreol in schools sheds light on a malaise relating to the status of the other islands comprising the Republic of Mauritius, such as the island of Rodrigues where the teaching of Kreol “Morisien” was seen as a threat to the linguistic and contextual specificities of the island.

In this week’s seminar we will discuss the complex and multidimensional realities attached to Kreol in the Republic of Mauritius. Rather than trying to disentangle and neutralize the paradoxes that characterize the Mauritian context, we shall consider those from a different perspective whereby one can actually embrace and work along this paradoxical situation.

Nicholas Natchoo is a lecturer in the Mauritian Kreol Unit at the Mauritius Institute of Education. He joined this institution on a permanent basis in 2011 when Kreol Morisien was about to be introduced in schools and has been involved with the training of Kreol language teachers, curriculum development projects and textbook writing. He recently obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas with a dissertation titled “A Creolizing Curriculum: Multicultural Education, Ethnopolitics, and Teaching Kreol Morisien.” Nicholas is currently responsible for the curriculum, syllabus and textbooks for the teaching of Kreol Morisien in upper secondary level.

Speaker: Stan Zompì (MIT)
Title: A principled exception to the Müller-Takano Generalization
Time: Tuesday, October 12th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461 (with MIT COVID Pass or Tim Ticket, plus contact tracing information)

Abstract: According to the Müller-Takano Generalization (Müller 1993; Takano 1994), a remnant that contains a trace resulting from movement of a given type cannot itself undergo movement of the same type. In this talk, I argue that Richards’ (2004) data from Bulgarian “Russian-doll” wh-questions constitute a principled exception to the generalization under a version of Kitahara’s (1994) minimality-based approach to it.

Speaker: Emily Clem (UCSD)
Title: Switch-reference in Amahuaca: Syntactic and semantic implications
Time: Friday, October 15th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Location: Zoom (but those on campus can gather in 32-155 to attend the talk together)

Abstract: In this talk, I explore switch-reference constructions in Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru). I argue that the high attachment site of adjunct switch-reference clauses has interesting consequences for modeling both the syntax and semantics of these constructions. In terms of syntax, the challenge that arises is how to model a dependency between a head in the switch-reference clause and a matrix pivot argument in the absence of c-command. On the semantic front, I demonstrate that adjunct switch-reference clauses are used to form propositional attitude reports. The fact that attitude reports involve adjunction rather than complementation raises issues for analyses that assume that attitude verbs compose with complements that denote propositions. I propose an analysis that is able to overcome these challenges by leveraging the predictions of existing models and I discuss the theoretical implications.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week, Tuesday, October 5, 2-5pm EST, on “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education & Human Rights”  (MIT Linguistics, Graduate Seminar, 24.S96).   

Penda Choppy, Justin Zelime and Aneesa Vel (University of Seychelles) will help lead the discussion on ”Seychelles Language Policy and Levelling the Field”:

Seychelles is a very small country, and perhaps by virtue of its smallness, it has been able to educate its people to the highest level and across the board. This has earned the archipelago one of the highest ratings for education and literacy in Africa. However, this was not always the case. The success of Seychelles’ education system is based on a series of reforms which were introduced by the leftist government that took power in 1977. These included education and language reforms which were part of the new government’s attempts to “level the field” and bring more equity to education. The target was the eradication of poverty and the social improvement of the Seychellois nation. Prior to the language and other educational reforms (which included the valorization of Kreol, the mother tongue, and its introduction in the education system), the failure rate in the country’s schools was alarming and the official remedial cases reportedly stood at 30%.  Only a small amount of students were successfully completing their studies, and these students came from a very small percentage of the population who were socially and financially privileged. This meant that this small percentage of the population were able to maintain control of the country’s resources. The education reforms of the early 1980s aimed at rectifying this inequality, setting the scene for Seychelles to become the highly educated and modern society it is today. However, bearing in mind that Seychelles is also subject to the postcolonial narratives and syndromes that affect the Global South, we need to ask: Can Seychelles’ success story still be rated as such today?

This seminar will discuss how Seychelles’ language and education policies targeted social justice and how effective it has been over time.

1.     Background on the Seychelles socio-linguistic and historical landscape

2.     The history of the Creole movement in Seychelles and its bearing on issues of social justice

·       Firsthand experience: language learning in Seychelles

·       Firsthand experience: Kreyol in the school programme

3.     The way forward and what linguists can contribute to progress for the future

(Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for Zoom link.)

Speaker: Dan Milway
Title: Parallel Derivation: Adjunction and Coordination
Time: Friday, October 1st, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract: I argue that apparently singular expressions containing adjuncts or coordinate structures consist, in reality, of multiple independent syntactic objects, but that generative syntactic theory has consistently ruled out such an analysis by tacitly assuming that all derivations must be serial. I develop a theory of MERGE-based syntax (Chomsky 2020) which allows for semi-independent derivations to occur in parallel, and show that this theory yields solutions to or insights into various puzzles associated with adjuncts. I then apply this theory to coordination structures and discuss its implications for semantic theory with particular emphasis what I refer to as “reference to computation”.

You are invited to participate in our discussion this week on “Linguistics and Social Justice” with Darnelle Champagne and Wynnie Lamour on ”The Right to Read and Write: Language Activism in a Diasporic Haitian Creole Space.”  Darnelle and Wynnie will share their work promoting Haitian Creole as a heritage language via the Haitian Creole Language Institute in New York  and Jaden Ti Moun.  Please contact Michel <degraff@mit.edu> for Zoom link.

This week we only got through about half of the deck, so we’ll pick this up for a third and (likely) last meeting next week:

When: Wednesday 9/29, 2-3:30pm EST
Where: https://mit.zoom.us/my/hkotek
Who: students, visitors, and faculty members who are curious about tech internships/jobs
What: resumes (cnt’d), interviews

Feel free to attend even if you didn’t attend previous sessions.

Speaker: Fulang Chen (MIT) & Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: Phonotactics of gender in Mandarin given names: patterns and constraints
Time: Monday, September 20th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: Research on English given names has discovered phonotactic patterns that correlate with gender (Slater & Feinman, 1985; Cutler et al., 1990; Wright et al., 2005; Sidhu & Pexman 2015; a.o.): female names are more likely to have a higher ratio of open syllables and contain more high front vowels and sonorants, while male names tend to contain more back vowels and obstruents. Recent studies suggest that some of these patterns are cross-linguistic (e.g., Sullivan 2018; Wong & Kang 2019; a.o.), conforming to the Frequency Code Hypothesis (Ohala 1984, 1994; a.o.), which states that higher acoustic frequency signifies smallness, and lower acoustic frequency largeness. Hence, high, front, unrounded vowels, which have higher F2 (or F2-F1 difference), signify smallness and in turn are favored in female names; low, back, rounded vowels, which have lower F2 (or F2-F1 difference), and grave (i.e., labial and velar places) consonants, which also have lower F2, signify largeness and in turn are favored in male names.

In this paper, we first investigate the phonotactic patterns that correlate with gender in given names for Mandarin Chinese (MC), a language phonotactically quite different from English; then we compare the phonotactic grammars of MC male and female given names using maximum-entropy phonotactic learning models (Hayes & Wilson 2008).

We find that many of the predictors for gender trend in the same direction as reported in corpus studies of English given names and conform to the Frequency Code; specifically, in MC, female names tend to have a higher proportion of open syllables and high vowels, and male names a higher proportion of back vowels, round vowels, obstruent onsets, and non-coronal (grave) onsets.

We also probed the interaction of the predictors for gender more closely and find that certain low acoustic frequency sounds that signify largeness are penalized for female names, while higher acoustic frequency sounds that signify smallness are not marked in the grammar for male names.

Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Fall 2021! After our summer hiatus, Whamit! is back to regular weekly editions during the semester.

Whamit! is the MIT Linguistics newsletter, published every Monday (Tuesday if Monday is a holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Ruoan Wang, and Peter Grishin. 

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