Norvin Richards spent April 5-6 at the Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST), as did recent alumna Michelle Yuan. The theme of this year’s meeting was “counterexamples”. Norvin reports the following feeling: “[I’m] trying not too think too hard about the fact that, when the organizers tried to think of people whose theories have lots of counterexamples, they apparently thought of [me] right away.”
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018), who received her PhD from our department last summer, has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at San Diego. Also joining UCSD faculty is Emily Clem, who is currently finishing at Berkeley and was a visitor at MIT in Spring 2018. Congratulations to both!
Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz and Itai Bassi (MIT) Title: Relativized Anaphor Agreement Effect: Evidence from Koryak Time: Tuesday, 4/2, 1-2pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk, we discuss the Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE), an observation first proposed in Rizzi (1990) to the effect that anaphors do not trigger phi-agreement. We report on novel data from Koryak, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language of the Russian Far East, which we claim constitutes a particularly revealing partial counterexample to previous formulations of the AAE. Specifically, we show that the Koryak anaphor uvik triggers obligatory number agreement consistent with its binder, but never triggers person agreement consistent with it. We therefore propose that the AAE is limited to preventing anaphors from triggering covarying person agreement, but that it does not block number (or gender) agreement. Our account of this combines arguments from recent work by Omer Preminger on the AAE, as well converging evidence about the syntax of phi-features from Moskal (2015), Harbour (2016), and van Urk (2018). Following Preminger (2019), we take the AAE to be the result of the way that anaphors are structured: they contain a head Anaph that blocks agreement into its complement. However, to account for the Koryak facts (as well as other partial counterexamples to the AAE discussed in Murugesan (2018)), we deviate from Preminger’s proposal by allowing languages to vary with respect to where Anaph merges along the pronominal spine. In languages like Koryak, where anaphors trigger number agreement, Anaph merges below Num, whereas in languages like Albanian, where they trigger only 3SG agreement (Woolford 1999, Run Chen p.c.), it merges above Num. Following Moskal (2015) et. seq., we take person to be the most embedded phi-feature, forcing agreement with it to be blocked by Anaph regardless of how low it merges. Finally, we propose a compositional semantics for the Anaph head that explains how its presence gives rise to co-reference between the two arguments of the relevant predicate.
We’re very happy to announce that Simon Charlow will be here this week, and will teach a mini-course Wednesday and Thursday, April 3rd and April 4th. Details are below.
Speaker: Simon Charlow (Rutgers) Title: Extensible semantics Time: Wednesday (4/3), 1:00-2:30pm and Thursday (4/4), 3:30-5:00pm Place: 32-D461 on Wednesday, 37-212 on Thursday
Abstract: Since the basics were outlined by Frege, semantic theory has been enriched in various ways. Pronouns and alternative-invoking expressions motivated a souped-up interpretation function, one capable of composing assignment-sensitive and multifarious meanings (and eventually meanings that were both). Various kinds of ‘dynamic’ phenomena resulted in lexical enrichments that replaced propositions with context-change potentials. Quantification and scope gave us the Y-model. Type-shifting has appeared from time to time. This mini-course will show how to recast all these enrichments in a uniform way with basic, well-studied tools used by programmers to introduce so-called ‘side-effects’ into functional programs: (applicative) functors and monads. We’ll see concrete examples of how to abstract these tools out of existing semantic theories, and compositionally combine them to build new super-tools (in more ways than one). We’ll study how this flexible, modular approach to composition solves various empirical problems and dissolves some recalcitrant technical issues. And we’ll apply these techniques to the study of pronouns (with or without assignments), exceptionally scoping indefinites, cross-sentential and donkey anaphora, quantification and scope (with and without events), and ‘higher-order’ analogs of these phenomena (e.g., functional pronouns and higher-order questions).
Speaker: Daniel Hole (Universität Stuttgart) Title: Arguments for a universal distributed syntax of evaluation, scalarity and basic focus quantification with ‘only’ Time: Thursday, 4/4, 12:30-1:50pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk, I review the evidence that has been adduced for a multi-constituent syntax of focus particle constructions. Traditionally, those components that I model as independent morphemes with their own scope-taking properties have been analyzed as submorphemic components of focus particles. I use ‘only’ words to make this point. This work is based on Hole (2013, 2015, 2017), and it makes use of data from Chinese, Vietnamese, German and Dutch. However, many arguments carry over to English. Time allowing, I will also present novel data from the interaction of German nur with modals and the German NPI modal brauchen ‘need (+NPI)’.
This approach to focus particles stands in stark contrast to Büring & Hartmann (2001) or Coppock & Beaver (2013).
Speaker: Candace Ross (MIT CSAIL) Title: Grounding Language Acquisition by Training Semantic Parsers using Captioned Videos Time: Thursday, 4/4, 5-6pm Location: 46-5165
Abstract: We develop a semantic parser that is trained in a grounded setting using pairs of videos captioned with sentences. This setting is both data-efficient, requiring little annotation, and similar to the experience of children where they observe their environment and listen to speakers. The semantic parser recovers the meaning of English sentences despite not having access to any annotated sentences. It does so despite the ambiguity inherent in vision where a sentence may refer to any combination of objects, object properties, relations or actions taken by any agent in a video. For this task, we collected a new dataset for grounded language acquisition. Learning a grounded semantic parser — turning sentences into logical forms using captioned videos — can significantly expand the range of data that parsers can be trained on, lower the effort of training a semantic parser, and ultimately lead to a better understanding of child language acquisition.
Speaker: Simon Charlow (Rutgers) Title: Local contexts in ellipsis Time: Friday, April 5th, 4pm-5:30pm Location: 32-155
Abstract: This talk advocates a specific semantic implementation of discourse congruence (Rooth 1992, Schwarzschild 1999), which plays a central role in the licensing of ‘anaphoric’ reduction (i.e., ellipsis and deaccenting). I argue that congruence is checked compositionally, and that satisfaction of congruence is determined extensionally — that is, in a local context. I show how this leads to significant simplifications in the theory of reduction licensing, allowing us to dispense with otherwise necessary prohibitions on Meaningless Coindexing (Sag 1976, Heim 1997) and Redundancy within an assignment (cf. Schlenker 2005), and to strengthen the relationship between an elided phrase and its antecedent to one of pure identity. I consider several consequences of my proposal for the formulation of congruence operators, arguing that it compels us to take their anaphoric character seriously, while allowing for ex post facto (i.e., post-suppositional) linking of congruence operators to their ‘antecedents’. And I explore some consequences of these moves for restrictions on antecedent-contained deletion (Kennedy 1994) and the puzzling phenomenon of focused bound pronouns (Sauerland 1998).
The 15th workshop on Altaic formal linguistics will take place at Moscow State University on September 26th to 28th. The deadline for abstract submissions is April 14th 2019.
From
April 2 to April 5, Arts at MIT,
in collaboration with Prof. Michel DeGraff at MIT Linguistics and the MIT-Haiti Initiative, and Prof. Nick Montfort in Comparative Media Studies, is hosting the visit from
Haiti of
rapper, poet and singer BIC Tizon Dife (Roosevelt Saillant) for a celebration of music, literature, linguistics, dance and community. Joining BIC at his concert on Friday, April 5, 8pm, at MIT, is the Boston-based dance company Jean Appolon Expressions (JAE).
JAE will also offer a dance workshop on Friday, April 5, 1-3pm. BIC will help lead a digital story-telling workshop on Tuesday, April 2nd, 5-7pm, and he will perform at Brothers’ Kafe Kreyòl in Everett on Wednesday, April 3rd, 8pm. All events are free of charge
and open to the MIT and greater Boston community. For more
information on BIC’s schedule and related events, please visit
https://arts.mit.edu/artists/bic/#schedule.
Speaker: Itai Bassi (MIT) Title: Principle C effects with plural antecedents (joint work with Paul Marty) Time: Monday, March 18th, 1-2 pm Abstract:In the literature on Principle C, it has been claimed on the basis of examples like (1) that an R-expression cannot overlap in reference with a c-commanding plural antecedent (a.o., Lasnik 1989, Schlenker 2003). Yet we add to (1) the datapoint in (2), and observe that this claim only holds on a distributive interpretation of the relevant antecedent: as (2) shows, things get better on a collective interpretation (cf. Reinhart and Reuland for a parallel observation for principle B configurations).
(1) They think that Oscar should be the band leader (* if Oscar is part of the reference of “they”) (2) They (jointly) decided that Oscar will be the band leader (ok if Oscar is part of the reference of “they”)
Our idea to understand this contrast is this: the distributive LF, but not the collective one, has an embedded constituent of the form ‘x thinks that Oscar…’, where ‘x’ is an atomic variable quantified over by a distributive operator. When `x’ takes Oscar as one of its values, a (classical) Principle C violation obtains. We propose to derive these “embedded principle C” effects by extending Reinhart’s competition theory of principle C (aka ‘Rule I’) to make it operative at embedded levels. We then argue that on this refinement, Rule I can be eliminated as a primitive of the grammar and be subsumed by the independently motivated principle, Maximize Presupposition!, which has also been argued to regulate competition between LF representations at embedded levels (Singh, 2011).
Speakers: Colin Davis (MIT) Title: Mismatched suppletion in Azeri as morphology/phonology competition Time: Monday, March 18th, 5-6:30pm Location: 32-D831
In this paper, I examine a puzzle about suppletion in the northern dialect of Azeri/Azerbaijani (Turkic). I focus on suppletion of the perfect (PRF) / evidential (EVID) morpheme, whose default form is -miʃ. My fieldwork work has found, in agreement with Oztopcu (2003), that this morpheme has an allomorph -Ib that is typically only used with 2nd and 3rd person subjects: (1) a. o gatʃ-mɨʃ/ɨb 1SG run-PRF-3SG ’He/she/it has run’
b. biz dʒal-miʃ/*ib-ij 1PL come-PRF-1PL ‘We have come’
However, I have found that in contexts where multiple adjacent instances of -miʃ would surface, one of those instances is realized as -Ib, even when the subject is 1st person:
(2) a. biz gatʃ-ɨb-mɨʃ-1ɣ 1PL run-PRF-EVID-1PL ’Apparently we had run’
b. man je-maj je-ib-miʃ-am 1SG eat-NMLZ eat-EVID-PRF-1SG ‘Apparently I ate food’
Since -Ib suppletion typically requires a 2nd/3rd person subject, we would have expected the 1st person subjects in (2) to make -Ib unavailable. Why did -Ib suppletion in (2) succeed? I argue that this over-application of suppletion in (2) occurs due to a phonological constraint against forms with adjacent identical morphemes (Menn & MacWhinney 1984, Plag 1998, Yip 1998, a.o.). This phonologically-forced morphological mismatch provides new evidence that morpheme insertion interacts and competes with phonological constraints (Wolf 2008, 2009, Pertsova 2015).
Speaker: Cater Chen Title: Split Partitivity in Mandarin Time: Tuesday, March 19, 1pm-2pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In Mandarin (Chinese), a numeral classifier (henceforth NCL) fragment can be interpreted as a partitive expression relative to a definite DP antecedent in various constructions, a phenomenon I refer to as split partitivity (henceforth SP). In the first part of this talk, I will argue for a stranding approach to SP. That is, the NCL fragment is analyzed as a stranded element in the course of movement of its nominal associate, therefore, it can be used to identify a movement trace of its nominal associate.
In Mandarin (Chinese), a numeral classifier (henceforth NCL) fragment can be interpreted as a partitive expression relative to a definite DP antecedent in various constructions, a phenomenon I refer to as split partitivity (henceforth SP). In the first part of this talk, I will argue for a stranding approach to SP. That is, the NCL fragment is analyzed as a stranded element in the course of movement of its nominal associate, therefore, it can be used to identify a movement trace of its nominal associate.
(1) NCL fragment identifies A-traces
a. [Na-liu-ge xuesheng]i [WollPhuiyou [vP[NCLPsan-ge ti]lianxi Zhangsan]].
Dem-6-CL student will exist 3-CL contact Zhangsan
Lit. ‘Those six students will three (of them) contact Zhangsan.’
b. Na-liu-ge xuesheng [VP lai-le san-ge].
Dem-6-CL student come-Perf 3-CL
‘Three of those six students came.’
Lit. ‘Those six students came three (of them).’
(2) NCL fragment identifies Ā-traces
a. [Na-liu-ge xuesheng]i(a), you [NCLPsan-ge ti] renshi Zhangsan.
Dem-6-CL student Top exist 3-CL know Zhangsan
‘Those six students, three (of them) know Zhangsan.’
b. [Na-liu-ge xuesheng]i(a), Zhangsan renshi [NCLPsan-ge ti].
Dem-6-CL student Top Zhangsan know 3-CL
‘Those six students, Zhangsan knows three (of them).’
In the second part of this talk, I will show that, having justified a stranding approach to SP, we can use SP as a tool to study various constructions in Mandarin that involve argument-gap dependencies. In particular, passive constructions in Mandarin have been analyzed as involving raising, control or null operator movement and predication. I propose that SP can shed light on the right analysis, because different patterns of SP can diagnose different types of argument-gap dependencies.
Speaker: Adam Albright (MIT), joint work with Vighnesh Subramaniam (Millard North High School, Omaha NE) Title: Modeling typological frequency with a grammatical learner Time: Wednesday (3/20), 5:00pm-6:30pm Location: 32-D831
Speaker: Philip Shushurin (NYU) Title: A uniform account of possessives and applicatives: evidence from external possession in Russian Time: Thursday, 3/21, 12:30-1:50pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: Much of the work on external, or raised, possessors in Russian (Paykin and van Peteghem (2003), Grashchenkov and Markman (2009)), as well as in other languages with the similar phenomenon (Landau (1999), Deal (2016)), has recognized the dual nature of such arguments: on one hand, they are interpreted as possessors, on the other hand, they show many similarities with other types of arguments, most frequently, applicatives and topics. I consider two external possession constructions in Russian and propose that they are merged in a DP-external functional projection (ApplP) and either are licensed in situ or move to a topic position for licensing. I propose that goals of ditransitives (low applicatives), external possessors and DP-internal possessors are introduced by the same functional head.
Speakers: Anya Lunden (William & Mary) Title: Real and accidental glides Time: Friday, March 22nd, 3:30pm-5pm Location: 32-141
Abstract:
Articulating a vowel sequence like [i.a] results in formant movements that are identical to those resulting from the articulation of a [j]. This raises questions about the status of phonological rules of glide insertion, which are often stated as the hiatus resolution strategy for such configurations. The talk explores the question of whether there are, or can be, “real” glides in such cases, and whether the “accidental” glides have any status perceptually. Evidence from production and perception studies as well as cross-linguistic behavior is presented and used to motivate an analysis where an accidental fact about articulation has consequences for the phonology.
Speaker: Paola Merlo (University of Geneva) Title: Quantitative Computational Syntax: some case studies Time: Thursday, 3/21, 5-6pm Location: 46-5165 Abstract: In the computational study of intelligent behaviour, the domain of language is distinguished by the complexity of the representations and the sophistication of the domain theory that is available. It also has a large amount of observational data available for many languages. The main scientific challenge for computational approaches to language is the creation of theories and methods that fruitfully combine large-scale, corpus-based approaches with the linguistic depth of more theoretical methods. I report here on some recent and current work on word order universals and argument structure that exemplifies the quantitative computational syntax approach. First, we demonstrate that typological frequencies of noun phrase orderings, universal 20, are systematically correlated to abstract syntactic principles at work in structure building and movement. Then, we investigate higher level structural principles of efficiency and complexity. In a large-scale, computational study, we confirm a trend towards minimization of the distance between words, in time and across languages. In the third case study, much like the comparative method in linguistics, cross-lingual corpus investigations take advantage of any corresponding annotation or linguistic knowledge across languages. We show that corpus data and typological data involving the causative alternation exhibit interesting correlations explained by the notion of spontaneity of an event. Finally, time permitting, I will discuss current work investigating on whether the notion of similarity in the intervention theory of locality is related to current notions of similarity in word embedding space.
Bio: Paola Merlo is faculty in the linguistics department of the University of Geneva. She is the head of the interdisciplinary research group Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics (CLCL). The group is concerned with interdisciplinary research combining linguistic modelling with machine learning techniques. The scope of her current research includes fundamental issues in the statistical nature of language, empirical evaluations of linguistic proposal about the lexical semantics of verbs and language universals of word order and statistical models of syntactic and semantic parsing. Prof. Merlo has been the editor of the journal of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, and has been member of the executive committee of the EACL and of the ACL. Prof. Merlo holds a doctorate in Computational Linguistics from the University of Maryland, USA. She has been associate research fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been visiting scholar at Rutgers, Edinburgh, and Stanford.
Title: How to find the rabbit in the big(ger) box: Reasoning about contextual parameters for gradable adjectives under embedding (joint work with Roger Levy (MIT BCS) and Elizabeth Coppock (Boston University)) Speaker: Helena Aparicio (MIT BCS) Time: Friday, 22nd of March 2-3pm Abstract:Haddock (1987) noticed that the definite description ‘the rabbit in the hat’ succeeds in referring even in the presence of multiple hats, so long as only one hat contains a rabbit. These complex definites suggest that uniqueness with respect to the NP hat is not required in such embedded contexts, raising the question of what the correct formulation of the uniqueness condition for definite determines is. Generally speaking, two types of solutions have been proposed to this puzzle. The first one postulates a complex semantic representation for definite determiners, where uniqueness can be checked at different points of the semantic representation for either sets of hats or sets of rabbit-containing hats (Bumford 2017). The second type of account proposes that definite descriptions can be evaluated against a sub-portion of the maximally available context (Evans 2005; Frazier 2008; Muhlstein 2015). This pragmatic mechanism ensures that reference resolution is successful, even when the maximal context would violate the uniqueness presupposition of the definite article.
The present work seeks to tease apart these two classes of theories by investigating the interpretive preferences for similarly embedded noun phrases containing a positive or comparative adjective (e.g., ‘the rabbit in the big/ger box’). Experimental results show that embedded positive adjectives exhibit a sensitivity to contextual manipulations that embedded comparatives lack. We derive this sensitivity using a probabilistic computational model of the contextual parameters guiding the interpretation of the embedded NP, and compare it to alternative models that vary in the lexical representations assumed for definite determiners. Our simulation results show that neither of the two proposals under consideration can independently account for all of the observed experimental results. We show that the model that best matches human data is one that combines both a complex uniqueness check (à la Bumford) with pragmatic context coordination.
Speakers: Suzana Fong (MIT) Title: Regular and athematic participles in Brazilian Portuguese Time: Monday, March 11th, 5-6:30 pm Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
In Brazilian Portuguese, the regular participial (PTC) form of the verb can be parsed as follows:
(1) com-i-d-as eat-TH-PTC-AGR(fem.pl) ‘eaten’ [where ‘TH’ is a theme vowel]
Besides a regular form (2a), some verbs also allow for an additional short form of the PTC (2b):
(2) a. Regular participle limp-a-d-as clean-TH-PTC-AGR(fem.pl) ‘cleaned’ b. Short/Athematic participle limp-as clean-AGR(fem.pl) ‘cleaned’
Short PTC’s like (2b) lack both the participial morpheme (-d in (1) and (2a)) and a theme vowel (-a in (2a)), hence why they are referred to as athematic PTC’s.
In this presentation, I focus on the distribution of the PTC when both a regular and an athematic form is in principle available. In particular, we will look at the PTC form(s) that occur(s) in three constructions: verbal passives (3a), adjectival passives (3b), and absolute participles (3c). (3) a. Verbal passive: regular or athematic PTC allowed As gavetas foram limp-a-d-as / limp-as pelo João. the drawers were cleaned(REG) / cleaned(ATHEM) by.the João ‘The drawers were cleaned by João.’
b. Adjectival passive: only athematic PTC allowedAs gavetas estão/permanecem *limp-a-d-as / limp-as. the drawers are/remain *cleaned(REG) / cleaned(ATHEM) ‘The drawers are/remain clean.’ c.Absolute participles: only regular PTC allowed[ Limp-a-d-as / *Limp-as as gavetas ], o João pôde ir descansar. [ cleaned(REG) / *cleaned(ATHEM) the drawers ] the João could go rest ‘The drawers having been cleaned, João could go rest.’ I propose a tentative analysis where the athematic PTC (2b) arises as a consequence of a fusion rule that targets v and the root. Whether or not that rule can be applied will depend on the size of a given PTC construction, which in turn determines how much structure is Spelled-Out. Specifically:
In absolute participles like (3c), v and the root are Spelled-Out separately, bleeding the context of application of the proposed fusion rule. Only a regular PTC can then be realized.
In adjectival participles like (3b), v and the root are part of the same Spell-Out domain, which allows for fusion to apply. As a consequence, an athematic PTC can be used in this construction.
In verbal passives like (3a), two derivations are possible. In one of these derivations, v and the root are Spelled-Out separately, just as in absolute participles, hence why a regular PTC arises. In the other — equally convergent — derivation, v and the root are Spelled-Out together, just as in adjectival passives, hence why an athematic PTC arises.
Speakers: Frank Staniszewski (MIT) Title: Marty & Romoli (2019) Time: Wednesday, March 13th, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: I will present Marty & Romoli’s new paper “Presupposed Free Choice” (which expands on material discussed in Gajewski & Sharvit (2012) and Spector & Sudo (2017)). I will also explore possible connections with some of my work in progress on ‘until’ phrases, which I hypothesize should be treated as free choice items.
Speaker: Chris Tancredi (Keio University) Title: De dicto, de re and de qualitate unified Time: Thursday, 3/14, 12:30-1:50pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Past approaches to the semantics of belief statements have argued for a multiplicity of distinct interpretations, including de dicto, de re, de qualitate and de translato. The need
for ambiguity in attitude statements is clear from the potential truth of sentences like Ralph believes Ortcutt is a spy, but he doesn’t believe ORTCUTT is a spy. However, I argue that the only ambiguity specific to attitude statements is the de
translato/non-de translato distinction. In particular, I show how to reduce de dicto/de re/de qualitate interpretations
to a single form. The key to the reduction is to analyze the embedded
clause of an attitude statement as denoting a
proposition inferable from an underlying belief of the subject rather
than denoting the subject’s underlying belief itself. I show that the
semantics developed can account for attitudes toward necessary as well
as impossible propositions, and that it further
can account for the range of entailments felt to hold among multiple
attitude statements.
What is the role of
psycholinguistic evidence (specifically evidence from language
processing) in the study of language? What is the relation between
knowledge of language and use of language? We hope to explore these
questions through a discussion of an HPSG textbook chapter. HPSG
(Head-driven phrase structure grammar) is a different syntactic
framework from generative transformational grammar, and is
surface-oriented, constraint-based and strongly lexicalist. This
textbook
chapter argues that HPSG is more compatible than transformational
grammar with observed facts about language processing. For instance,
language processing is incremental and rapid (e.g. Tanenhaus et al. 1995
& 1996, Arnold et al. 2002). The order of presentation
of the words largely determines the order of the listener’s mental
operations in comprehending them. And lexical choices have a substantial
influence on processing (MacDonald et al. 1994). For these reasons,
such psycholinguistic evidence supports an HPSG
type of grammar, and poses difficulty to transformational grammar.
Speakers:Paula Fenger (University of Connecticut/Harvard University) Title: Words within words: The internal syntax of verbs Time: Monday, March 4th, 5-6:30 pm Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Superficially, languages differ in how grammatical categories like tense and aspect are expressed on the verb; e.g. in English, both [progressive] and [past] cannot be suffixes on the verb (*stay-ing-ed) and require a periphrastic realization (was stay-ing), whereas in Turkish both [progressive] and [past] appear as agglutinating suffixes on the verb (kal-ıy’or-dı, stay-prog-past). Moreover, a language like Turkish is not uniformly agglutinating and can have periphrastic constructions in other environments, which makes it seem like the existence of periphrasis is contextually defined within a language. In this talk I explore the idea that Turkish-type languages and English-type languages are underlyingly the same. By looking at stress assignment patterns and behavior under coordination, it is revealed that the agglutinative pattern is only superficial. That is, syntax-phonology mismatches in Turkish in fact reveal a domain inside the verb and this domain is similar to the domain found for the periphrastic construction in English. Specifically, the syntactic operation that creates words (main verbs and auxiliaries) is uniform in both types of languages, the differences between them arise only at PF. This approach does not treat notions like “agglutinating” and “periphrastic” as deep properties of grammar, but as superficial differences.
Abstract: The first part of this talk will focus on the derivation and interpretation of so-called ‘Comp-internal clauses’ in Bengali (Bhattacharya 2001). Clauses headed by the head-initial complementizer je normally appear obligatorily extraposed to the right of the (normally head-final) verb: (1) ami bollam [je Aparṇa deri korlo] I said C Aparna late did I said that Aparna was late. However, when an element appears in first position within the clause (henceforth the PJE, or pre-je-element), these clauses obligatorily appear to the left of the verb, in the normal object position: (2) ami [Aparna je deri korlo] bollam. I aparna C late did saidI said that Aparna was late. I will present previously unnoticed facts about the binding and scope behavior of Comp-internal clauses which suggest that the PJE occupies its own matrix specifier, despite the fact that it appears to move along with the rest of the clause. I will argue that this mismatch suggests that Comp-internal clauses involve clausal pied-piping driven by long scrambling of the PJE. In the second part of this talk, I will consider facts which suggest that clausal scrambling in other languages (Basque, Bavarian German, Kannada) may also be amenable to an analysis in which this movement is driven by a clause-internal element, and discuss how this supports previous arguments on the immobility of CPs (Koster 1978, Stowell 1981, and many others).
Speaker: Laura Kalin (Princeton University) Title: Morphological opacity in Turoyo (Neo-Aramaic): Support for cyclicity and separation Time: Friday, March 8th, 3:30-5 pm Location: 32-141 (please note, this is a different lecture hall than the room the colloquia are usually in)
Abstract: In this talk, I use complex verbs in the Neo-Aramaic language Turoyo (Jastrow 1993) as a window into theoretical issues at the syntax/morphology and morphology/phonology interfaces, including cyclicity, derivational timing, and constraints on allomorphy.
I will first show, using converging cross-modular data from allomorphy on the one hand and agreement restrictions on the other, that the suffixes to the verb base in Turoyo appear in the opposite linear order from what is expected given their underlying syntactic hierarchy: the innermost suffix is the syntactically highest, and the outermost is the lowest. (This is reminiscent of the findings of Speas 1991 and Rice 2000 for Athapaskan languages.)
Once I have motivated a basic structure for the verb word in Turoyo, I turn to a case of counterbleeding in the verbal complex. The past tense morpheme, *-wa*, has a variable linear position in the verbal complex, and interacts very differently with phonological processes as compared to morphological processes; more specifically, *-wa* is visible in its surface position to phonology, but is invisible in this position to allomorphy. I propose that *-wa* is an infix, and show how this analysis—coupled with a cyclic derivation that separates morphology from phonology—straightforwardly accounts for *-wa*’s puzzling behavior, along with the other morphological quirks of Turoyo verbs.
The analysis I put forward has several consequences for the architecture of the grammar, in particular, in arguing against incorporating allomorph choice and infixation into the phonology (contra, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1993, Kager 1996, Wolf 2008), and in supporting cyclic, serial, realizational models that both separate syntax from exponent choice, and separate exponent choice from phonology (along the lines of Paster 2006, Embick 2010, and Bye & Svenonius 2012).
We are happy to announce that Laura Kalin will be visiting the department this week and will teach two mini courses (details below). Laura has asked that attendees read section 4 of McCarthy & Prince 1993 Generalized alignment (with the rest being optional) and chapter 3 up until the end of section 3.2 of Yu 2007 A Natural History of Infixation (the rest being optional) in preparation for the course.
Speaker: Laura Kalin (Princeton University) Title: Theoretical approaches to infixation Time: Wednesday, 1:00-2:30 and Thursday, 12:30-2:00 Location: 32-D461
Abstract: This mini-course will discuss a number of different theoretical approaches to infixation, and bring data from a variety of languages to bear on these approaches. More specifically, we will differentiate approaches to infixation along the following two dimensions: (i) Is morphology (in particular, exponent choice/suppletive allomorphy) evaluated alongside phonology, or does morphology precede phonology? (ii) Does an infix linearly concatenate with the stem it combines with (i.e., as following or preceding the stem) before taking its surface (infixed) position inside the stem, or does an infix slot directly into its infixed position without a preliminary step of linear concatenation? Crossing these two dimensions gives us four logically-possible types of approaches to infixation, three of which are well-attested in the literature. On the one hand are accounts that take morphology to be simultaneous with phonology, all of which also lack a step of linear concatenation prior to infixation (e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1993, Hyman & Inkelas 1997, Wolf 2008, Samuels 2009), though these accounts do differ with respect to whether/how infixes are specified as (wanting to be) prefixes/suffixes. On the other hand are accounts that separate morphology from phonology; some such accounts take infixes to slot directly into their surface position (e.g., Yu 2007), while others include a step of linear concatenation prior to infixation (e.g., Bye & Svenonius 2012, Embick 2010). Using novel typological data that catalogues interactions between allomorphy and infixation, I will argue that only this last approach to infixation makes the right empirical predictions, and further, that this data supports a cyclic, serial, realizational morphological grammar.
The 3rd Crete Summer School of Linguistics will be taking place from July 13 to July 26, 2019, at the University of Crete in beautiful Rethymnon.
Current MIT faculty Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Sabine Iatridou will be teaching classes at CreteLing, along with alumni Heidi Harley, Paul Kiparsky, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Douglas Pulleyblank, Philippe Schlenker, William Snyder, and Zoltán Szabó , as well as colleagues from around the world.
Full information (including details on the student application due April 6th), can be found on the school website (https://www.phl.uoc.gr/cssl19/).
Speaker:Ljiljana Progovac (Wayne State University) Title: Syntax in the shadow of evolution: Stepping stones into hierarchy, Move, recursion, and coordination Time: Tuesday, Feb. 26, 1-2pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: It is often stated that the nature of human language cannot be fully understood without reference to its evolution. Here I consider how one such (theoretically grounded) reconstruction of syntax may lead to a deeper understanding of attested syntactic phenomena, both those well-supported in syntactic theory (e.g. the small clause foundation of sentences), and those which remain largely unresolved (e.g. islandhood). The reconstruction leads to a proto-syntax characterized as flat, symmetric, intransitive, and static (without Move). Arguably, these rigid but robust beginnings still pervade the fabric of modern syntax, intertwined and interspersed with more modern forms, producing some intricate effects and echoes of the past, including islandhood. I will consider a variety of approximations of such proto-syntactic structures in modern languages, as well as intermediate/ambivalent forms, with the focus on the parataxis-coordination-subordination dimension (the intransitive-middle-transitive dimension was discussed in last semester’s Syntax Square talk). Both of these continuums/progressions are of relevance to the gradual emergence of the hallmarks of modern syntax, and each is characterized by ambivalent and overlapping intermediate forms. The postulated approximations of proto-syntax not only exhibit different syntactic behaviors relative to their (more) hierarchical counterparts, but they also rely on different processing strategies when investigated in neurolinguistic experiments. This is a practice talk for one of the three lectures to be given in Tokyo and Kyoto, Spring School in EvoLinguistics, March 2019.
Speakers:Maša Močnik & Rafael Abramovitz (MIT) Title: Building Attitudes in Koryak Time: Wednesday, February 27th, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk we explore the attitude verb ivyk from Koryak, a highly endangered Chukotko-Kamchatkan language of the Russian Far East. Ivyk looks like a variable-force variable-flavour attitude verb: it can be translated by (at least) say, tell/order, think, allow for the possibility, hope, fear, and wish (though not, for example, imagine). We will focus primarily on the division of labour between the doxastic readings (think, allow for the possibility) and the desiderative readings (hope, fear, wish) and argue, following Bogal-Allbritten (2016), against a lexical ambiguity or an underspecification analysis of the various readings.
Speaker: Kevin Ryan (Harvard University) Title: Superheavy avoidance in meter Time: Wednesday (2/27), 5:00pm-6:30pm Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
Superheavies are known to be marked, as demonstrated by processes such as closed syllable shortening. Additionally, metrists have reported that poets disprefer locating superheavies in cadences, that is, in line endings, where the meter is strictest (e.g. Hoenigswald 1989 on Vedic and 1991 on Homeric). I verify this finding using broader and better controlled statistical tests and extend it to certain other languages. I add that superheavy avoidance, though strongest in the cadence, is evident throughout the line. Moreover, it is gradient; for instance, ultraheavies are even more strongly avoided relative to their baseline incidence.
To analyze superheavy avoidance, one could simply index *Superheavy to the relevant constituents (e.g. *Superheavy_cadence) and call it a day, as I have previously. This is unsatisfactory in a few ways. First, as such, it doesn’t capture gradient weight, though it could easily be augmented by stringent or scalar mapping to fix that (cf. Ryan 2011). Second, in general, marked structure is not avoided in cadences. For example, in Vedic, codas, retroflexes, and vowel hiatus are all marked, but none is avoided in cadences. Thus, we shouldn’t open the door to constraints like NoCoda_cadence and Onset_cadence; rather, we should explain why specifically overweight is a problem. Third, not all quantitative traditions exhibit superheavy avoidance, so we should explain its confinement to certain languages/meters. I attempt to address all of these questions through an analysis in terms of phonetic lapse (Stanton 2019).
Speaker:Colin Davis (MIT Linguistics) Title: Why extraposition is rightward Time: Thursday, 2/28, 12:30-1:50pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
In this work in progress, I’ll offer an approach to some word order puzzles about extraposition. Fox & Nissenbaum (1999) proposed that extraposition is derived by covert movement to the right, followed by late merge (Lebeaux 1999, a.o.) to that covert rightward position. Even if we accept that string-vacuous movement can in some sense have linear direction, this account does not straightforwardly apply to extraposition from phrases that undergo overt leftward movement. One of my central concerns will be this issue. I’ll argue that we can derive the possibility of extraposition from overtly moved phrases as well as covertly moved ones, without stipulating a linear direction to covert movement, through the interaction of the following concepts. #1: Spellout linearizes entire phases at once, and must not generate ordering contradictions (Fox & Pesetsky 2005, a.o.). #2: Late merge can only apply to the linear edge of a phase (NIssenbaum 2000). #3. Late merge can apply even to embedded phases (Fox 2017). Removing the hypothesis that covert movement is ordered provides insight into why extraposition fails when its source DP is deleted by ellipsis (Takahashi & Ohtaka 2017). This account leads to difficulty in deriving William’s Generalization (=the height of an extraposed phrase determines the scope of its “source”), without a more constrained notion of how extraposition is ordered, which I won’t have time to tackle here.
Speaker:Julien Musolino (Rutgers University) Title: Studying Language Acquisition during the Preschool years: Do we need a new paradigm? Time: Friday, 3/1, 2-3pm Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
The preschool years
have been a particularly fruitful developmental period for research on
language acquisition for two main reasons. The first is that
preschoolers are sophisticated language users and can
therefore be tested on a range of complex linguistic phenomena of
interest to linguists and psycholinguists. The second is that in spite
of their linguistic savvy, preschoolers have often been found to differ
systematically from adults in their linguistic
behavior. Over the past several decades, these observations have led to
the emergence of a dominant framework to study language acquisition
during the preschool period, accompanied by a wealth of empirical
findings. Its historical significance and usefulness
notwithstanding, there are strong signs today that this framework needs
to be fundamentally revised. In this presentation, I will introduce the
standard framework, showcase some of its main applications, and discuss
its limitations and the need for a new paradigm.
Discussion leader: Erin Olson (MIT) Paper: Zuraw, K., & Hayes, B. (2017). Intersecting constraint families: an argument for Harmonic Grammar. Language, 93(3), 497-548 (available here). Time: Wednesday 02/20, 5:00pm-6:30pm Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
In the analysis of free variation in phonology, we often encounter the effects of intersecting constraint families: there are two independent families of constraints, each of which has a quantifiable effect on the outcome. A challenge for theories is to account for the patterns that emerge from such intersection. We address three cases: Tagalog nasal substitution, French liaison/élision, and Hungarian vowel harmony, using corpus data. We analyze the data patterns created by intersecting families using several formal frameworks, and find that an accurate account is best based on Harmonic Grammar (in one of its two primary quantitative implementations). Our work also suggests that that certain lexical distinctions treated as discrete by classical phonological theory (e.g., “h aspiré” vs. ordinary vowel-initial words of French) are in fact gradient and require quantitative treatment.
Abstract: Evidential bias found in certain polar questions is not well understood. I delineate a structural account based on parallel propositional alternatives, propositional alternatives to p that do not include not-p, but rather q, r etc. The evidence will come from Turkish, where evidentially biased PQs are differentiated from non-biased ones by the locus of clitic placement, and there are clearly testable intuitions of parallel propositional alternatives whenever the evidentially biased placement is used.
Speaker: Sherry Yong Chen (MIT Linguistics) Title: The linguistics of one, two, three Time: Thursday 02/21, 5-6pm Location: 46-5165
Abstract: The interpretation of number words in context is of interest not only to linguists, but also logicians, psychologists, and computer scientists. In this talk, we will discuss some theoretical and developmental questions related to the linguistics of English numerals.
Bare numerals (e.g. two, three)
present an interesting puzzle to semantic and pragmatic theories, as
they seem to vary between several different interpretations:
‘at least n’, ‘exactly n’, and sometimes even ‘at most n’.
We will examine how the availability of a particular interpretation
seems to depend on the interaction between linguistic structure and
contextual factors, and discuss three approaches
that try to capture the relationship between these interpretations.
Turning
to the acquisition of bare numerals, developmental research suggests
that preschoolers by the age of 5 are able to access
’non-exactly’ interpretations of
a bare numeral in contexts where these interpretations are licensed,
just like adult speakers. A natural hypothesis for this is that the
knowledge of the full range of interpretations may come through a prior
understanding of the meaning of explicit expressions
such as ‘at least/at most’ in English. This turns out to be
questionable, however, since it is also shown that 5-year-olds haven’t
yet acquired the meaning of the expressions at least and at most yet. Time permitting, we will end with a discussion
about what all this means for the development of numerical concept and/or language development in general.
Michel DeGraff wrote the foreword to a recently published volume edited by Donaldo Macedo Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages. The foreword is entitled “Against apartheid in education and in linguistics: The case of Haitian Creole in neo-colonial Haiti “
More information about this volume can be found on Amazon and Google Play.
The materials and video recordings of the course “Creole languages and Carribean identities”, taught by Michel DeGraff in spring 2017, have been made available publicly at MIT OpenCourseWare. You can find them here.
Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT) Title: Davis (2019) vs. Bošković (2018) Date and Time: Tuesday, Feb. 12, 1-2pm Location: 32-D461
In this presentation I’ll compare a paper of mine about stranding with another by Bošković about movement from moved elements, which has some overlap. A reviewer wants me to find some advantages, but it’s a bit complicated. I have some thoughts, but I hope that the audience will help. This will be an informal presentation with interruption encouraged.
Speaker: Danfeng Wu (MIT) Title: Syntax of either in either…or… sentences Date and time: Thursday, 2/14, 12:30-1:50pm Location: 32-D461
Either in
either…or… sentences can appear as the sister of a disjunction
phrase (1), higher than the sister of a disjunction phrase (2)-(4), or
lower (5)-(6), assuming the disjunction phrase is
rice or beans in all these examples (based on observations by Larson (1985), Schwarz (1999), Han and Romero (2004), den Dikken (2006), a.o.).
(1) John will eat either rice or beans.
(2) John will either eat rice or beans.
(3) John either will eat rice or beans.
(4) Either John will eat rice or beans.
(5) John will either eat rice or he will eat beans.
(6) John either will eat rice or he will eat beans.
I propose an analysis of
either that accounts for its distribution in these three types of sentences. I argue that there are two copies of
either in an either … or … sentence. Either
originates inside the disjunction phrase, and later moves (overtly or
covertly) to be the sister of the disjunction phrase. In the meantime,
ellipsis may delete material in the second disjunct
that is identical to its counterpart in the first disjunct.
These independent ingredients of the proposal, namely the movement of
either and ellipsis, may interact with each other and create
complicated empirical results. In particular, I will discuss four
empirical generalizations about
either that the current proposal account for successfully while alternative proposals fall short.
I speculate, based on similarities between this analysis of
either and previous analyses of focus-sensitive operators (e.g.
Cable (2007) and Hirsch (2017)), that all focus-sensitive operators have
what I call
bipartite syntax: there are two instances of the operator in a
sentence, one structurally higher than the other. The lower copy is
semantically inert, and must c-command the focus from a local position.
The higher copy agrees with a probe and/or marks
semantic scope.
CompLang will resume this Spring semester. The group will be meeting on Thursdays at 5pm, in MIT room 32-370. There is something new this semester: in addition to the regular invited talks, the group will be hosting discussions on foundational topics in the language sciences. Each of these new meetings is centered around a reading, selected as a springboard for fruitful interdisciplinary discussion and debate. You can find the talk and reading schedule for this semester online on the CompLang website.
Details: This
review paper views human language as a computational system in the
mind, primarily
for the expression of thoughts. With several examples from semantics,
syntax, morphology, and phonology, this paper illustrates the central
role of hierarchical structures, not linear properties of strings, in
formulating an explanatory and theoretical characterization
of linguistic knowledge.
We would like to invite you to join us in thinking and discussing the
insights and critical aspects of the arguments outlined in this review
paper, and how different perspectives, alternative approaches, and
interdisciplinary methodologies could enrich our
inquiry and understanding of human language.
The East Coast Syntax Workshop (ECO5) took place at the University of Maryland this year on Saturday (February 9th). Suzana Fong (4th year) was there to represent MIT ; she gave a a talk entitled “CONCORD vs. INDEX number in Wolof bare nominals ”. She reports: “Not only did I get useful feedback on research in progress, I was also happy to see again fellow linguists from past editions of the workshop and meet UMD students and faculty.”
Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Spring 2019! After our winter 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, Keny Chatain, Tracy Kelley, Elise Newman, HyunJi Yoo.
To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.
Chen Zhao (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
I’m currently teaching French and introductory courses of linguistics to undergraduates majored in French at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China). My research is grounded in formal syntax, with a special interest in labeling theory, Linearization, object shift, Syntax of Chinese and typological studies of different languages under the generative framework. My favorite part of the research is to be able to shed new lights on a linguistic phenomenon that has already been thoroughly studied by the scholars. I am currently involved in an investigation of the symmetry in the syntax and different strategies that grammars resort to in order to label the symmetric structures.
I’m from London, UK. I did an undergraduate degree in English Language teaching. I did an MA in theoretical linguistics at UCL, where I am currently doing a PhD. The majority of my research is concerned with the syntax-semantics of the clausal spine (VP, TP, CP). I am particularly interested in various types of clausal embedding (non-finite clauses, adverbial clauses, attitude reports). My interests outside of linguistics include: playing the piano and climbing.
24.942: Topics in the Grammar of a Less Familiar Language
24.947: Language Disorders in Children
24.954: Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
24.960: Syntactic Models
24.964: Topics in Phonology
24.966J: Laboratory on the Physiology, Acoustics, and Perception of Speech
24.979: Topics in Semantics
24.981: Topics in Computational Phonology
24.942 Topics in the Grammar of a Less Familiar Language Kenstowicz, Richards Students will work with a native speaker of Javanese, examining aspects of its syntax, semantics, and phonology. In the course of doing this, students will acquire techniques for gathering linguistic data from native speakers.
24.947 Language Disorders in Children Flynn Reading and discussion of current linguistic theory, first language acquisition and language disorders in young children. Focus on development of a principled understanding of language disorders at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. Examines ways in which these disorders confront theories of language and acquisition.
24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory Fox, Levy Formal theories of context-dependency, presupposition, implicature, context-change, focus and topic. Special emphasis on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Applications to the analysis of quantification, definiteness, presupposition projection, conditionals and modality, anaphora, questions and answers.
24.960 Syntactic Models Pesetsky Comparison of different proposed architectures for the syntax module of grammar. Subject traces several themes across a wide variety of approaches, with emphasis on testable differences among models. Models discussed include ancient and medieval proposals, structuralism, early generative grammar, generative semantics, government-binding theory/minimalism, LFG, HPSG, TAG, functionalist perspectives and others.
24.964 Topics in Phonology Steriade Description: The goal of this class is to understand some of the results of linguistic research using the Artificial Grammar paradigm (Reber 1967, 1993). The AG studies we consider compare learning outcomes between subject groups exposed to artificial languages that are designed to differ just in whether they present ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ patterns. The definition of ‘naturalness’ varies, and understanding what should be meant by this term will be one focus of discussion. Naturalness is commonly defined in terms of attestation – with natural taken to mean well-attested – but this needs rethinking. Most of the large body of phonological AG work now available dates from the last 15 years. The hypothesis commonly tested is that the naturalness of the target pattern is a determinant of learning success. When this hypothesis is supported, subjects succeed in learning the natural pattern and fail with the unnatural one. In many studies, however, null results are obtained: subjects acquire to the same extent patterns identified as natural and unnatural. We will begin the course by exploring one interpretation of these mixed results, due to Moreton and Pater 2012a,b, and Moreton 2008: the successfully learned natural patterns are not necessarily natural in a typological, or phonetic sense, but they are simpler than the patterns that the subjects fail to learn. This idea comes with its own learning algorithm and with a distinct view of how phonological typology relates to competence, or doesn’t. It is a useful way to explore large parts of the AG literature but we will see that it has limitations. A different idea to consider is that studies that have successfully shown that natural patterns are easier to learn than unnatural ones have focused on faithfulness, or can be reinterpreted in those terms. The null results are found in the markedness domain. If this interpretation continues to look promising, we’ll look for an explanation. There are other potentially interesting results in the phonological AG work and we may expand the reading list and consider syntax if participants express an interest. I can’t promise answers to any of the questions raised above, but the best of this AG body of literature tackles two essential questions in the field: do aspects of a speaker’s grammatical knowledge reflect the linguistic typology? what are the sources of this knowledge?
24.966J Laboratory on the Physiology, Acoustics, and Perception of Speech Braida, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Choi Experimental investigations of speech processes. Topics include computer-aided waveform analysis and spectral analysis of speech; synthesis of speech; perception and discrimination of speech-like sounds; speech prosody; models of speech recognition; speech development; analysis of atypical speech; and others. Recommended prerequisite: 6.002, 18.03, or 24.900.
24.979 Topics in Semantics Fox, Hackl, Schwarzschild The seminar will focus on topics in degree semantics. Issues to be addressed include:
how degree operators interact with individual and modal quantifiers
interpretation of degree modifiers of noun phrases (e.g. at least)
analysis of relative clauses modifying nominalized degree predicates (height, weight)
whether degrees are primitive or derived
analysis of degree constructions using vectors or directed segments
external and internal syntax of comparative clauses
Our starting point will be Schwarzschild 2019, which we will later try to use as the basis for the discussion of older literature. Some of the sessions will be lead by registered students in collaboration with the instructors.
24.981 Topics in Computational Phonology Albright Computational modeling can usefully inform many aspects of phonological theory. Implementing a theory provides a more rigorous test of its applicability to different data sets, and requires a greater degree of formal precision than is found in purely expository presentations. By training learning models on realistic training samples, we can test whether a posited analysis can actually be discovered from representative data, and we can observe what proportion of the data is actually accounted for by that analysis. Modeling also provides a direct means of testing whether a proposed formal device facilitates the discovery of generalizations, or whether it hampers learning by greatly increasing the size of the search space. In the most interesting cases, computational modeling uncovers facts about the language that would have been difficult to discover by eye, and forces us to ask which facts are treated as linguistically significant by speakers. Topics will include: (subject to revision) - Statistical “baseline” models (n-gram models, exemplar models) - Algorithms for constraint ranking and weighting - Algorithms for constraint discovery - Integrating learned and innate constraints - Learning in the midst of variation and exceptions, and discovery of gradient patterns Requirements: readings and small regular problem sets, final project+presentation.
Title: How to do things with nominals. Towards a syntax of nominal speech acts Time: Friday, February 8th, 4pm-5:30pm
Room: 32-155
Abstract: Going back to Aristotle, classic grammatical description as well as current theories of grammar and the construction of meaning take the sentence to be the object of investigation. In his seminal work, Austin 1962 took a first step towards breaking with this tradition within philosophy of language. He argued that our understanding of meaning has to be informed by the fact that when we say things, we also do things. Different types of sentences give rise to different speech acts such as asserting, questioning, requesting, promising etc. and over the past sixty years, evidence has accumulated suggesting that speech act meaning is part of sentences, and hence part of grammatical structure. However, when we do things with words, we do not always use sentences. For example, a content question may be answered with a nominal phrase only (e.g., Who wrote that essay? Penelope). And by uttering a nominal we are also doing something. Specifically, we are attempting to identify a referent in a manner that will enable our interlocutors to recognize them.
This leads us to postulate a novel hypothesis, namely that noun phrases (like sentences) may be full-fledged speech acts. We refer to this as the nominal speech act hypothesis. Specifically, we postulate that, just like clauses, nominals are dominated by a layer of structure which encodes pragmatic information contributing to their use-conditions. They differ in that the speech act layer in the clausal domain establishes a direct link between the speech-act participants and the proposition denoted by the clause, while the speech act layer in the nominal domain establishes a direct link between the speech-act participants and the referent denoted by the nominal.
In this
talk I provide empirical evidence for a dedicated nominal speech act
layer. Specifically, the evidence I discuss comes from i)
cross-linguistic variation in pronominal paradigms; ii) properties of
impersonal pronouns; iii) properties of formality distinctions in
nominal expressions; iv) distinctions between spatial and discourse
functions of demonstratives.
The Linguistic Society of America’s Annual Meeting for 2019 was held at in New York in January. As per usual, MIT was well represented. The following department members presented talks and posters:
Alumni who presented or organised symposia include: Ezra Keshat, Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, Jon Nissenbaum, Aron Hirsch, Michelle Yuan, Hadas Kotek, Coppe Van Urk.
This is happening this Thursday 7th from 5pm to 6pm. Martina will talk about methodologies and how to elicit interactional language (discourse markers and beyond).
Speaker: Tanya Bondarenko, Stanislao Zompi’ Title: Leftover Agreement: spelling out number in Kartvelian languages Date and time: Monday 12/10, 5-6pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract:
In this talk, we present our work in progress in which we argue that sometimes probes agree with features on lower probes that have not yet been spelled out —- a mechanism we refer to as Leftover Agreement. We show that this mechanism is helpful in accounting for the verbal agreement paradigms in all four of the Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Laz, Megrelian, Svan). The main body of evidence comes from number agreement: we show configurations where a higher probe spells out plural features only if those features have failed to be spelled out by a lower probe. Here is a short illustration from Georgian:
(1) a. gv-naxa b. g-naxa-t 1PL-see.AOR.3SG 2-see.AOR.3SG-PL
‘He/she saw us.’ ‘He/she saw you (pl).’
The lower probe (the prefix) in (1a) spells out both first-person and plural features of the object, so the higher probe (the suffix) does not find anything left over to agree with. In (1b) however, the lower probe has spelled out only the person, but not the number feature of the object. This leftover feature is being agreed with and spelled out by a higher probe (the suffix -t).
This alternation between synthetic and analytic exponence of number has previously been dealt with by morphological tools (Fission in Halle & Marantz 1993; templates in Harley & Lomashvili 2011; bottom-up nonterminal spellout in Blix 2016). By contrast, we argue for a fundamentally syntactic approach, which integrates insights from the theory of multiple spellout and of fine-grained probing.
Presenter:Lee Bickmore (University at Albany) & Winfred Mkochi (University of Malawi) Title:Segmental and Tonal Absolute Neutralization in CiTonga Date/Time: Wednesday, December 12, 5:00-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract:
CiTonga, an under-described Malawian Bantu language, exhibits a complex array of stem tone patterns. We show that these patterns can be accounted for by assuming that in addition to various lexical High tones present underlyingly, melodic (grammatical) High tones are also added. These target the stem-initial TBU if it is free, otherwise the final one. Two productive tonal processes are key to understanding the surface tones: Tone Doubling, which spreads an underlying H to the following mora, and Phrase-final Left Shift, which shifts a H off a phrase-final mora to the phrase-penultimate one. These two processes create a variety of tonal configurations, many of which violate the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). We show that in some cases these violations simply remain, while in other cases they are repaired. Of interest is the fact that four different repair strategies are used depending on 1) whether one or both Hs are multiply linked and 2) the domain in which the OCP violation is found (e.g. within the stem, across the stem, or across words). Finally, we present two TAMs, the Subjunctive and Imperative, which seem to have anomalous surface tone patterns, given the productive rules which have been motivated to that point. To account for these we present and discuss an abstract analysis which involves an absolute neutralization. For the subjunctive, we propose that even though the Subject Prefixes uniformly surface as Low, they must be set up as High in order to trigger the various processes which directly account for the surface stem tone patterns, even though this H is not ultimately realized. For the imperative, a segmental prefix is posited in order to trigger the appropriate processes, which must ultimately be deleted (i.e. both the mora and tone of the prefix). We conclude by briefly comparing this analysis to several alternatives.
Title: Variation and the amn’t gap (joint work with David Adger, Caroline Heycock and Jennifer Smith)
Time:Thursday, December 13th, 3:30pm-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:
This talk is concerned with “the amn’t gap,” which refers to the absence of a negated form for the finite auxiliary am in most varieties of English. Bresnan (2001) notes that while the gap is persistent in the varieties of North America and England, things are interestingly different in Irish English and Scots: in Irish English, amn’t may be used in all syntactic contexts, and in Scots it may be used in inversion contexts (”amn’t I coming with you”) but not in declaratives (”I amn’t coming with you”). Using new data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, I show that the empirical picture in Scotland is more complex than what Bresnan described, and I develop an account of dialectal variation with amn’t in terms of Yang’s (2016, 2017) Tolerance Principle, where it is the productivity of the negative affixation rule which is crucial.
Whamit! will be on its Winter (semi-)hiatus from now until the start of the Spring semester. Weekly posts will resume on February 5th, 2019. In the mean time, we will have rolling posts, publishing breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Thanks to all our contributors, editors, and you dear readers!
We are delighted to announce that Emily Elfner will be here for an extended visit, during which she will give a mini course in two parts, details below.
Speaker: Emily Elfner (York University) Time: Wednesday, December 5th, 1pm-2:30pm; Thursday, December 6th, 12:30pm-2pm Place: 32-D461 Abstract:
In recent years, there has been considerable renewed interest in debates regarding the syntax-prosody interface and the source of prosodic domains. Broadly speaking, there are two types of approaches to the “discovery” of prosodic domains: an “intonation first” model, which derives prosodic domains on the basis of observable phonological processes (such as intonational patterns, gradient phonetic markers to prosodic boundaries, and domain-sensitive phonological processes), and a “syntax first” model, which derives prosodic domains on the basis of syntactic constituent structure. Within these two extremes, most approaches to the syntax-prosody interface will assume a middle ground, with an implicit assumption that both syntax and phonology should be taken into account in the positing and diagnosing of prosodic domains. However, modelling the exact contribution of each part has proven to be difficult to determine and subject to some debate.
In this mini-course, I will provide an overview and critical analysis of a current “hybrid” approach to the syntax-prosody interface, Match Theory (Selkirk 2011), which incorporates a direct approach to syntax-prosody mapping under the guise of Prosodic Hierarchy Theory. Match Theory may be considered to be a “syntax first” model because it assumes that the origin of prosodic domains lies in the syntactic component, and that these are mapped onto the phonological component, specifically, the prosodic hierarchy, via a family of violable MATCH constraints. However, because these constraints are violable and evaluated in the phonological component (as in an OT model), mismatches, as observed via domain-sensitive phonological processes, can be accounted for systematically using violable prosodic markedness constraints that interact with the relevant MATCH constraints. Thus, while prosodic domains are mapped directly from syntactic structure, resulting in recursive prosodic domains, phonological and intonational processes can still be used as evidence to help diagnose and define the edges and scope of prosodic domains. The positing of prosodic domains is thus approached from both sides (syntax and phonology), meeting in the middle. This approach to the syntax-prosody interface has important consequences for our understanding of the syntax-prosody interface and the continuing role of the prosodic hierarchy in accounting for phrase-level phonological processes.
Dilip Ninan (Tufts University)’s talk about his 2012 paper Counterfactual attitudes and multi-centered worlds has been reported to this week.
Please join us on Friday 7th at 1pm in the 8th floor seminar room.
*Exceptionally, it is preferrable to have read the paper beforehand.*
Title : Counterfactual attitudes and multi-centered worlds
Author(s) : Dilip Ninan
Abstract :
Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent’s attitudinal possibilities using multi-centered worlds, possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are assignment-sensitive expressions and attitude verbs are assignment shifters.
In this talk, I’ll argue for a surprising condition on the prosody of embedded CPs, which I’ll call Clausal Downstepping:
(1) Clausal Downstepping: All phonological material within a CP must be immediately downstepped with respect to the phonological material of the head which immediately projects over it.
Downstep is a cross-linguistically attested phenomenon in which high tones within a prosodic domain are lowered with respect to preceding high tones, triggered at specific points within an utterance. It has been well-established that in many languages, downstep has a strong connection to syntactic and prosodic structure. I’ll give a brief primer on the relevant prosodic background and show the varying ways that (1) is satisfied cross-linguistically.
Next, I’ll argue that (1), along with the inherently left-to-right nature of downstep, provides an explanation for the commonly attested phenomenon of clausal extraposition. Clausal extraposition, a phenomenon seen in many SOV (German, Hindi, Turkish, Persian) and VOS (Malagasy, Toba Batak) languages, involves clausal objects obligatorily appearing in a peripheral position (2) despite normal objects appearing in a non-peripheral position (3) .
(2) a. Frank hat mir erzählt [dass die Eintracht Meister wird]
Frank has me told [that the Eintracht champion becomes]
‘Frank told me that Eintracht will become champions.’
b. * Frank hat mir [dass die Eintracht Meister wird] erzählt
(3) a. Frank hat mir [die Wahrheit] erzählt.
Frank has me [the truth] told
‘Frank told me the truth.’
b. * Frank hat mir erzählt [die Wahrheit].
Furthermore, I’ll argue that (1) provides better empirical coverage of the surface distribution of CPs in these languages than previous prosodic, syntactic, and semantic accounts.
Speaker: Emma Nguyen (UConn Linguistics) Title: Using developmental modeling to specify learning and representation of the passive in English children Date and time: Thursday, 12/6, 5-6pm Location: 46-5165 Abstract:
Complete knowledge of the passive takes significant time to develop in English children. Building on prior work identifying the importance of lexical factors for this process, we specify a Bayesian learning model that can capture experimentally-observed passivization behavior in five-year-olds, given child-directed speech to learn from. Through this developmental model, we identify (i) how English children may be integrating lexical feature information, and (ii) how costly they may view the passive structure to be.
Speaker: Emily Elfner (York University) Title: The Syntax-Prosody Interface Time: Friday, December 7th, 3:30-5pm Place: 32-155 Abstract:
In this talk, I discuss word- and phrase-level prominence in two languages which may be characterized as “polysynthetic”: Kwak’wala (North Wakashan: BC, Canada) and Inuktitut (Eskimo-Aleut; Northern Canada). Polysynthetic languages are typically described as such in terms of their morphosyntactic characteristics: allowing complex morphological “words” which blur the lines between words, phrases, and clauses. In recent years, researchers have argued that complex words may be analyzed using the same syntactic tools used for less agglutinative languages, proposing that the unusually complex “words” result from the ways in which such structures are spelled out phonologically (e.g. Compton & Pittman 2010). This assumption places the onus on the syntax-phonology interface to account for notions like what constitutes a word, notions that were previously thought to be determined by a language’s morphological and syntactic properties.
Kwak’wala and Inuktitut share similarities in terms of their word-level systems of prominence: both show evidence of a single (tonal) prominence within each word-level domain, but little evidence of prosodic structure within that domain: no secondary stress or evidence of alternating metrical structure, as would be expected of foot structure, nor any apparent sign of word-internal morphophonological domains. What does this mean for theories of prosodic structure in which prosodic constituents are derived from syntactic structure? In other words, why do “words” spell-out as large domains in languages like Inuktitut or Kwak’wala, but smaller domains in languages like English? This talk will explore some preliminary answers to these questions on the basis of these two case studies.
Partly based on joint work with Patricia A. Shaw (Kwak’wala), Anja Arnhold (Inuktitut), and Richard Compton (Inuktitut).
Speaker:Rafael Abramovitz Title: Successive-Cyclic Wh-Movement Feeds Case Competition in Koryak Date and time: Monday 11/26, 5-6pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract:
Recent debate surrounding theories of ergative case has centered on two types of analyses: ergative as a dependent (configurational) case (Yip et. al. 1987, Marantz 1991, Baker 2015, a.o.), and ergative as an inherent case (Nash 1996, Woolford 1997, a.o.). On the former, ergative case is assigned to the external argument of a transitive verb by case competition: it `competes’ for case assignment with another nominal in the same phase, and is assigned ergative because it is the higher of the two. On the latter, ergative is assigned to the external argument of a transitive verb by being merged as the specifier of an agentive vP. In this paper, I present new evidence for the configurational analysis of ergative case from Koryak (Chukotko-Kamchatkan), showing that movement of absolutive wh-words into higher case domains triggers dependent case in the higher domain, as well as in intermediate domains along the movement path. This is easily accounted for on the dependent case analysis, but cannot be captured if ergative marking is tied to thematic roles, as the inherent case view holds.
We are delighted to announce that Martina Martinovic will be here for an extended visit, during which she will give a mini course in two parts, details below.
Speaker: Martina Martinovic (University of Florida) Time: Wednesday, November 28th, 1pm-2:30pm; Thursday, November 29th, 12:30pm-2pm Place: 32-D461 Abstract:
It is a long-standing observation that syntactic features can be differently distributed over the functional spine. The strong cartographic approach commonly follows the “one property, one feature, one head” principle (e.g., Kayne 2005; Cinque and Rizzi 2010), however, the reality of cross-linguistic variation has made it clear that the bundling of features often cannot be achieved via traditional syntactic processes (such as head movement). Various bundling parameters and other mechanisms have been proposed to account for the variation in feature distribution (e.g. the “Split-IP” parameter, Thráinsson 1996, Bobaljik & Thráinsson 1998; the “Voice-bundling” parameter, Pylkänen 2002, 2008; feature “scattering”, Giorgi & Pianos 1996; etc.). Particularly popular in the last decade have been modifications of the Feature Inheritance model (Chomsky 2005, 2008; Richards 2007, 2011), proposing that Feature Inheritance is obviated under certain conditions (e.g. Ouali 2006, Fortuny 2008, Legate 2011, Gallego 2014, Aldridge 2015, 1017).
In this mini-course we will focus on the properties of the clause-peripheral layers, commonly known as CP and TP, the cross-linguistic variation in how features traditionally associated with C and T are distributed over functional heads, and how this advances our understanding of how syntactic structures are built. The bulk of the data will come from Wolof and will explore the Head-Splitting approach developed in Martinović 2015. We will discuss recent extensions of this proposal (e.g. Erlewine 2018), and other data that might be amenable to similar treatment, with the goal of identifying a possible unified approach.
In this talk we will discuss an “Austronesian” phenomenon of voice marking in a Uralic language Khanty (Northern dialect). In particular, we will look at the Khanty morpheme -a/-i, usually called ‘passive’ in descriptive grammars. There are several features that make the Khanty ‘passive’ not passive-like. Firstly, arguments other than the Theme can promote to the subject position. Secondly, all the noun phrases that do not promote to the subject position surface with a special case (called locative). Thirdly, the ‘passive’ morpheme has an effect on the information structure of the sentence. Finally, the ‘passive’ morpheme follows the tense morphemes, which is atypical for argument structure changing passives that are usually put at the vP/VoiceP level.
There are several questions to explain. First, what is the semantic contribution and the syntactic position of the ‘passive’ morpheme? Second, what is the source of the locative case? Third, what type of movement is the promotion to subject in ‘passive’?
We will discuss some ideas of how we can deal with these data. All of them involve one basic assumption: the ‘passive’ morpheme is a composite probe ala Coon and Bale (2014) or van Urk (2015). It is T with a Topic feature on it. The problem is the locative case. Is it assigned by the composite T? Is it assigned independently? There will be several open questions and cryings out for help.
Dilip Ninan (Tufts University) has kindly agreed to talk about his 2012 paper Counterfactual attitudes and multi-centered worlds.
The meeting will take place on Friday 30th at 1pm in the 8th floor seminar room.
*Exceptionally, it is preferrable to have read the paper beforehand.*
Title : Counterfactual attitudes and multi-centered worlds
Author(s) : Dilip Ninan
Abstract :
Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent’s attitudinal possibilities using multi-centered worlds, possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are assignment-sensitive expressions and attitude verbs are assignment shifters.
Speaker: Martina Martinovic (University of Florida) Title: Bi-clausal progressives in Wolof (partly joint work with Marie-Luise Schwarzer) Time: Friday, November 30th, 3:30pm-5pm Place: 32-155 Abstract:
In many languages, clauses predicating location and progressive constructions are related. Progressives often develop from or contain locative markers/copulas, or entire locative constructions (Heine & Reh 1984, Heine et al. 1991, Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2000, Heine & Kuteva 2002). Much work has shown that progressive constructions are often bi-clausal, consisting of a locative clause that embeds a nominalized complement clause or an adjunct (Comrie 1978, Bybee et al. 1994, Fontanals & Simon 1999, Polinsky & Comrie 2002, Laka 2006, Salanova 2007, Coon 2010).
In this talk I discuss the syntax of default progressive construction in Wolof, which contain the element angi, in the literature most commonly considered to be progressive aspect. I reanalyze angi as a bimorphemic element composed of the A′-complementizer and a locative clitic. This is supported by the fact that progressive clauses can be extracted out of. Next, I propose that progressives in Wolof are biclausal, consisting of a locative clause that embeds a reduced imperfective infinitival clause. I give two pieces of evidence for this claim. First, PP modifiers can only follow the main verb in mono-clausal constructions in Wolof. In progressive constructions, however, they can precede the verb, suggesting that they are modifying a higher predicate. Second, progressive constructions cannot be negated, which would be puzzling under a mono-clausal analysis. A bi-clausal analysis straightforwardly accounts for this fact, because the two clauses that the progressives consist of — the locative clause and the reduced imperfective infinitival clause — independently cannot contain negation. This work gives further cross-linguistic support for the bi-clausality of progressive structures, and enriches the typology of bi-clausal progressives.
Michel DeGraff was at the University of Hawaii at Hilo (@UHHilo) during the week of November 12, visiting their Program in Linguistics which is part of the College of Hawaiian Language. Michel also gave a talk there on ” Haitian Creole for education, human rights & development.” The Program in Linguistics at UH Hilo has set up an inspiring example of collaboration among linguistics, language revitalization and teacher education. The Hawaiian language was nearly exterminated through US cultural genocide starting in the late 19th century when US marines overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. Then the US banned the use of the Hawaiian language. In the early 1980s there were fewer than 50 children speaking Hawaiian. But now Hawaiian has been revitalized and counts some 10,000 speakers, especially thanks to the efforts of the College of Hawaiian Language’s laboratory schools, which start as early as in pre-schools (called “Pūnana Leo” in Hawaiian; i.e., “language nests”). These laboratory schools may well be the best examples of language-immersion schools in the context of language revitalization. For a sampling of images of these immersion activities, both at @UHHilo and in the laboratory schools, see Michel’s videos and photos on Facebook:
Abigail Thwaites will be presenting a paper by Torres on De Se content. The meeting will take place on Monday 19th in the 8th floor seminar room.
Title : In Defense of De Se Content
Author(s) : Stephan Torre
Abstract :
There is currently disagreement about whether the phenomenon of first-person, or de se, thought motivates a move towards special kinds of contents. Some take the conclusion that traditional propositions are unable to serve as the content of de se belief to be old news, successfully argued for in a number of influential works several decades ago. Recently, some philosophers have challenged the view that there exist uniquely de se contents, claiming that most of the philosophical community has been under the grip of an attractive but unmotivated myth. At the very least, this latter group has brought into question the arguments in favor of positing special kinds of content for de se belief; I think they have successfully shown that these arguments are not as conclusive, or fully articulated, as many have taken them to be. In this paper I will address these challenges directly and I will present and defend an argument for the conclusion that the phenomenon
of de se thought does indeed motivate the move to a special kind of content, content that is uniquely de se.
Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz
Title: Outward-Looking Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy in the Koryak Verb: A Conspiracy in Exponence.
Date and time: Monday 11/19, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
“Bobaljik (2000) proposes that phonologically-conditioned allomorphy (PCA) can only be inward-sensitive. The reasoning goes like this: Assume vocabulary insertion is cyclic. Given this, when a given node is undergoing vocabulary insertion, phonological information will not be present for any nodes above it. This precludes the choice of the vocabulary item from being influenced by the shape of any higher morphemes. In this talk, I will discuss a counterexample to this proposal from a conspiracy in exponence found in the verb-word of Koryak (Chukotko-Kamchatkan; Russian Far East), in which an aspectual (?) suffix and an agreement suffix cannot coexist if the agreement suffix begins in a non-coronal consonant. In intransitive verbs, this causes the (outer) agreement suffix to delete, making this an instance of inward-looking PCA. In transitive verbs, however, the (inner) aspectual suffix deletes, making this an instance of outward-looking PCA. I analyze this by appealing to obliteration, an operation that deletes entire terminals, but, following Vergara & Luis (2017), argue that this obliteration takes place after vocabulary insertion. To account for the conspiracy involved in the realization of these morphemes, I propose that this case of obliteration is governed by a grammar of ranked, violable constraints (Prince & Smolensky 2008). This analysis is consistent with the predictions about the directionality of allomorphy based on cyclic spellout because it shifts the responsibility for this alternation to a post-spellout operation. Time permitting, I’ll talk about the difficulty of assigning specific semantic contributions to elements we might want to call tense and aspect morphemes in the Koryak verb to show why I put a question mark in the phrase ‘aspectual (?) suffix’ above.”
Title: Unlocking, intervention, and conditions on extraction
Date and Time: Tuesday, November 20, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461 Abstract:
In this speculative presentation, I’ll examine some constraints on movement, from the perspective of the nominal domain. I’ll argue that certain asymmetries in extraction from a given DP, versus a second DP embedded within the first, are indicative of a theory in which certain extractions from a phase require that phase to be “Unlocked” by Agree (Rackowski & Richards 2005, Halpert 2015, 2018, Branan 2018).
Taking DPs to be phases, a phi-probe on v can target and Unlock a given DP, but subsequent DPs embedded within the first will be too distant for v to target. Thus an A-bar probe on v can subsequently probe into and extract from the highest DP, but lower DPs within remain “Locked” for A-bar extraction. I’ll suggest that this sort of approach makes some correct predictions for Chichewa, English, and Russian, though in the latter two, the phi-agreement involved in Unlocking is not overtly expressed.
Speaker: Keny Chatain (MIT) Title: “The same” = the + same ? Date and time: Wednesday, November 21, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
This is work in progress on the semantics of same;I will need your indulgent feedback! Some authors (Barker 2007, a.o.) have puzzled at the obligatory presence of the in (1-3), whose effect on the semantics is not readily detectable, and is unnecessary given certain assumptions about the meaning of same. If this is so, then same enters a small family of operators (along with superlatives, and only), which mysteriously seem to weaken the standard Fregean presupposition of the definite.
(1) Alison praised the same poet as Carlos.
(2) Alison and Carlos praised the same poet.
(3) Every librarian praised the same poet.
In light of this problem, Charnavel (2011) notices a peculiarity of French: in a limited set of environments, French allows a same “un même”. One crucial difference that Charnavel reports between French a same and the same is a (barely recognizable) Fregean presupposition. Building off of this observation, I will: a) identify the detectable contribution the makes to (1-3) in English, using NPI data, b) show that in a scoping account of same à la Barker, this contribution is readily derived from nothing but the standard semantics of the. Finally, I will present some ideas for unifying the use of same in (1) and in (2-3).
There has been a debate about whether non-clausal elements can be coordinated, i.e. whether coordination of elements smaller than TP and VP is possible, such as DP coordination and PP coordination (e.g. Gleitman 1965, Ross 1967, McCawley 1968, Hankamer 1979, Schein 2017, Hirsch 2017). In this talk, I will provide arguments supporting coordination of non-clausal elements based on the position of ‘either’ and the scope of disjunction.
Once we allow non-clausal elements to be coordinated, we can explain a puzzle about adjunct fronting in ‘whether‘-clauses and ‘if‘-clauses. My analysis of this puzzle involves the following components: (a) non-clausal elements can be coordinated; (b) ‘whether’ can pied-pipe adjacent materials in moving to Spec, CP, whereas phonologically null elements cannot pied-pipe; (c) it is not possible to sub-extract out of an A’-position (e.g. a topicalized phrase does not allow sub-extraction).
I will briefly describe the puzzle below. While both ‘whether‘-clauses and ‘if‘-clauses allow the Alt(ernative) reading in (1), when the PP disjunction is apparently fronted to immediately follow ‘whether’/’if’, only ‘whether‘-clauses obtain the Alt reading (2), and the Alt reading is lost in ‘if‘-clauses (3).
(1) I don’t know whether/if John will arrive on Saturday or on Sunday.
✓Alt Reading: I don’t know whether John will arrive on Saturday or he will arrive on Sunday.
✓Yes/No (Y/N) Reading: I don’t know whether John will arrive on a weekend day or he won’t arrive on a weekend day at all.
(2) I don’t know whether on Saturday or on Sunday John will arrive. (✓Alt; ✓Y/N)
(3) I don’t know if on Saturday or on Sunday John will arrive. (*Alt; ✓Y/N)
This puzzle parallels another puzzle previously observed in the literature. When ‘or not’ is at the end of the sentence, we can get Y/N reading for both ‘whether‘-clauses and ‘if‘-clauses (4). But when ‘or not’ is apparently fronted, only ‘whether‘-clauses obtain the Y/N reading (5), and ‘if‘-clauses become ungrammatical (6).
(4) I don’t know whether/if John will arrive this weekend or not. (✓Y/N)
(5) I don’t know whether or not John will arrive this weekend. (✓Y/N)
(6) *I don’t know if or not John will arrive this weekend. (*Y/N)
Speaker:Frank Staniszewski (MIT) Title: Deriving the properties of until phrases Date and time: Wednesday, November, 13, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
The well-known paradigm in (1-2) presents a challenge for a semantic analysis of until phrases.
(1) a. He was angry until the end of the conference
b. He wasn’t available until the end of the conference.
(2) a. *The bomb exploded until yesterday.
b. The bomb didn’t explode until yesterday.
Condoravdi (2008)
Stative/progressive predicates can appear with until phrases with or without negation, as in (1a-b). Perfective predicates, however, can appear with until phrases only under negation, as shown in (2a-b).
Most analyses of this paradigm fall into two basic camps. One proposes that there is only one until, which selects for “durative” predicates. This means that without negation, it can combine only with stative/progressive predicates, thus explaining the badness of (2a) (Klima (1964), Mittwoch (1977), a.o.). In this system, the acceptability of (2b) is a consequence of the assumption that negation is a predicate modifier that can create a durative predicate.
The other camp proposes that until is lexically ambiguous between two untils. One is a “durative” until that combines only with statives/progressives, and another is a “punctual” until that combines with perfectives, and is additionally assumed to be an NPI (Horn (1970, 1972, Karttunen (1974), Condoravdi (2008), a.o.). Here, the NPI property of “punctual” until derives the ungrammaticality of (2a).
In this presentation of work in progress, I explore another possible approach. I propose that there is only one until, with a basic meaning similar to before, that is compatible with both stative/progressive as well as perfective predicates. I then hypothesize that this basic meaning of until is obligatorily strengthened in positive environments to its “durative” interpretation by exhaustification, adopting a mechanism similar to ones that have been proposed for obligatory strengthening of other quantificational elements (Bar-Lev & Margulis (2014), Bowler (2014) a.o.). Given this strengthening, until phrases will be incompatible with perfective predicates in upward-entailing environments, thus deriving the badness of (2a).
I will discuss some arguments for the various approaches, and then develop an analysis that builds on a presuppositional entry for until (Karttunen (1974), Condoravdi (2008)), which in turn interacts with an exhaust operator as proposed in Bar-Lev & Fox (2017) in an attempt to derive the attested empirical patterns.
This talk evaluates the hypothesis that the phonological grammar is algebraic and amodal. The first part of the talk examines the computational properties of the phonological grammar. Using the restrictions on doubling as a case study, I show that doubling restrictions generalize across the board. Such generalizations are evident in both spoken and signed language phonology, and they require algebraic rules.
In the second part of the talk, I turn to show that the restrictions on doubling are demonstrably dissociable from the phonetic system. I first show that a single linguistic stimulus (e.g. panana) elicits conflicting responses (preference vs. aversion), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). I next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of their spoken language. Together, these findings demonstrate that (i) a single, invariant phonetic form can elicit conflicting linguistic parses; whereas (ii) a linguistic parse can remain invariant when the phonetic substance is radically altered – from speech to signs.
These results suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a single set of linguistic principles that are amodal, algebraic and abstract.
Title: PRO’s Rigid Dependence and some possible consequences.
Date and time: Thursday, 11/15, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
An examination of the study of the behavior of obligatorily or non obligatorily controlled PRO yields the conclusion that PRO and its antecedent must rigidly covary, a requirement I call the `de re ipsa’ requirement. Why this holds suggests ways to derive why `de se’ or `de te’ readings mandatorily arise in obligatory control constructions under attitude control predicates, and in fact elsewhere too. In turn, this behavior of PRO suggests that binding theory could be about the sharing (or non sharing) of recipes for reference which would provide a different way of looking at some binding puzzles discussed in Heim (1994), and Sharvit (2011).
Title: Automatic speech recognition without linguistic knowledge?
Date and time: Thursday, 11/15, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:
Building state-of-the-art speech recognizers, besides a large corpus of transcribed speech, require several additional ingredients, such as a phoneme inventory, a lexicon, and a language model. These ingredients carry linguistic constraints to make training more feasible and more sample efficient. Recently, there has been a push towards building a speech recognizer end to end, i.e., using few or even none of the aforementioned ingredients. This raises a fundamental question: is it possible to train a speech recognizer without any linguistic constraint?
How much data do we need to make it possible? What linguistic constraints are necessary for building a speech recognizer? In this talk, I will review the inner workings of conventional and end-to-end speech recognizers, and to help answer some of those questions, I will present empirical results in training end-to-end speech recognizers without any linguistic constraints.
Title: Resolving scope ambiguity under (negative) degree questions
Date and time: Friday, 11/16, 2-3pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
This talk presents work-in-progress that provides evidence for facilitation effects of certain types of Question under Discussion (QUD) on scope ambiguity resolution. Specifically, when an ambiguous sentence involves a negation and a comparative quantifier (CQP), a negative QUD facilitates access to the inverse scope reading, but only when the non-negated question nucleus is expected to hold in a given context. We discuss our results with references to the ignorance inference of comparative numerals, maximal informativeness, question answer congruence.
Maša Močnik and Keny Chatain will be presenting a paper by Cable on a new choice-function-based approach to De Re/De Dicto. The meeting will take place on Monday 5th in the 8th floor seminar room.
In this paper, I present a relatively simple syntax and semantics for de re attitude reports, one that builds heavily upon the approaches developed by Percus & Sauerland (2003), Charlow & Sharvit (2014), and Sauerland (2014). The principle innovation of this account is that such readings involve quantification over choice-functions, rather than direct quantification over accessibility relations (Cresswell & von Stechow 1982), concept generators (Percus & Sauerland 2003, Charlow & Sharvit 2014), or counterpart functions (Sauerland 2014). I show that the proposed system accounts for the same range of complex data and judgments as prior approaches, particularly (i) the behavior of bound de re pronouns (Charlow & Sharvit 2014), (ii) interactions between de re readings and non-upward monotone operators (Charlow & Sharvit 2014), (iii) constraints on de re readings of complex DPs (Sauerland 2014), and (iv) the inability for DPs to be construed de re when they contain opaquely interpreted NPs (Charlow & Sharvit 2014). Despite this equivalent empirical coverage, the proposed system offers a relatively simple compositional semantics for de re attitude reports, one where (i) the object-language quantification at play is of a type independently observed in natural language, (ii) attitude verbs do not require a ‘type-flexible’ denotation, (iii) the intensional argument of an attitude verb is simply a proposition (or property of entities), (iv) there is no lexical ambiguity between ‘existential’ and ‘universal’ readings of such verbs. I show that the facts which motivated the complexities found in prior accounts – particularly the interactions between de re readings and quantificational DPs – can follow from independently known properties of choice-functional quantification. [[Author’s Note (9/7/2018): The general approach presented in this paper was independently suggested in earlier, unpublished work by Orin Percus and Simon Charlow: Percus (2013) “Res-Marking in Belief Reports”, Charlow (2014) “Locality in the Syntax and Semantics of Attitude Ascriptions.”]]
Speaker: Ray Jackendoff (Tufts/MIT) and Jenny Audring (Leiden)
Title: The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology in the Parallel Architecture
Date and time: Monday 11/5, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
Linguistic theory has emphasized Humboldt’s “infinite use of finite means,” to the relative neglect of the “finite means,” i.e. the lexicon. What does a language user store in the lexicon,and in what form? We explore this question in the context of the Parallel Architecture (Jackendoff 1997, 2002; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005). Within this outlook, lexical items are pieces of phonological, (morpho)syntactic, and semantic structures, and morphology is the grammar of word-sized pieces of structure.
Unlike classical syntactic patterns, the majority of morphological patterns are not productive, and their instances must be listed in the lexicon. They therefore present a number of important difficulties for a grammar formulated in terms of traditional rules. More adequate is a formulation in terms of schemas, along the lines of Construction Grammar and especially Construction Morphology. Nonproductive schemas do not build new structures; rather, they motivate relations among items stored in the lexicon.
In addition to building novel structures, productive schemas can also motivate relations within the lexicon. This leads to a new perspective on productive patterns: the principles used to build novel structures are simply a subset of the schemas in the lexicon, and productive schemas canbe thought of as schemas “gone viral.” We conclude that the focus in linguistic theory on the“infinite use of finite means” has deflected attention from a more basic issue: the form of the lexicon and the relationships within it.
This outlook on morphological relations in the lexicon has consequences for syntactic theory as well. First, it offers an account of nonproductive syntactic constructions – Culicover’s (1999)“syntactic nuts.” Second, it suggests a nontraditional approach to syntactic alternations, in which movement operations are replaced by relations between independent constructions. We will briefly mention some possible cases.
I will present Benjamin Bruening’s (2014) paper ”Precede and command revisited” (click here for a link). In this paperBruening argues that the relation ofc-command is irrelevant to binding phenomena, and proposes to replace it with a coarser notion of command, “phase command”. To give a taste of the argumentation, consider the known fact that (1) feels like a principle C violation, although “her” doesn’t c-command “Rosa”; no constituency test tells us that “her” in (1) forms a constituent with “about Rosa’s son” to the exclusion of everything else.
(1) *We talked with her_1 about Rosa_1’s son. (Reinhart 1976)
Furthermore, Bruening argues that precedence also plays a role in accounting for binding phenomena. Hence “precede and (phase-)command” is the correct relationship underlying binding effects.
We will discuss and evaluate Bruening’s attempt to derive “precede and command” from a particular view of the grammar where sentences are built left-to-right, phase by phase.
Speaker: Kai von Fintel (MIT) Title: Conditional desires Date and time: Wednesday, November 7th, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Sentences with an *if*-clause and a desire predicate have a “restricted” reading that claims that among the worlds described by the *if*-clause, the attitude holder prefers certain worlds. Deriving this reading compositionally reveals hidden properties of conditionals and attitude predicates. There are intriguing connections to puzzles in the analysis of deontic conditionals (*if p, ought q*) and conditional imperatives (*if p, do q!*).
Presenter:Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst) & Aleksei Nazarov (University of Toronto) Title: Domain-general learning of stress parameters: A typological investigation Date/Time: Wednesday, November 7, 5:00-6:30pm Location: 32-D831 Abstract:
Existing learners for stress in OT (e.g., Tesar and Smolensky 2000, Boersma and Pater 2013/2016, Jarosz 2013, 2015) are all so-called domain-general learners (need not be specified in UG). However, Pearl (2007, 2011) argues that Principles & Parameters models of stress (e.g., Dresher and Kaye 1990) do necessitate domain-specific learning mechanisms (specified in UG). Nazarov and Jarosz (2017) proposed a domain-general learning with more inference power than Yang’s (2002) learner (which Pearl 2011 showed didn’t work for stress parameters), arguing that domain-general learners may be sufficient for both OT and parametric models.
However, Nazarov and Jarosz (2017) only tested their learner on a small set of stress systems with a subset of Dresher and Kaye’s parameters. To validate these initial results, we have now tested our learner, in addition to 3 versions of Yang’s (2002) learner, on all 280 stress systems that are possible in Dresher and Kaye’s (1990) framework. Similarly to Nazarov and Jarosz (2017), it is found that the proposed learner converges on the correct stress system about 95% of the time, while Yang’s learner does so no more than 10% of the time. To further compare the learners, we have extracted a few statistics on the stress systems themselves that predict their performance under each learner. Finally, we found that the stress systems never learned by Nazarov and Jarosz’s learner are unattested (save for two cases that warrant further investigation), suggesting that the only function of domain-specific learning mechanisms might be to enable the learning of unattested languages.
Title: “She must be mad” Really? Must? Epistemic must statements are felt “weak” because they are usually false [work with Edward Gibson and Rachel A. Ryskin]
Date and time: Thursday, 11/8, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Two main hypotheses have been proposed in the literature about the semantics of epistemic ‘must’. The Strong Must Hypothesis (von Fintel & Gillies, 2010) and the Weak Must Hypothesis (Karttunen, 1972; Kratzer, 1981; Lassiter, 2017). Lassiter (2016) offers an experiment whose results support the Weak Must Hypothesis. I argue that Lassiter (2016)’s task is invalid for testing participants’ competence about truth-conditions of statements and I show that if one modifies Lassiter’s task so that participants understand it as a truth-value task then the results support the Strong Must Hypothesis over the Weak Must Hypothesis. Moreover, Lassiter (2016) offers some weak uses of epistemic ‘must’ derived from a corpus. I discuss these examples as well and challenge their status as piece of evidence supporting the Weak Must Hypothesis.
Overall, I argue for the following claim: the weakness observed since Karttunen (1972) with respect to epistemic ‘must’ statements is not due to their being true in weak contexts but to their being systematically falsely uttered in weak contexts. To account for such systematicity, I propose that epistemic ‘must’ statements are often used hyperbolically.
Itai Bassi will be presenting a paper by Uli Sauerland. This paper uses Lewis counterpart theory to obtain a more constrained and empirically adequate view of the De Re/De Dicto phenomenon. The meeting will take place on Monday 29th in the 8th floor seminar room.
Title : Counterparts block some “De Re” readings
Author(s) : Uli Sauerland
Abstract :
Irene Heim in unpublished work proposed a new syntax-semantics interface for propositional attitude reports based on an ontology without transworld individuals, but counterpart functions instead. We show that the approach can capture the ‘de re’/‘de dicto’ distinction, but makes different predictions from accounts with transworld individuals. Specifically, the account uses a non-invertible counterpart functions: a single individual in an alternative world can be the counterpart of many individuals of the real world. The directionality of counterpart functions predicts that a ‘de dicto’ interpreted DP cannot be an argument of a ‘de re’ interpreted predicate. We show that the predicted restriction is corroborated by existing work on restrictions on ‘de re’ interpretation. The derivation of constraints on ‘de re’ interpretation argues empirically for the counterpart ontology and Heim’s implementation thereof.
Title: Asymmetries in the licensing of bare nominals in Wolof
Date and Time: Tuesday, October 30, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461 Abstract:
In this research in progress, I try to analyze some properties of the syntactic behavior of bare nominals (i.e. nominals without an overt determiner) in Wolof (Niger-Congo), (1c).
(1)
a.
Awa defar na oto bi/yi.
Awa fix NA.3sg car the.SG/the.PL
‘Awa fixed the car/the cars.’
b.
Awa defar na ab/ay oto.
Awa fix NA.3sg some.SG/some.PL car
‘Awa fixed some car/some cars.’
c.
Awa defar na oto.
Awa fix NA.3sg car
Lit.: ‘Awa fixed car.’
Bare nominals in Wolof are apparently singular in that (i) they can bind a singular reflexive, though not a plural one; (ii) they cannot saturate a collective predicate, and (iii) a sentence containing a bare nominal cannot be followed up by the question how many targeting the bare nominal.
However, added plural morphology elsewhere in the sentence “turns” bare nominals plural. A plural relative clause or plural genitive agreement render a bare nominal (i) an adequate binder for a plural anaphor and (ii) an appropriate argument for a collective predicate. Conversely, plural verbal morphology has no effect in the licensing of (i) and (ii). The first asymmetry to explain, then, is why nominal-internal plural morphology in relative clauses and genitive agreement are able to “turn” a bare nominal plural, but verbal morphology does not have the same effect.
A second asymmetry that I will describe is that (iii) a how many follow-up becomes felicitous due to the addition of plural morphology not only from a relative clause or genitive agreement, but also from verbal agreement.
I will present a tentative analysis where bare nominals in Wolof come in two varieties, a singular and a plural one, number being determined by the type of Phi-P (Sauerland 2003) that tops off the bare nominal. With an additional stipulation of a featural difference between a singular and a plural Phi-P and some assumptions about binding, I will try to derive the binding and howmany data. I will also comment on how the analysis falls short of accounting for the collective predicate data.
Speaker: Carolyn Spadine (MIT) & Gunnar Lund (Harvard) Title: Complementizers in matrix contexts: Reporting attitudes without attitude verbs Date and time: Wednesday, October 31st, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Using evidence from attitude-report constructions lacking attitude verbs, we argue against the received view of attitude-reports, which locates the central component of attitude-reports, quantification over sets of accessible worlds, in the attitude verb. Instead, we follow recent proposals (Kratzer 2006, a.o.) placing intensional quantification in the complementizer, while providing an analysis for a class of under-researched attitude reports involving matrix complementizers.
“The study of phonotactics is a central topic in phonology. We propose a theory of phonotactic grammars and a learning algorithm that constructs such grammars from positive evidence. Our grammars consist of constraints that are assigned numerical weights according to the principle of maximum entropy. The grammars assess possible words on the basis of the weighted sum of their constraint violations. The learning algorithm yields grammars that can capture both categorical and gradient phonotactic patterns. The algorithm is not provided with constraints in advance, but uses its own resources to form constraints and weight them. A baseline model, in which Universal Grammar is reduced to a feature set and an SPE-style constraint format, suffices to learn many phonotactic phenomena. In order for the model to learn non-local phenomena such as stress and vowel harmony, it must be augmented with autosegmental tiers and metrical grids. Our results thus offer novel, learning-theoretic support for such representations. We apply the model in a variety of learning simulations, showing that the learned grammars capture the distributional generalizations of these languages and accurately predict the findings of a phonotactic experiment.”
We are happy to announce an extended visit with Lisa Matthewson, joint between MIT and Harvard. Lisa will teach a mini-course at Harvard this Thursday 11/1, details below.
Speaker: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia) Title: Finding semantic building blocks: Tense, aspect and evidentials Time: Thursday, November 1, 12-1:30pm Location: 2, Arrow Street - Room 420 Description:
According to von Fintel and Matthewson (2008), semantic universals will likely not be found at the level of umbrella categories such as ‘perfective’ or ‘accomplishment’. Instead, we should search for semantic building blocks: smaller pieces of meaning, which recur cross-linguistically and combine in different ways. In this mini-course we explore building blocks in the areas of tense, aspect and evidentials. We explore traditional larger categories like ‘past’, ‘perfect’, and ‘inferential’, and we identify recurring atoms such as existential quantification over times, changes-of-state, and reliance on prior reports. We discuss the new perspectives on cross-linguistic comparison which result from this approach.
This week’s Comp-Lang meeting features our very own Keny Chatain! everyone is welcome to join. Pizza will be served.
Speaker:Keny Chatain (MIT) Title: Is logic useful in the study of meaning? Pronouns can tell Date and time: Thursday, 11/1, 5-6pm Location: 46-5165 Abstract:
Pronouns, like he, she, or it, are among the items with highest frequency in English and other languages that use overt pronouns. Within the same language, they have a variety of uses that do not form an obvious natural class. They can for instance be used to refer to a previously mentioned name (the anaphoric use), but also as variables in quantified statements (the bound use, e.g. ‘every athlete thinks he will win’). More intriguingly, it seems, in broad strokes, that no language distinguishes these uses by employing different forms, suggesting an underlying connection between them.
In this talk, I will show how this connection has been used to shed light on the system that underlies meaning. I will start off by showing that standard predicate logic provides a remarkably adequate understanding of the behavior of pronouns. I will then present the famous case of so-called donkey sentences that translations to predicate logic seem unable to capture. These cases are taken to argue in favor of new take on the meaning of sentences, called Dynamic Semantics ; the meaning of sentences, it is claimed, is more appropriately understood as the effect that sentences have on the context. I will show how this approach can capture donkey sentences, and other pronoun-related phenomena. Time allowing, I will discuss alternatives.
Speaker: Lisa Matthewson (UBC)
Title: Micro-variation in discourse particles: From St’át’imcets to German (joint work with Henry Davis) Time: Friday, November 2nd, 3:30-5pm Place: 32-155 Abstract:
Discourse particles convey information about the discourse status of propositions and the belief states of interlocutors. They are cross-linguistically understudied, and there is little understanding of what makes a possible vs. impossible particle meaning.
Investigating micro-variation offers a route towards eventually answering the big-picture questions. In this talk we examine the St’át’imcets (Salish) ‘frustrative’ particle, and compare it to similar elements in Tohono O’odham, Kimaragang and German. We argue that the particles micro-vary in properties including whether the prejacent is entailed, (lack of) reference to the common ground, (lack of) reference to a salient proposition, and (a)symmetry of contrast entailments.
Michel DeGraff, along with Enoch Aboh, Viviane Déprez, Salikoko Mufwene and Anne Zribi-Hertz, were plenary speakers at a conference in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, October 18–19, 2018, celebrating the 40-year anniversary of the Applied Linguistics Faculty of the State University of Haiti. The conference was also in honor of the memory of two giants of linguistics in Haiti: Prof. Yves Dejean and Prof. Pierre Vernet. Michel’s slides for his plenary lecture are available on his Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/michel.degraff/posts/10156836065143872
Vincent Rouillard will be continuing the De Re/De Dicto saga on the linguistic side with the influential Percus and Sauerland (2003). The meeting will take place on Monday 22nd in the 8th floor seminar room, i.e. the usual time & place.
Title : On the LFs of attitude reports
Author(s) : Orin Percus and Uli Sauerland
Abstract :
We argue that attitude reports with embedded pronouns have LFs that specifically describe “de se” attitudes. We offer some proposals for what the LFs of attitude reports look like.
Speaker: Christos Christopoulos (UConn/Harvard)
Title: Outward-sensitive allomorphy
Date and time: Monday 10/22, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
“I review the literature of counter examples to the Adjacency Condition (e.g. Allen 1979) in outward-sensitive allomorphy and argue that, viewed under a certain set of assumptions, these are no longer counter examples. I also discuss some issues related to the relevant set of assumptions.”
Title: vP infinitives in Wolof: on A’-movement to Spec vP
Date and Time: Tuesday, October 23, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461 Abstract:
In this talk, I will discuss infinitival relative clauses in Wolof. Or more accurately: infinitival clauses with gaps that show A’-properties. We will see evidence from clitic climbing and aspect that one such clause is small (vP-sized). These facts support a view of A’-movement that can target the edge of vP and stop there, even in the absence of higher A’ probes. We will additionally see that these clauses do not form a constituent with the DP that controls the gap, suggesting that they may attach higher as a type of adjunct purpose clause. This begs the question of how the gap comes to be associated with the matrix object. I will offer a preliminary analysis that these gaps are parasitic, which demands covert movement of matrix objects. Also featured in this talk are island sensitive resumptive pronouns!
