Whamit!

Course announcements in this post:

• Topics in Syntax (24.956)
• Topics in Semantics (24.979)
• Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981)
• Topics in Computational Linguistics (24.982)
• Special topics: Linguistics in K-12 education (24.S95)

24.956: Topics in Syntax

• Instructors: Ksenia Ershova and Will Oxford
• Wednesdays, 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Subject is one of the most fundamental and most frequently appealed to notions in the discussion of argument asymmetries cross-linguistically. Subjects are taken to display a cluster of properties, which in tree-geometric terms are associated with being the structurally highest argument in the clause. Properties typically associated with subjects include: (i) unmarked (nominative) case; (ii) the ability to control verbal agreement; (iii) the ability to bind anaphors; (iv) the ability to be PRO and to participate in raising; (v) agentivity and thematic prominence; (vi) topicality; (vii) accessibility for wh-movement. In modern Minimalism these properties are distributed across several positions in the clause, but tend to converge on a single nominal due to standard constraints on locality and movement. In this seminar we will explore phenomena that challenge a universally homogeneous notion of subjecthood, focusing on cases where the subject displays only a subset of typical subjecthood properties, or where subjecthood properties are distributed across more than one argument in the clause. We will discuss both the empirical landscape of research on subjecthood and the implications that research has for syntactic theory and our understanding of locality, intervention, licensing, case, agreement, thematic and structural prominence, etc.

24.979: Topics in Semantics 

• Instructors: Amir Anvari and Kai von Fintel
• Mondays, 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

This semester, we will explore the philosophy of natural language semantics, or meta-semantics. The overarching question will be: what has to be the case for a prominent branch of formal semantics, often referred to as Heim-and-Kratzer semantics, and various specific proposal made within it over years, to make any sense? The course will be split in two parts. In part one, our attention will be focused on what makes formal semantics formal: the emphasis on entailment and contradiction. These concepts seem to play important and diverse roles in semantic theorizing and, by extension, linguistic theory. What does this tell us about language and, by extension, how the mind works? In part two, we will discuss a series of issues, some of which may already be raised in part one. Possible topics include internalism vs externalism; the prospects for referential semantics; the idea of natural language metaphysics/ontology; the position of semantics vis-a-vis cognitive science and/or philosophy; questions of expressive power and type economy; issues of modularity; the connection between language and thought; critiques of mainstream formal semantics from authors like Chomsky, Jackendoff, and Pietroski.

We concur with the following from Bob Stalnaker’s seminar description: “The schedule will be flexible and open ended, following the discussion where it leads, and spending as much time on each topic as it seems to need. That is, we will make it up as we go along.”

As usual, to receive credit, we expect active participation in seminar meetings, weekly emailed questions and comments, and a final paper.

24.981: Topics in Computational Phonology

• Instructor: Giorgio Magri
• Tuesdays, 2-5
• Room: 66-160

This year’s installment of 24.981 (Topics in Computational Phonology) will focus on categorical phonology and will address the perennial issue of OT’s strict domination versus HG’s constraint weighting and the additive (or cumulative or gang) effects precluded to the former but allowed by the latter. The tentative plan includes the following issues.

[1] Defining additive effects.
I will put forward a new, purely extensional definition of ‘additive’ effects. We will then discuss it through a couple of concrete examples
that have figured prominently in the literature on additive effects. If the definition makes sense, it affords a way to talk about additive effects (and thus of comparing OT and HG) that makes no reference to constraints, weights, or rankings.

[2] OT and HG as two sides of the same coin. I will introduce the OT and HG implementations of constraint-based
phonology from scratch, trying to formally deduce both of them from the same axiom on additive effects in one fell swoop. This suggests
that, when OT and HG are construed within the huge space of all logically possible implementations of constraint-based phonology, they are quite similar in terms of additive effects: neither of them yields many.

[3] Additive effects in OT and HG.
We will then focus on additive effects in HG and OT, trying to understand which additive effects are indeed within HG’s reach and
which instead require something like ‘constraint conjunction’ in both OT and HG.

[4] OT as ‘margin-free’ HG.
We will then switch to learnability, focusing on ‘online’ or ‘error-driven’ learners (that is, learners that discard each piece of data after having encountered it, rather than storing it). I will review the classical ERCD/GLA theory of online learning in OT. We will then discuss the ideas of ‘margin’ and ‘kernel trick’ in the context of HG. And I will try to conclude that HG, contrary to OT, comes with no good online learners.

[5] Strict domination and exponential update rules.
OT’s strict domination can be mimicked by HG weighting, as long as the weights decay exponentially fast (relative to the size of the constraints). Building on this observation, we will investigate whether learning algorithms with an exponential update rule can be rebooted as OT learning algorithms. We will focus on two cases: ‘AdaBoost’, a batch iterative algorithm; and Winnow, an online algorithm.

Quoting from Amir and Kai’s quote of Bob’s seminar description: “The schedule will be flexible and open ended, following the discussion
where it leads, and spending as much time on each topic as it seems to need. That is, we will make it up as we go along.” As for requirements, I propose the following three: (1) a squib to turn in at the end of the course; (2) four simple problem sets (one every two weeks, during the first two months of the course); (3) taking turns at transcribing classes (that will be taught out of a lean handout, mostly at the blackboard). This course can be used to satisfy the program’s acquisition requirement with a suitable choice of the topic for the final project. Please consult me at the beginning of the semester if you are planning to do so.

24.982: Topics in Computational Linguistics

• Instructor: Forrest Davis
• Tuesdays, 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

We will be exploring the relationship between computational models and linguistic theory, with a particular focus on neural models of language (e.g., GPT-3). The main theme of the course will be how neural models should relate to a theory of language. As a means of orienting our initial discussions, we will focus on three papers:

1. Wilcox, Futrell, and Levy. (2022). Using Computational Models to Test Syntactic Learnability. Linguistic Inquiry.
2. Baroni. (2022). On the proper role of linguistically-oriented deep net analysis in linguistic theorizing. In Algebraic Structures in Natural Language.
3. Steinert-Threlkeld and Szymanik (2019). Learnability and semantic universals. Semantics and Pragmatics.

Taking these papers in turn, we will touch on a variety of topics ranging from the relationship (or lack thereof) between grammaticality and probability, acceptability judgments, learnability, and the poverty of the stimulus. Background material will be supplemented as needed and topics expanded depending on interest. Possible additional directions include, probing models for syntactic trees (e.g., Hewitt and Manning, 2019, A Structural Probe for Finding Syntax in Word Representations), superficialism (e.g., Rey,, 2020, Representation of Language), and/or meta-learning for adding linguistic knowledge to models (e.g., McCoy et al., 2020, Universal linguistic inductive biases via meta-learning).

No programming will be necessary for this course. Instead, the goal is to bring linguists from a variety of backgrounds in conversation with recent developments in computational modeling (and the excitement around their ‘abilities’). Supplemental interactive code notebooks may be circulated for those interested in engaging more deeply with the computational experiments highlighted in the course.

For those enrolled there are three requirements, i) active participation in class discussions, ii) posting comments/questions/thoughts on readings via canvas, and iii) a squib to be submitted at the end of the course. Visitors are welcome – either regularly or sporadically! Please send me your email address if you are not registered so that I can add you to the canvas.

Quoting from Giorgio’s quote from Amir and Kai’s quote of Bob’s seminar description: “The schedule will be flexible and open ended, following the discussion where it leads, and spending as much time on each topic as it seems to need. That is, we will make it up as we go along.”

24.S95: Special topics: Linguistics in K-12 education

• Instructor: Maya Honda
• Wednesdays, 2-5pm
• Room: 26-142

In this seminar, we will explore the idea that the study of language in K-12 (kindergarten-grade 12) education can be a means to develop young people’s understanding of scientific inquiry as well as their understanding of the nature of language. We will examine the view that the native language knowledge that each student brings to the classroom comprises a rich, accessible database, which can be used to give students the opportunity to become familiar with the methods, concepts, and attitudes of scientific inquiry. We will probe past and current efforts to engage young learners in linguistic inquiry and consider how to advance this work.

The challenge of this seminar is to create pedagogical materials and methods that will motivate learners of all ages to be inquisitive about their native language and about language in general, with a primary focus on secondary school students (grades 6-12). Seminar participants will work with one another and in partnership with K-12 teachers whenever possible.

There are two prerequisites for the seminar: the first is that you come motivated to making linguistic inquiry accessible to all and the second is that you come committed to collaborating with others in this work. Previous experience teaching linguistics at any level is welcome, but not required. Graduate students from other departments and undergraduates are also welcome if they have taken a linguistics course or if they have the instructor’s approval.

Instructor: Hadas Kotek
Wednesdays 2-3:20pm; 5-231 or virtual


The industry workshop aims to equip its participants with the knowledge required to apply for non-academic jobs.
Each meeting will be comprised of two parts:
an external speaker for the first 30-45 minutes of the meeting (see list below)
a discussion topic, review of participants’ material, and/or hands-on practice
We will cover topics such as: types of jobs for linguists, types of industries and companies linguists are employed in, transferable skills, internships and other ways you can prepare for the market, searching for jobs and networking, preparing a resume, interviewing, negotiating offers, and special considerations for international students. We will use Canvas alongside a communal course notes document to collect and disseminate materials and to share links to relevant web pages, job ads, and other resources among ourselves.

Anyone who might consider a non-academic job (i.e., everyone!) is invited to attend. It may be of particular interest to graduating students, but also to anyone who wants to plan a few years ahead and has the time to adjust their studies and projects to be better prepared for a diverse job market.

The expected workload for this workshop is quite low. I do not intend to assign any required homework or readings. Ideally you will leave this workshop after having done a bit of introspection into the types of skills you most enjoy using and the jobs and industries where you could put them to use, you will have a draft resume that has gone through at least one iteration of feedback+revising, and you will have practiced at least some basic interview questions. Where relevant, you will have also thought about what changes or additions you might make to your existing coursework and projects to become better prepared for a future career of interest.

External speakers:
David Q. Sun, Siri NL data science manager: 9/21 (in person)
Andy Zhang, Google Ads analytical linguist: 9/28 (virtual)
Afton Coombs, Spotify data science: 10/5 (virtual)
Ruth Brillman, Google software engineer: 10/12 (in person)
Alaina Talboy, author of “What I Wish I Knew: A Field Guide for Thriving in Graduate Studies”: 10/19 (virtual)
Sarah Clark, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) strategic communications officer: 10/26 (virtual)
Katharina Pabst, educational developer, York University: 11/2 (virtual)
Khia Johnson, Audio@Meta UX researcher: 11/9 (virtual)
Kim Witten, career coach: 11/16 (virtual)
(11/23 – no class: Thanksgiving)
Sherry Yong, Alexa AI knowledge engineer: 11/30 (virtual)
Charlotte Prieu, Amazon data linguist: 12/7 (virtual)

24.964: Topics in Phonology

Giorgio Magri

Monday, 10-1, 32-D461

Phonological theory has recently extended its empirical coverage from
categorical to quantitative probabilistic data. What is the proper
model of probabilistic phonology? This question is difficult. In fact,
while categorical phonology can be done with paper-and-pencil,
probabilistic phonology cannot. Sophisticated tools are needed to
analyze probabilistic grammars and spell out their phonological
predictions. On the **practical side**, the goal of this class is to
develop some of these tools, and thus to be able to do theoretical
phonology in the probabilistic setting with the same degree of
maturity we have been doing categorical phonology up until now. The
class comes with a companion piece of software (CoGeTo, available at
https://cogeto.stanford.edu/home), that implements these tools and
thus allows class participants to apply them on test cases of
interest.

On the **theoretical side**, I will use these tools to defend a very
specific proposal about the right model of probabilistic phonology. I
will distinguish two classes of models. ‘Intrinsically’ probabilistic
models (such as maximum entropy; ME) postulate phonological grammars
that directly assign probabilities and are therefore very different
from traditional categorical grammars. ‘Extrinsically’ probabilistic
models (such as stochastic harmonic grammar; SHG) instead rely on
traditional categorical grammars and derive the probabilistic behavior
indirectly from the assumption that speakers are uncertain as to which
categorical grammar to use. The class will develop an argument (based
on inference and typological predictions) in favor of SHG and against
intrinsically probabilistic models such as ME. If the argument goes
through, it shows that probabilistic natural language phonology is
intrinsically categorical, after all.

This paper (which is short, if you ignore the
appendix) illustrates some of the tools that will be developed in the
class and sketches the theoretical argument that I will try to make.

24.943, Fall 2022: Aspects of Haitian Creole in minds, in history and in society

Michel DeGraff

Wednesdays 10AM–1PM, Room 32-D831

“In carrying out field research, linguists are inevitably responsible to the larger human community which its results could affect… What matters is eventual success, and that will be measured by the extent to which work on the language is integrated in a meaningful way into the life of the community of people who speak it.” (Ken Hale, 2001)

Background and Course Description:

First, some personal and historical background to unveil my positionality and situate the aspects of this course that are rooted in my biography and ongoing concerns as a linguist, educator, activist, Haitian and human being; then some details about topics, requirements, calendar, etc.

2022 is another eventful year for me as a Haitian linguist and for Haiti and Haitian Creole (“Kreyòl”) for a few reasons.  Here I’ll mention six of these.  The first one is the personal that’s political, the latter five bear on history, socio-linguistics and education—all of these contribute to the political context of the course, keeping in mind Ken Hale’s exhortation above:

1. This year (2022) I’ve been both selected as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and nominated to stand for election for a seat on LSA’s Executive Committee.  I take both of these as kudos to my work on Kreyòl with the MIT-Haiti Initiative.  The challenges, opportunities and documents related to this Initiative will provide some of the backdrop and resources for this course.

2. On February 22, 2022, DuoLingo released its Haitian Creole online course—which will be another important resource for this course.

3. On April 1, 2022 (April’s Fool Day) Prof. Rochambeau Lainy, a linguist and a founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen (AKA), made a public plea that French should remain as the primary language of instruction in Haiti, a country where most students (and teachers!) are fluent in Kreyòl only.  Later that year, AKA’s scientific commission has made proposals to alter the structure of Kreyòl’s phonemic alphabet and to adopt letter names that are derived from French, thus distancing the alphabet from its phonemic bases.

4. On April 6, 2022, Ambassador Dominique Dupuy, Haitian Delegate at UNESCO in Paris, took a spectacular public stance against linguistic discrimination in UNESCO’s survey for their World Language Atlas whereby Creole languages (alongside Pidgins, Mixed Languages and Language Isolates) were mis-classified outside the “Language” category.

5. It’s now been 40 years since the most transformative and (in?)famous reform in the history of education in Haiti: the 1982 reform by Mr. Joseph C. Bernard who was Minister of National Education in Haiti from 1979 to 1982.  He was fired in 1982 by Dictator / President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier soon after he (Bernard) began efforts at implementing this reform whereby Kreyòl was to become a language of instruction in the first 10 years of schooling.  Now, Minister Nesmy Manigat, the current Minister of Education since November 2021, has valiantly relaunched efforts to implement the Bernard Reform.  So this course will be proceeding in parallel with Minister Manigat’s efforts toward the use of Kreyòl to open up quality education for all in Haiti, alongside often vociferous invectives against the claim that Kreyòl is a “normal” language instead of an expressively inadequate deformation of French. These invectives echo similar attacks, even among linguists, against the validity of Kreyòl and other Creole languages throughout their history.

6. 2022 is also when the New York Times (on May 25, 2022) published a historic series of articles on the Ransom that King Charles X of France levied against Haiti in 1825 as an indemnity for repayment of the “lost property” of the white colonists who were ousted in 1804 as a result of the successful Haitian Revolution against colonization and slavery.  As the NYT documents, France’s syphoning Haiti’s financial reserves from the birth of our nation (a ransom that forced Haiti into endless cycles of debts and corruption) made it impossible for Haiti to ever have any opportunity for sustainable development and sovereignty.  The NYT articles also show that this ransom was orchestrated by France as one way to punish Haiti for having successfully defied white supremacy and having started the #BlackLivesMatter movement—long before the hashtag era.  This is the first time in history that an article in a major international newspaper was translated into Kreyòl.

In turn, the NYT “Ransom” articles raise questions that connect issues in all six bullet points above. To start with, let’s ask:   

Why would the Haitian élites in power in the early 19^th century ever agree to, and even celebrate, Charles X’s ordinance for such an abominable ransom whose amount even included the “property” value of the enslaved Africans that liberated themselves?

The answer is very complex, but my contention, as I follow the analyses of anthropologists, sociologists and historians such as Michel Rolph Trouillot, Jean Casimir and Alex Dupuy, is that such consent on the part of the Haitian State in the 19^th-century was also a tacit consent to participate in white supremacy against the Haitian nation and the Haitian Revolution’s promise of “equality for all.”  This Francophile élite did not recognize themselves in the language, culture and political and economic interests of the broader Kreyòl-speaking population.  Furthermore the racially motivated oppression against the Haitian nation is connected to the reasons why the 1982 Bernard Reform (for the benefit of the Kreyòl-speaking majority in Haiti) has been such a challenge to implement, up to today, in spite of its robust scientific foundations in linguistics and education.

In turn, the ambivalence toward Kreyòl as language of instruction is connected to the psychological and social consequences of the brutal transatlantic slave trade that triggered the formation of Creole languages in Africa and the Caribbean, including my native Haiti.  Some of my papers have analyzed how the hierarchies of power embedded in this colonial, then neo-colonial, history have shaped certain scientific claims around Creole languages, from the onset of Creole studies, as early as the very first description of Creole languages by European scholars in the 17^th century.  Understanding these socio-historical connections will help us look at analyses of Haitian Creole and other Creole languages in a broader frame for social justice which can benefit the speakers of the languages that we linguists so love to study.

Indeed, the field of Creole studies is still discomforted by debates around the proper characterization of Creole languages and their formation—debates around a host of questions such as:

• Are Creole languages “normal” / “regular” languages? 
• Do Creole languages arise through “abnormal” processes of language evolution? 
• Are Creole languages (part of) a family?
• In the case of Caribbean Creole languages, are they genetically related to the Indo-European or Niger-Congo languages that were in contact during Creole formation?
• Do Creoles belong to an “exceptional” typology? 
• Can Creole languages be used to teach and learn science and other complex concepts?

The last question is one that is most relevant to ongoing debates in contemporary education circles in Haiti and most everywhere else in the Greater Caribbean and beyond in the Global South. And all these questions are part of the larger socio-historical and biographical backdrop of this seminar. But here we won’t spend too much time on these centuries-old debates about the development, structures and viability of Creole languages, even though these debates still infect most linguistic textbooks—as a banal reflex of unbroken transmission of biases via (neo-)colonial power/knowledge cycles in the human sciences.

What we’ll do then, in the first couple of sessions of the course, is to sample these debates and the biases therein.  Then, in the rest of the course, we’ll focus on  Kreyòl as a perfectly “normal”language, and we’ll study it with “uniformitarian”lenses—that is, we’ll enlist the toolbox of syntactic theory in order to examine Kreyòl as a language that is as “exceptional” as every other language. More generally, I’d like to assume that whatever tools linguistic theory gives us to understand the synchrony and diachrony of any non-Creole language will also help us understand the synchrony and diachrony of any Creole language. That is, our seminar will assume that there’s absolutely no need for a sui generis theory of Creole formation.

With these caveats in mind, I will invite students to take a stab at various puzzles in the diachrony and synchrony of Haitian Creole and other Creole and non-Creole languages.  I do have a preliminary menu of puzzles and theoretical proposals to analize some of the data in these puzzles. This menu comes mostly from my own work, over the past three decades, on Haitian Creole, alongside a manuscript in progress, from which I will share drafts of chapters.  But I also want to leave space for course participants to come up with their own favorite puzzles and challenges, especially if they might bear on puzzles that still resist neat explanations.

Course requirements and preliminary calendar of activities

Course participants will present and lead discussion on topics of their liking that connect with the afore-mentioned areas of syntax and that include relevant (Haitian) Creole data. So the formal course requirements will include regular weekly participation, questions and comments about assigned readings before each session, in-class presentations and a short paper (~10 pages) which may well be a draft of something publishable.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, September 7, we’ll begin the seminar with a discussion of basic socio-historical and political issues (as sketched above), in order to clear up some muddy issues around general terminological and conceptual background about “Creole” languages and their history.  We will also use that the first session to survey participants’ backgrounds, interests and (potential) topics for research in the context of the cours.e

Then time permitting or perhaps next Wednesday, September 14, we’ll segue with my and Enoch Aboh’s views about “A null theory of Creole formation based on Universal Grammar.”

Meanwhile you may also want to look at another paper of mine that gives a general survey of Haitian Creole—from John Holm’s 2007 book Comparative Creole Syntax:

Course Requirements (equally weighted at 25% each):

1. Regular weekly class participation
2. Questions & comments on relevant readings before each session—by Monday, 8PM
3. Presentation in class (toward the end of the semester)
4. Short paper (~10 pages)

TENTATIVE Schedule of Classes with topics—subject to change based on participants’ evolving interests, new questions and new puzzles, etc.

Wed., 9/7:       General socio-historical introduction—“the politics of Creole studies” starting with the colonial invention of “race” and of “Creole languages” 

                        DeGraff (2020) “The politics of education in post-colonies: Kreyòl in Haiti as a case study of language as technology for power and liberation”
https://iacpl.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/DeGraff-1.pdf

 Wed., 9/14:     General background about “Creoles” — What’s in a label?  “Creole Exceptionalism” vs. “Uniformitarianism”

                        Aboh & DeGraff (2017) “A null theory of Creole formation based on Universal Grammar” http://linguistics.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/aboh-and-degraff-2017-null-theory-of-creole-formation.pdf                       

                        DeGraff (2007) “Kreyòl Ayisyen or Haitian Creole” http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/degraff/degraff2007hc-ccs.pdf

                        A peek at DuoLingo’s online Kreyòl course—and at some puzzles (glitches?) there in search of analyses https://www.duolingo.com/course/ht/en/Learn-Haitian%20Creole

                        [To be continued…]

Course announcements in this post:

• 24.943: Syntax of a Language Family: Turkic and their neighbours
• 24.956: Topics in Syntax: The Syntax of Agree(ment)
• 24.964 Topics in Phonology: Phonological grammars as integrated systems: Yiddish and Romanian
• 24.979 Topics in Semantics: Discourse referents inside and out

24.943 Syntax of a Language Family: Turkic and their neighbours

• Instructors:   Rafael Abramovitz, Dmitry Privoznov
• Time:              Tuesdays 10:00am-1:00pm
• Room:            32-D461
• Description:

This class will be dedicated to the syntax of Turkic languages (with some short excursions to Uralic, Mongolic and Chukotko-Kamchatkan). We will discuss some topics in linguistic theory into which we believe that these languages can provide a useful insight.

The first part of the class will be dedicated to case studies (“studies of case”) and related topics: the structure of DP/NP and of a (finite, nominalized, relative) clause. We will discuss three cases of differential case marking and what these might tell us about the theory of case/Case/Kase/χase/ɣase/ʁase/ʔase… and the dependent vs. abstract case debate. First, we will discuss the differential case marking of the possessor in a noun phrase or Differential Possessor Marking, in relation to the NP/nP/PossP/DP-structure and the structure of nominalized relative clauses and the syntactic position of their subjects. Second, we will discuss the differential case marking of the object in a transitive clause or Differential Object Marking and object agreement in Uralic. Third, we will discuss the differential case marking of the subject in argument nominalizations or Differential Subject Marking.

In the second part of the class we will talk about the syntax and semantics of argument alternating suffixes. In particular, we will talk about the causative construction (variable case of the Causee) and the passive construction (passivized unaccusatives).

The third part of the class will be dedicated to focus and information structure. We will talk about local scrambling, the SOV-OSV word order alternation and the preverbal focus position (with some discussion of the Turkic variant of wh in-situ).

• Requirements:

Weekly readings and participation, one question about one of the readings every week by email, a Ken Hale style research proposal in place of a final paper.

• Tentative list of topics:

  - Background

  I Case studies

  - Differential Possessor Marking (DPM)

                 - Turkic ezafe

                 - The NP/nP/DP-structure

                 - Nominalized relative clauses

                 - Subjects of nominalized relative clauses

  - Differential Object Marking (DOM)

                 - The dependent case for Sakha

                 - The abstract case for Tatar

                 - Object (pseudo)incorporation

                 - Object agreement and DOM in Uralic and beyond

  - Differential Subject Marking (DSM)

                 - Nominalized clausal arguments

                 - DSM in Turkish and Balkar nominalizations

  II Argument alternations

  - Causatives and the case of the Causee

  - Causal passives

  III Clausal structure and focus

  - Preverbal focus

  - Wh-in-situ

24.956 Topics in Syntax: The Syntax of Agree(ment)

• Instructors:   Amy Rose Deal, David Pesetsky
• Time:              Tuesdays 2:00-5:00pm
• Room:            32-D461
• Website:        https://canvas.mit.edu/courses/13433
• Description:

This seminar will focus on the syntax of long-distance dependencies. Of special interest is the proposal that all such dependencies are derived via a single grammatical operation, Agree. In the first part of the course, we aim to delimit basic properties of this operation with special reference to phi-Agree, clitic doubling, and movement. Empirical phenomena of special interest involve hierarchical agreement systems, PCC effects, mixed A/A’ phenomena, and locality effects (phases, Keine’s “horizons”). In the second part of the course, the logic connecting agreement to movement will be explored further, as we look carefully at the proposal for a more indirect link between the two advanced in Longenbaugh’s (2019) MIT dissertation, as modified and developed in Newman’s (2021) dissertation — as well as what might be needed to connect clause reduction phenomena with independent discoveries concerning the syntax of agreement such as Kinyalolo’s Generalization.

• Course requirement #1 (all attendees): weekly online discussion contributions

This class will work best if those attending it are engaged enough to think about the topics both outside of class and in class itself.  With this in mind, we would like to strongly encourage students who wish to attend to register for the class.  If you want to attend faithfully but do not want to write a paper, we ask that you register as a listener and at least fulfill the posting assignment below.  It’s not onerous, and should in fact be fun.

By Friday evening each week, every student participating in the class should post a question or comment about what we have been discussing and/or reading on our Piazza discussion board. (There is a Piazza tab on the Canvas site.)  The ideal question/comment shows some substantive thinking about the topic, e.g. discussion of possible answers, the significance of the question, or other thoughts that clarify the contribution and might spark discussion. This is also a place to think about possible connections between what we have read/discussed and other work with which you are familiar or curious to learn more about.

By Monday evening each week, every student should post a reply or followup to the post of at least one other student.  These too should go beyond “I agree” or “Wow!”, and attempt to answer the question asked or develop a theme from the original posting. The goal of this is to work collaboratively toward a deeper understanding of course topics and a richer view of how course topics integrate with other areas of linguistic inquiry.

These contributions need not be long or formal (a few sentences will sometimes be fine), but should be thoughtful. 

• Course requirement #2 (registered students): final paper + presentation of project

By the end of the week after Spring break, every registered student should pick a topic related to the class (the instructors are happy to help) and submit a short prospectus for their final paper, stating the problem to be explored and why it is interesting.  The final 1-2 weeks will be reserved for students to present their projects.  The final paper itself will be due at the end of the semester.

• Hybridity policy

Obviously, if you are ill or do not pass the daily symptom screener, stay home; we will work with you to make sure that you miss as little as possible. Please be in touch to let us know about the situation. Similarly, if one of the instructors is unable to attend due to COVID related reasons, we will be in touch to make alternative arrangements for class. If you are not ill/unable to attend due to health reasons or MIT policy, we expect you to be in class each week. Our experiences over the past few semesters have taught us that classes like these work best if we are all together in the same classroom.  So: catch the bus on time, get plenty of sleep the night before, and join us for class in the seminar room!  

24.964 Topics in Phonology: Phonological grammars as integrated systems: Yiddish and Romanian

• Instructors:   Adam Albright, Donca Steriade
• Time:              Mondays 2:00-5:00pm
• Room:            32-D461
• Description:

1. 1. The grammar may employ multiple levels of evaluation (as in Stratal OT; Kiparsky 2000) or multiple grammars associated with different morphological constructions (as in Cophonologies; Inkelas and Zoll 2005, Inkelas 2016, Sande et al. 2020), containing distinct rankings
   2. There may be constraints indexed to specific morphemes (Pater 2009) or to lexical classes (Ito and Mester 1995) which differ in their rankings from analogous unindexed constraints.
   3. Different processes require different sub-rankings, in a way that can be captured by rules, but not OT constraint hierarchies

• Requirements:

• Tentative list of topics:

24.979 Topics in Semantics: Discourse referents inside and out

• Instructors:   Patrick Elliott, Amir Anvari
• Time:              Mondays 10:00am-1:00pm
• Room:            32-D461
• Description:
  

“Consider a device designed to read a text in some natural language, interpret it, and store the content in some manner, say, for the purpose of being able to answer questions about it. To accomplish this task, the machine will have to fulfill at least the following basic requirement. It has to be able to build a file that consists of records of all the individuals, that is, events, objects, etc., mentioned in the text and, for each individual, record whatever is said about it. Of course, for the time being at least, it seems that such a text interpreter is not a practical idea, but this should not discourage us from studying in abstract what kind of capabilities the machine would have to possess, provided that our study provides us with some insight into natural language in general.” (Karttunen 1976)

The notion of a discourse referent emerged from the work of Lauri Karttunen and David Lewis (Karttunen 1976; Lewis 1979), during a time of general optimism concerning connections between linguistic theory and artifical intelligence research. The central idea is that discourse participants introduce and manipulate variables corresponding to individuals mentioned over the course of a conversation. This powerful idea subsequently informed dynamic approaches to meaning, which essentially model anaphora as a powerful cross-referencing device (Heim 1982; Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991). Frank Veltman crystalizes the ‘slogan’ of dynamic approaches to meaning as follows: “You know the meaning of a sentence if you know the change it brings about in the information state of anyone who accepts the news conveyed by it” (Veltman 1996). Irene Heim’s foundational work on file change semantics in the 80s lead to an explosion of insightful research applying this central idea to an impressive variety of empirical domains. At the same time, dynamic semantics incorporates powerful propietary mechanisms for manipulating contexts in an apparently arbitrary fashion, and even precompiles these mechanisms into the meanings of logical vocabulary such as “or”. In this seminar we’ll track developments in dynamic approaches to anaphora, starting from classical theories of (singular) pronouns and their indefinite antecedents, and eventually progressing to intricate theories of modality, plurality, and quantification. In parallel, we’ll consider what exactly dynamic semantics commits us to, both as a theory of content, and as a theory of how semantic composition proceeds. A central goal will be a re-assessment of Veltman’s slogan, in light of recent work that fine-tunes the division of labour between dynamic semantics and pragmatics (Elliott 2020b; Mandelkern 2020).

One of the themes of the seminar will be linguistic motivations for a rich notion of contexts, which goes beyond a “flat” model of information (Stalnaker 1976) and incorporates a notion of aboutness. Mid-way through the semester, we’ll take a break from anaphora and consider a set of empirical phenomena which motivate a different kind of enrichment. Thanks to Amir Anvari for providing the following summary:

“We will rehearse a host of puzzles that have been discussed in the literature on oddness (Singh 2008, Katzir & Singh 2014, Mayr & Romoli 2016, Mandelkern & Romoli 2018, Marty & Romoli 2021). The ambition is to provide a unified analysis for all these cases. We begin with the classical insight, as formulated by Katzir & Singh (2015), that “a good assertion is one that provides a good answer to a good question”: a good sentence is one that is about something. We explore the idea that the question that a sentence addresses in a given context is one that must be constructed in a principled fashion from sentence itself and its formal alternatives (Katzir 2007, Fox & Katzir 2011). If such a “formal background question” cannot be constructed, the sentence is not about anything and predicted to be odd. We will explore one implementation of this idea in the context of the puzzles mentioned.”

• Requirements
  

Regular readings and participation, a squib, a short presentation of a paper/original research.

Michel DeGraff is inviting colleagues and students, with interest in linguistics for a better world, to visit his new seminar.  You are welcome to visit any and all sessions on Tuesdays 2-5pm (see schedule of themes and guest speakers below). Please forward far and wide to all those who might be interested.

Linguistics and social justice:
Language, education & human rights
24.S96, Tu 2-5PM
In person — in Room 32-D461
Via Zoom and Facebook Live @MITHaiti — please email degraff@mit.edu for link and for further details

Here’s Michel’s course description:

I am very excited about this new seminar because it brings together three topics that I am passionate about and that I think should be of utmost importance, not only to linguists, but also to the world at large. These three topics are: linguistics, education and social justice.

So I’m hoping that you too will be interested as well, as I am planning much of this seminar as a “sandbox” for designing the foundations of socially-engaged research that can have practical impact in the lives of the people whose languages we so love to study.

Our point of departure will be these three related observations:

1) We linguists take it for granted that all languages, including languages in the Global South, are worthy of study in our investigation of Universal Grammar.

2) Yet some 40% of children in the world are prevented from studying in, and valorizing, their home languages—including some of these very languages that we linguists study with such fondness. (Incidentally UNESCO estimates that 43% of the world’s ~6,000 languages are endangered.)

3) And so much of our research in linguistics and the benefits thereof remain inaccessible to the bulk of the very speech communities whose languages we study.

Now consider this three-way gap between:

• our own egalitarian ideals in (1) about the universal worth of the world’s languages;

• these discriminatory practices, in (2), that exclude too many languages in classrooms (and even courtrooms) throughout the world, especially in the Global South, where these languages are most needed for universal access to quality education (and to justice);

• the, often inadvertent, elitist and exclusive nature of academia, as in (3), which risks alienating these very speech communities whose struggles for liberation, justice and economic opportunity stand to benefit from our research in linguistics.

Now here’s a key question for us:

Is it our responsibility, as linguists, to analyze and try to narrow this three-way gap?

Some of the reasons for the sort of linguistic discrimination mentioned in (2) have to do with colonial history and white supremacy writ large.  A full analysis of (2) would take us too far afield as it would require forays into history, sociology, political science, critical race theory, etc.

Our goal this semester will be more modest and more in line with our discipline, though we will certainly need to keep the above disciplines in mind throughout our discussions.  At the very least, we need to unveil the, often hidden, role of ideology and various “normative gazes” in deciding what sorts of questions, in the first place, are even worth asking among linguists.

In this seminar as a “sandbox”, we will look at efforts by linguists and educators making their research more inclusive, accessible and hospitable, and trying to reduce that three-way gap between: (i) linguists’ egalitarian ideals; (ii) linguistic-discrimination practices in various communities world-wide; and (iii) the (perceived) elitist attitudes of academic linguistics.

Our initial case study will be the Global South community that I’m most familiar with, namely my native Haiti—which is a rather spectacular case study whereby most Haitian children are prevented from learning academic subjects in the one language (Kreyòl) that every Haitian fluently speaks while they are forced to learn these subjects in a language (French) that most have no opportunity to learn at home. And most Haitian intellectuals, even (or especially?) some familiar with linguistics, still seem to adhere to the hegemonic belief whereby Kreyòl is “naturally inferior” to French as a language of instruction and as a language to express science, law and most everything else—outside of popular culture artefacts like songs and theater.  This is the sort of hegemonic belief and practices that I myself grew up with and that I’ve learned to un-learn while confronting somewhat related beliefs in certain quarters of linguistics.

In terms of student participation and class requirements, my hope is that each participant will bring in a particular language or language area that instantiates community-wide linguistic discrimination—one that linguists can help solve. In the ideal scenario, these case studies will lead to specific projects that linguists can concretely contribute to.  The overall goal is to have us, all together, sketch models of how linguistics can contribute to the betterment of some speech community.

To stimulate and inspire discussion and projects, we plan to cover topics and welcome speakers that engage work on linguistics for social justice in various areas of the world:

Tuesday, Sep 14, 2021: Linguistics & (in)justice: The case of Creole studies from a Haitian perspective

Tuesday, Sep 21, 2021:    Linguistics & Social Justice: The MIT-Haiti Initiative as a case study

Tuesday, Sep 28, 2021: The Right to Read and Write: Language Activism in a Diasporic Haitian Creole Space (Guests: Wynnie Lamour & Darnelle Champagne)    

Tuesday, Oct 5, 2021: Seychelles’ language policy for “leveling the field” (Guests: Penda Choppy & team)

Tuesday, Oct 12, 2021: A language that binds/a language that divides: the Kreol paradox in Mauritius (Guest: Nicholas Natchoo)    

Tuesday, Oct 19, 2021: Resistance and revitalisation of French Creole in Trinidad & Tobago and Venezuela (Guest: Jo-Anne Perreira)    

Tuesday, Oct 26, 2021: Language Rights & Justice for All in the Caribbean (Guests: Hubert Devonish and team)    

Tuesday, Nov 2, 2021: From definiteness to poetry: doing linguistic work with and in Ch’ol (Guest: Carol Rose Little)    

Tuesday, Nov 9, 2021: Decolonizing Iñupiaq Language Curricula (Guest: Annauk Denise Aulin)    

Tuesday, Nov 16, 2021: Language from Below: Grassroots efforts to develop language technology for minoritized languages. Case studies from Ireland and New Zealand (Guest: Kevin Scannell)    

Tuesday, Nov 23, 2021: Beyond linguistic repression at 60°N: Growing acceptance of diversity in Shetland (Guest: Viveka Velupillai)    

Tuesday, Nov 30, 2021: Cabo Verdean in Education: Access, Equity and a Basic Human Right (Guest: Marlyse Baptista & Abel Djassi Amado)    

Tuesday, Dec 7, 2021a: Language Friendly Schools and children’s rights to their mother tongues (Guests: Ellen-Rose Kambel & Deena Hurwitz)   

Tuesday, Dec 7, 2021b: Linguistics and social justice: The perspective of Haiti’s Ambassador at UNESCO (Guest: Dominique Dupuy)  

Course announcements in this post:

• 24.981: Topics in computational phonology
• 24.964: Topics in Phonology: Generative Phonetics
• 24.956: Topics in syntax and semantics
• 24.960: Syntactic Models

24.981: Topics in computational phonology

• Instructor(s): Adam Albright
• Time: Tuesdays 10-1
• Course site: https://canvas.mit.edu/courses/7288/ 
• Note:

This class does not presuppose any background in modeling or programming, but it does presuppose a basic knowledge of phonological theory (i.e., from 24.961 or 24.901). 

• Description:

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, including a small final project+presentation.
*** This class can be used to satisfy the graduate acquisition requirement, with the appropriate choice of readings, exercises, and project. Please let the instructor know if you are planning on doing this.

24.964: Topics in Phonology: Generative Phonetics

• Instructor(s): Edward Flemming
• Time: Mondays 10-1
• Course site: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp21/24.964/
• Description:

It is well-established that languages differ systematically in matters of fine phonetic detail such as patterns of coarticulation and contextual variation in the durations of segments, so grammars must regulate these details. However, relatively little is known about the component of grammar responsible for phonetic realization. In this course we will investigate the nature of phonetic grammars, focusing on constraint-based approaches. We will cover both theoretical issues surrounding generative phonetics and the practical skills required to develop constraint-based analyses of phonetic data.

24.956: Topics in syntax and semantics

• Instructor(s): Patrick Elliott, Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox, Sabine Iatridou, David Pesetsky
• Time: Mondays and Thursdays 3-5 pm
• Course site: https://canvas.mit.edu/courses/7282
• Description:

Despite the assumed theoretical primacy of declarative sentences, questions have frequently played a central role in the literature spanning syntax, semantics, and pragmatics - informing issues ranging from structure-building and combinatorics, to speech acts and their effect on the common ground. In this vein, we’ll be asking: what kinds of things are questions, how are they built, and what can they do? Specific topics we’ll cover include: question composition and pied-piping, embedded questions and question-embedding predicates, the dynamic pragmatics of questions qua illocutionary acts, and the external syntax of interrogative clauses.

You can find a preliminary syllabus on the canvas site.

• Course requirements:

Active participation, weekly reading, weekly submission of questions and comments about the reading, final term paper on a relevant topic.

*** Students can receive credit for the advanced seminar requirement in either syntax or semantics, depending on their chosen topic for the final term paper. ***

24.960: Syntactic Models

• Instructor(s): David Pesetsky
• Time: Tuesdays 2-5 pm
• Course site: https://canvas.mit.edu/courses/7283
• Description:

The course has twin goals:

First, it gives a quick introduction to at least two “frameworks” for syntactic research that compete with the Government-Binding/Principles & Parameters/Minimalist tradition in the current syntax world:  HPSG and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).  We work speedily through much of the HPSG textbook by Sag, Wasow and Bender, and also look at the LFG textbook by Bresnan, Asudeh, Toivonen and Wechsler.

Next, the class turns historical, tracing the development of generative syntax from Syntactic Structures (1957) up to the early 1980s, when HPSG and LFG first separated themselves off from the research program that became GB/P&P/Minimalism.   An overarching theme of the course is the issue of derivational vs. representational views of syntax — a theme that offers some surprising observations about who said what at various points in the history of the field, but also gives the course a focus relevant to the most current work.  

You can get a good sense of what the class will be like from its old Stellar pages — for example http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp19/24.960.  I plan to follow essentially the same structure — but perhaps with a twist or two for the Zoom era. 

New for 2021:  We may have a guest lecture or two, and it is possible that one or another might be at a non-canonical time, and possibly might involve one or two commitments on top of the regularly scheduled classes.  Obviously these will optional, if they happen at non-normal times, but recommended — just letting you know in advance.

• Course requirements:

As you may have heard, the sole requirements for the class are:

1. 1. regular attendance and participation;
   2. a few straightforward problem sets (finger exercises) in the first half of the class; and
   3. three class presentations or co-presentations (depending on numbers): of an HPSG paper, an LFG paper, and a paper from the period of generative semantics/interpretive semantics debates.  In some years, the HPSG and LFG presentations have been done together.  That will depend on what the calendar looks like when we get to that point in the semester.

There is no paper required! (A major attraction in the past.)  If you want to write a paper, in order to satisfy a program requirement, you can talk with the instructor to arrange that. Many students have reported finding this class both fun and enlightening (and not just because there is no required paper). Ask some of your predecessors for their reviews.

• Reading material:

The most important book to order right now is the following one:

Sag, Wasow and Bender, Syntactic Theory — second edition (this is crucial).  Here are some links so you can buy it now:

https://amzn.to/2RyMEcJ

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo3633025.html

Please start reading it in advance of the first class.  Get as far as you can in it, so you come to the first class already somewhat prepared. This book is intended as an introduction to syntax for undergraduates, so you will find the early chapters go quickly.  But the syntax it introduces is HPSG, so fairly soon you will be learning new things and tripping over unfamiliar notations.

The books we will be using later in the semester are:

• • Bresnan et al., Lexical-Functional Grammar — please note that this too is a second edition.
  • Chomsky, Syntactic Structures

Other readings (papers and excerpts from books) will be downloadable from Canvas.

Michelle Sheehan (Anglia Ruskin University) will be visiting the department this week. In addition to her Colloquium talk on Friday, she will be offering a mini-course on the evidence for and against an ‘escape hatch’ for successive-cyclic A-movement. Details below:

Speaker: Michelle Sheehan (Anglia Ruskin University)
Title: No escape hatch for A-movement: evidence and issues
Time: Wednesday, November 15th, 1:00pm-2:30pm and Thursday, November 16th, 4:00-5:30 pm
Place: 32-D461 (Wed), TBD (Thurs)
Abstract:

This mini-course explores the proposal that A-movement does not proceed through the phase edge. We begin by looking at simple clause-internal A-movement and note that, even if we accept Legate’s (2003) evidence that passive vP is a phase, if we also adopt Chomksy’s (2001) PIC2, there is no need for A-movement to proceed through the phase edge in such contexts. Turning to (more insightful) interclausal contexts, we examine places where A-movement is possible vs. contexts where it is blocked (notably with causative/perception ECM verbs) and note that many of these contrasts can be attributed to the lack of an escape hatch in the v- or C-related phase. For example: 

1. 1. *Kim_i was made/had/let seen/heard/witnessed/listened to [t_i sing]
   2. Kim_i was made/seen/heard [ t_i to sing].
   3. Kim was seen/heard/witnessed/listened to [ t_i singing].
   4. Sam_i was made [ t_i angry] by the news.

 Using independent diagnostics for the size of these ECM complements, we propose that A-movement is blocked in (1a) because it must cross two phase heads. A-movement is permitted in (1b-c) because the complement is larger and so a T-related EPP feeds successive cyclic A-movement. Finally, in (1d) the small clause complement is too small to be phasal. The same effect is observed in instances of raising, and possibly (some instances of) control. Where a phasal complement is embedded and there is no T-projection to feed A-movement before the next phase head is merged, the result is ungrammaticality. Once we have shown that this approach works pretty well for English-type languages, we will address a number of elephants in the room: (i) passivisation of causatives/perception verbs in other languages (the variation problem); (ii) languages which appear to lack an English-style EPP to feed successive cyclic A-movement; (iii) hyperraising and (iv) apparent interactions between A- and A-bar movement that appear problematic for our central claim (including Holmberg, Sheehan and van der Wal 2016, oh dear). We’ll see that many languages have restrictions on the passivisation of causatives and/or perception verbs (Italian, French, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Hungarian), but the patterns are complex and there is a lot of variation both within and across languages. Some languages are also notable in permitting passives of causatives, e.g., Japanese (with complications), Zulu and Sotho. We’ll see how the approach can handle this variation, making testable predictions about the size of complementation in each language. There will be many puzzles left open for participants to solve and they will be encouraged to think about these issues in other languages that they know or work on. 

Benjamin Spector (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) will be visiting the department this week. In addition to his Colloquium talk on Friday, he will be offering a mini-course on the relationship between logical entailment and contextual knowledge. Details below:

Speaker: Benjamin Spector (CNRS)
Title: Understanding the interactions between contextual knowledge and logical entailment: scalar implicatures and presuppositions
Time: Wednesday, October 11th, 12:45-2:15pm and Thursday, October 12th, 3:30-5:00 pm
Place: 32-D461 (Wed), 4-237 (Thurs)
Abstract:

I plan to revisit a number of problems/puzzles in semantics/pragmatics which all have to with the relationship between logical entailment and contextual knowledge. These puzzles include phenomena usually understood in terms of

- Maximize Presupposition
- Interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions
- Blind scalar implicatures

(i) Maximize Presupposition

Why can’t you say “A president of the US came”? Standard answer: because you’d better say “The president of the US came”. What’s responsible for that is Maximize Presupposition.

(ii) Interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions

Relevant reading: Spector & Sudo, Presupposed ignorance and exhaustification: how scalar implicatures and presuppositions interact

(1) Mary is un/aware that some of the students smoke

(1) suggests that in fact not all of the students smoke. The most straightforward theories of scalar implicatures fail to predict this.

(iii) Blind implicatures (Magri oddness cases)

(2) Every professor gave the same grade to all of their student.
#Mary, who is one of the professors, gave an A to some of her students.

The puzzle here is that in the context of the first sentence, the second one is equivalent to ‘Mary gave an A to all of her students’. Yet it is infelicitous, feels nearly contradictory, possibly because ‘some’ triggers a ‘not all’ inference. However, this inference is not expected if the notion of informativity used to compute scalar implicatures takes into account background knowledge: in this context, the sentence with ‘some’ is as informative as the sentence with ‘all’, so there should not be any particular pressure to use ‘all’ rather than ‘some’.

Relevant reading: Giorgio Magri, Another argument for embedded scalar implicatures based on oddness in downward entailing environments.

My goal will be a) to present some of the recent literature about these topics, b) to discuss problems with current theories, c) time-permitting, whether it is possible to unify these different cases, based on on-going work by a student of mine, Amir Anvari.

We have a number of exciting and new courses this coming semester!

24.946. Topics in Syntax

• Instructors: Daniel Fox, Norvin W Richards
• Time: Tuesdays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Course Description:

Stellar site: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa17/24.956/index.html

We will spend the semester considering some properties of A-bar chains; in particular, we’ll be interested in understanding the rules that determine how such chains are pronounced, and trying to figure out what kind of work we can get these rules to do for us. Particular topics include multiple wh-movement, parasitic gaps, ‘lowering’ operations, and extraposition.

Reading for the first class can be found on stellar.

24.979. Topics in Semantics: The Linguistics of Desire

• Instructors: Sabine Iatridou, Kai von Fintel
• Time: Wednesdays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Course Description:

We will discuss classic and current work on the semantics and syntax of desire constructions. We mostly will focus on wanting, wishing, hoping, intending. There are plenty of parallels and connections, among others to deontic modality, teleological modality, imperatives, optatives.

This class can satisfy either the Topics in Semantics or the Topics in Syntax requirement, depending on the nature of your final paper.

An initial list of readings can be found here.

Course requirements for registered students:

• Regular attendance
• Class participation
• Submit weekly questions/comments on the readings by Monday afternoon
• Final paper on a topic related to the seminar

24.964. Topics in Phonology: Reduplication

• Instructors: Sam Zukoff
• Time: Thursdays 2pm-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

Course Description:

Reduplication has played a major role in the development of phonological theory, leading to advances in Autosegmental Phonology (Marantz 1982, Steriade 1982, 1988, McCarthy & Prince 1986) and Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993a,b, 1994), and serving as the basis for Correspondence Theory within OT (McCarthy & Prince 1995, 1999). Since the 1990’s, there have been numerous proposals seeking to revise various aspects of McCarthy & Prince’s core framework of Base Reduplicant Correspondence Theory (e.g. Spaelti 1997, Struijke 2000, Raimy 2000, Inkelas & Zoll 2005, Frampton 2009, Kiparsky 2010, Saba Kirchner 2010, McCarthy, Kimper, & Mullin 2012). Some of these represent fairly minor tweaks, others represent more significant departures. The field has not yet paused to evaluate the arguments motivating these distinct alternatives (which sometimes make incompatible claims about the empirical evidence and its interpretation) nor fully compare their predictions, leaving the analysis of reduplication in a state of flux. This course will explore the core phonological issues relating to reduplication, and attempt to evaluate the various proposals. This course will be primarily concerned with two questions which are central to understanding the phonological properties of reduplication:

(i) How is the shape and composition of the reduplicant determined? Answering this question will involve examining issues such as templates, the emergence of the unmarked, fixed segmentism, locality, and others.

(ii) How do phonological processes interaction with reduplication? Namely, what is the status of the evidence for processes of over-application, under-application, back-copying, “re-copying”, etc. (broadly, opacity and look-ahead) in reduplication (Wilbur 1973), and what machinery is required to properly capture the typology of such effects?

We will take as our baseline the “a-templatic” approach to reduplication within BRCT (Spaelti 1997, Hendricks 1999, Riggle 2006, among many others), an offshoot of Generalized Template Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995, et seq., Urbanczyk 1996, 2001), which seeks to derive reduplicant shape mainly as the interaction between BR faithfulness and markedness, via the emergence of the unmarked.

24.946. Linguistic Theory and Japanese Language

• Instructors: Shigeru Miyagawa
• Time: Mondays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Course Description:

We will take up some recent studies of Japanese on topics including:

• complementation — topicalization; complementizer choice; “subjunctive”
• subject — position; empty pro; ga/no case marking
• question formation — ‘why’; the role of the Q-marker
• movement — scrambling; numeral quantifier float
• allocutive agreement — agreement at C
• ellipsis — NP ellipsis; “argument ellipsis”

24.965. Morphology

• Instructors: Adam Albright, Roni Katzir, David Pesetsky
• Time: Mondays 2pm-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

Course Description:

Web site (to be populated shortly): http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa17/24.965

Topics in the structure of words and their components. The leading question underlying the course will be: is there a distinct morphological grammar, or can morphological phenomena all be understood as arising from the interaction of syntax and phonology?

Particular questions to be discussed in light of this leading question include:

• What is the evidence for structure below the level of the word?
• What (if anything) distinguishes word structure from sentence structure?
• What principles account for the order of morphemes?
• How does morphological structure influence the phonological shape of complex words?
• Why does morphology sometimes fail to express syntactic/semantic differences (one affix, two functions), and how do multiple morphemes compete to express the same meaning?

Course requirements:

• weekly readings
• active class participation
• discovery of a data-rich problem to explore for term paper
• class presentation of project (details will depend on enrollment)
• submission of term paper

(Please, check back for updates!)

Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst) will be making an extended visit this week. In addition to his colloquium talk on Friday, he’ll be giving a mini course on Thursday on the theory of indefinites in Hindi-Urdu and its implications for polarity and movement cross-linguistically:

Speaker: Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst)
Title: Hindi-Urdu Indefinites, Polarity and Movement
Date/Time: May 11th, 11:30am-2:30pm
Place: 32-D461 (tentative)
Abstract:

[joint work with Vincent Homer, UMass]

Typically, Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), e.g. ‘would rather’, cannot be interpreted in the scope of a clausemate negation (barring rescuing or shielding) (Baker 1970, van der Wouden 1997, Szabolcsi 2004 a.o.):

1a. John would rather leave.
1b. *John wouldn’t rather leave.

The scope of most of them is uniquely determined by their surface position. But PPI indefinites are special: they can surface under negation and yet yield a grammatical sentence under a wide scope interpretation:

2. John didn’t understand something. ok: SOME > NEG;*NEG > SOME

Here we address the question of the mechanism through which a PPI of the `some’ type takes wide scope out of an anti-licensing configuration. One possibility is (covert) movement, another is mechanisms that allow indefinites to take (island-violating) ultra-wide scope such as choice functions (Reinhart 1997). The relevant configurations that have motivated choice functions for other languages can be set up for Hindi-Urdu too.
We can therefore assume that a device that generates wide-scope for indefinites without movement is available in Hindi-Urdu too. We show that in Hindi-Urdu at least, this device is unable to salvage PPIs in the relevant configuration. Only good old fashioned overt movement does the needful. If we think of overt movement in Hindi-Urdu as being the analogue of covert movement elsewhere, then the Hindi-Urdu facts are an argument that it is movement, albeit covert, that salvages PPIs in English too, not alternative scope-shifting devices. We explore whether the conclusion from Hindi-Urdu does in fact extend to English.

24.956: Topics in Syntax

• Instructors: Noam Chomsky, Sabine Iatridou, David Pesetsky
• Time: Fridays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

This semester’s 24.956 will cover a number of loosely related topics.

1. For the first five or six weeks, we will explore the syntactic behaviour of elements that are (apparently) totally or mostly devoid of meaning. We will have two foci: expletives and light verbs (such as English do of do-support fame). We will start with expletives. For the first class, please read and be prepared to hear about Amy Rose Deal’s 2009 paper in Syntax, entitled “The origin and content of expletives: evidence from selection”
2. Then, for the next three or four weeks we will look into recent work by Chomsky and by researchers inspired by his recent papers, with a focus on labeling and related matters. These papers are not always easy, and have not been a focus in recent classes at MIT, so this should be new to most of you. In particular, the idea is to be well prepared for…
3. … three classes by Noam. Here is an abstract for those classes:

   Assume, as reasonably well-established, that UG is a species property, with I-languages as instantiations, each a combinatorial system CS yielding representations at the conceptual-intensional CI interface, and modes of externalization to sensorimotor systems. Assume also that both methodological and empirical considerations suggest that the operations of CS are quite simple, perhaps approaching a version of the Strong Minimalist Thesis SMT. Crucial open questions arise at every point in this outline, among them the status of externalization (is it ancillary, or does it feed CI) and the nature of the operations of CS, which, there is reason to believe, have not yet been properly formulated, a matter of particular interest that I would like to turn to after some critical review and discussion of the general picture.

4. Following this, there will be three more classes, on a topic that we will choose together.

Sabine will be mostly in charge of part 1, David of parts 2 and 4 — and, well, you know who will be in charge of part 3

Requirements

Following we we think was a successful experiment in 24.956 last Spring, this class will not require a final paper or squib, on the grounds that if you’re interested in syntax, you are working on papers anyway. Instead, we will ask for :

• weekly submission of a comment or question+discussion based on that week’s reading
• co-presentation of one or two of the topics to be covered in parts 1, 2 or 4 of the class (details to be announced after class 1, partly depending on registration numbers)

If you find the class topics interesting and plan to attend, please register! Our hope is that people who attend will be active participants, and without the burden of a final research paper will find it more attractive to register— so they truly involve themselves in the class.

24.964: Topics in Phonology: The Phonetics and Phonology of Sentence Prosody

• Instructor: Edward Flemming
• Time: Wednesdays 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Different ways of pronouncing the same sentence can convey different meanings. The properties of pronunciation that modify meaning in this way are referred to as sentence prosody. There are three components of prosody: intonational melody, prominence, and phrasing. These components will be introduced through an overview of English prosody, then we will investigate the phonological representation and phonetic realization of each in more detail based on data from a variety of languages.

The goal of this course is to provide sufficient understanding of the phonetics and phonology of sentence prosody for participants to be able to engage in research on prosody in its own right, or in relation to other areas of linguistics (e.g. syntax, semantics/pragmatics, sentence processing).

Topics

1. Overview of the prosody of English
   • The Pierrehumbert/Beckman analysis of American English intonation
   • ToBI transcription
   • The phonetic implementation of intonation and phrasing
2. Instrumental and experimental techniques
   • Pitch tracking
   • Resynthesis
3. Intonational melody
   • What are the contrastive units of intonation?
   • Phonetic realization of melody
   • Alignment of F0 and segments
4. Prominence
   • The variety of meaningful prominence distinctions
   • Focus marking across languages
   • Phonetic correlates of prominence
   • The interaction of downstep and declination with prominence marking (Japanese, English)
5. Phrasing
   • Representation (prosodic hierarchical structure? boundaries?)
   • The factors that determine prosodic phrasing

24.979: Topics in Semantics

• Instructors: Gennaro Chierchia & Irene Heim
• Time: Thursdays, 2-­‐5PM
• Places: 32-­‐D461 (MIT) & Emerson 106 (Harvard)

Indefinites: where do we stand?

This class will analyze the scope, quantificational, and anaphoric properties ofi ndefinites. We will start from the ‘classic DRT’ period and work our way to present days, through dynamic approaches and situation based ones.

• Week 1: Introduction to classic DRT for the uninitiated. Indefinites as variables, quantificational variability, adverbs of quantification, existential closure.
• Week 2: Developments of classical DRT. Diesing’s mapping hypothesis, aspects of the theory of generics
• Week 3: Basically, Heim (1982) and its developments. The birth of dynamic semantics: File Change Potentials.
• Week 4: “Standard” Dynamic Semantics of the 90’s. Indefinites as Dynamic Generalized Quantifiers, weak and strong readings of donkey pronouns, existential disclosure.
• Week 5: Situation based approaches and e-­‐type anaphora
• Week 6: More on situation based approaches and e-­‐type anaphora
• Week 7: The debate on long distance indefinites: Non canonical scope properties of indefinites. Weak 8: Students’ presentations
• Weak 9: An interesting way to compare dynamic vs. e-­‐type approaches: Plural anaphora.
• Week 10: Student presentations
• Week 11: An attempt at explaining Weak Crossover with dynamic semantics
• Week 12: More on Weak Crossover
• Week 13: Other Binding Theoretic issues (especially, principle B and principle C).

24.S95: Computation and Linguistic Theory

• Instructor: Roni Katzir
• Time: Tuesdays 10-1
• Room: 32-D461

In this class we will explore the connection between linguistic theory and models of learning, examining considerations of learning that have been central to work in theoretical linguistics over the years.

The first half of the class focuses on the learning challenge from a mathematical and computational perspective. We will discuss work by Gold, Angluin, and others showing that, on certain innocent-looking assumptions, the child faces insurmountable problems when faced with even basic learning tasks. We will further see that making the learning criterion probabilistic seems at first to make the learning task much easier but ultimately does not help. During this formal part of the course we will also discuss mathematical notions of complexity and look at how these provide a natural handle on the kind of generalization needed for learning, along with a tight connection between linguistic representations and the learning process.

In the second half of the semester we will look at experimental attempts to determine what can and cannot be learned both in humans and in other organisms, starting with the radical empiricist approach of behaviorists such as Watson and Skinner and moving to the instinct-centered approach of ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen. In this context we will discuss Chomsky’s review of Skinner, as well as other early generative work on learning. We will then turn to the familiar argument from the Poverty of Stimulus and examine its implications for the child in light of the conclusions arising from the first part of the semester. We will then consider results that show that humans are very good at extracting certain kinds of statistical regularities from unanalyzed data but very bad at learning other, seemingly similar patterns. We will end the semester by looking at what can be said about the division of labor between innateness and learning based on typological generalizations and at the nuanced view on this connection offered by evolutionary approaches to language change.

Requirements: attendance and participation; reading; and a final paper.

(Please, check back for updates!)

Na’ama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University) will be teaching a mini-course in our department beginning October 7th. The topics covered include SLI (specific language impairment), dyslexia, critical period, hearing impairment and their relevance for the study of syntax and morphology, among others.

• Dates:
  • Friday October 7, 2—5 PM
  • Tuesday October 11, 6—9 PM
  • Friday October 14, 2—5 PM
  • Tuesday October 18, 6—9 PM
  • Friday October 21, 2—5 PM
• Location: 32D-461

Title: Let’s argue about clausal arguments!
Date: Dec 9th (Wednesday) and Dec 10th (Thursday)
Time: 5:00-7:00 PM
Place: 32-D461 (Wednesday) and 32-155 (Thursday)

The plan for this discussion is to investigate the ways in which clauses combine with predicates as internal and external arguments. We’ll look at the behavior of finite clauses with respect to case (e.g. Stowell 1981, Kempchinsky 1992, a.o.), theories of clausal embedding as relativization (e.g. Aboh 2005, 2010, Arseneijevic, 2009, Haegeman and Ürögdi 2010, Kayne 2009), differences between internal and external argument clauses, and the behavior of head-initial CPs in head final languages. I’ll be particularly concerned with the behavior of finite declarative clauses in languages that have them. (These questions relate to, and form some of the broader landscape for, the talk that I’ll give on Friday — but the talk is meant to stand alone.)

24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
Kai von Fintel & Irene Heim
MW 10-11.30 (56-180)
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp14/24.954/

This intermediate level class will explore basic concepts and tools in five areas of linguistic pragmatics:

1. presuppositions
2. implicatures
3. indexicality
4. focus
5. speech acts, discourse dynamics

Throughout, we will provide pointers to current work on these topics.

The class presupposes familiarity with compositional intensional semantics, as developed in our introductory sequence (24.970, 24.973).

Students who take the class for credit are expected to attend class diligently, to do all required advance readings, to participate vigorously in class discussion, to submit occasionally assigned homework exercises, and to submit a final term paper on a topic related to the class.

24.943 Syntax of a Language (Family)
Noah Constant
W 12-3 32-D461

This course explores a range of topics at the syntax/semantics interface within the Chinese language family, with special attention to Mandarin. Topics include:

- classifiers and structure of NP
- positioning of nominal modifiers
- quantification and scope-rigidity
- topics and topic-prominence
- focus constructions and clefts
- yes-no and alternative questions
- sentence-final particles

Participants will give in-class presentations of one or more assigned readings, and will write a short final paper.

24.964 Topics in Phonology: Stress with Feet
Donca Steriade
Thursday 2-5, 32D-831
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp14/24.964/

The full syllabus is available here (pdf).

The main goal of this class is to explore the uses of metrical constituent structure in the analysis of stress. The recent literature on stress reports overgeneration and undergeneration problems posed by existing foot-based constraints, and seeks to remedy them by adding more foot types and more foot-based constraints. Most of this work, with Kager’s 2012 exception, has not experimented with foot-free solutions. We will consider giving such alternatives a try. In the last two sessions we will apply what we have learned to the analysis of some complex metrical systems.

The course opens with a 4-week unit on background issues: how we can tell where stress is, important in light of how poor stress records occasionally are (deLacy 2012); whether stress is more than the sum of its acoustic correlates; and the early history of metrical analyses, including the debates between feet and grid-only analyses, which have set the stage for current research.

Instructor: Martin Rohrmeier

Lecture:  MW2-3.30  (4-152)

Information:

During the past decade the field of music cognition witnessed a substantial growth and has become a major interdisciplinary research area bridging musicology and the cognitive sciences. This course focuses on a number of selected topics that featured prominently in recent and ongoing cognitive debates. The class will cover an introduction of the history of music cognition, cognitive research in music perception, processing, learning and representation. It further emphasizes the relationship between music theory, music psychology and computational models of music. Finally, recent debates concerning the cognitive overlap between music and language as well as the role of music in human evolution will be covered.

This course is intended for undergraduate and graduate students with musical experience.

Prerequisites: Basic experience in instrumental playing and score reading
Basic knowledge of music theory and harmony
Foundations of scientific and psychological research methods
(optional) background in computer science for computational term projects

24.979 Topics in Semantics: The Linguistics of the Conversational Scoreboard
Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Justin Khoo
Fridays 12-3, 32D-461
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp14/24.979/

Short abstract: “Wait till you hear what Kai, Sabine, and Justin are learning about discourse and language. You won’t believe what happens next.”

There are linguistic phenomena (discourse particles, evidentials, speaker comments, sentence mood (?) etc.) that do not appear to contribute to the standard truth-conditional denotation of sentences but rather seem to be involved in the pragmatic deployment of these sentences in an evolving conversation. We’re planning to look at some recent work that tackles these kinds of items. Here is a small sample:

Krifka, Manfred. 2013. Embedding illocutionary acts. to appear in revised form in a volume ed. by Margaret Speas and Tom Roeper, Recursion: Complexity in Cognition, Springer. (pdf)

Yablo, Stephen. 2011. A problem about permission and possibility. In Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic modality. Oxford University Press.

Portner, Paul. 2007. Imperatives and modals. Natural Language Semantics 15(4). 351–383.

Farkas, Donka F. & Kim B. Bruce. 2009. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1). 81–118.

Murray, Sarah E. 2014 (to appear). Varieties of update. Semantics and Pragmatics 7(1). 1–55. (pdf)

Eckardt, Regine. 2014. Speaker commentary items. ms.

Dever, Josh. 2013. The revenge of the semantics-pragmatics distinction. Philosophical Perspectives 27(1). 104–144.

Our plan this semester is to engage with that new literature. We’ll start by talking about some historical and theoretical background. Then, we’ll tackle the new work, reflect on it, and situate it within a framework of big issues, such as “must semantics be dynamic?”. We will look at syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy, whatever is of relevance. This will be an interdisciplinary joyride.

Readings to be announced as we move along. They will be available via Stellar.

Second-year grad student Anthony Brohan will be teaching a five-day mini-course on statistical methods next week.

We will meet from 10-1PM at 56-167 from the 20th to the 24th. Below is a rough outline of the topics I plan on covering each day. The first half of every lecture I will cover some statistical concepts, and on the second half of the lecture will be focusing on hands-on R skills.

Day 1
Distribution tests; Tests for the mean; t-tests (paired and unpaired); Are the means the same?; Are the variances the same?; Linear regression; Interpreting p-values

Day 2
Non-parametric tests; Chi-square; Fischer’s exact test; Transformation and regression

Day 3
Handling Discrimination and Reaction time data; ANOVA

Day 4
Generalized Linear Models (building, interpreting and evaluating models)

Day 5
Linear mixed effects models

Along the way R skills will emphasize on data exploration, scripting and plotting, as well as implementing these tests. We’ll be using Baayen’s textbook as well as some materials from Jaeger’s lab about the use of mixed-effects models.

24.956 Topics in Syntax: Movement - what is it and how does it work?

Instructors: Norvin Richards & David Pesetsky

Monday 2:30-5:30pm, 32-D461

The existence and ubiquity of syntactic movement is one of the signature discoveries of the last half-century of research on syntax. With the realization that syntactic constituents may occupy multiple positions in phrase structure has come a cascade of findings, questions, and new conundrums that could not have been imagined before the discovery of movement. Why does movement exist? Why are there locality limitations on movement, what are they, and where do they come from? What determines the size of moved constituents? Why do types of movements seem to sort into A vs. A-bar varieties, and how do they interact? What types of dependencies instantiate movement — for example, is control a variety of movement?

This seminar will have a broad focus, covering many topics related to movement, in an attempt to learn the state of the art on some of these questions, and (if we are lucky) to push the state of the art forward a bit. If we succeed, the class will provide you with “news you can use” in your own syntactic research, by offering both a big picture and serious discussion of an array of exciting open problems.

24.964 More Advanced Phonology

Instructor: Edward Flemming

Friday 11am-2pm, 32-D461

24.964 this semester is ‘More Advanced Phonology’ or Phonology III rather than a seminar on a single research topic. Candidate topics are listed below. We will start with stochastic phonology, then cover additional topics depending on time and interest.

(1) Stochastic phonology

We will read key papers on the analysis of probabilistic phonological patterns, e.g. patterns where there is some free variation or exceptionality and the probability of a particular variant (or an exception) depends on phonological properties. We will focus on three interrelated questions:

(i) What is the relationship between categorical and stochastic phonology? Is the former just a limiting case of the latter, or are they distinct in some way?

(ii) What is the mechanism of constraint interaction in stochastic phonology? Frameworks differ substantially on this point, e.g. Stochastic OT is based on strict constraint domination, whereas MaxEnt grammars sum constraint violations.

(iii) Are all types of probabilistic phonological patterns amenable to a single form of analysis?

(2) Laryngeal neutralization and assimilation in obstruents

The typology of patterns of neutralization of voicing and aspiration contrasts, focusing on phenomena that motivate extensions and modifications to existing analyses. These include asymmetrical voicing assimilation (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic dialects, Ukrainian), consonants that undergo, but do not trigger, voicing assimilation (e.g. Hungarian, Russian, Czech), voicing of obstruents before sonorants (e.g. Krakow Polish, Slovak), morphological effects on voicing neutralization (e.g. German). The goal is to review the theoretic background, then investigate some of these phenomena based on data we collect during the course.

(3) Phonetic grammars

It has long been known that the grammars of languages must regulate relatively fine details of phonetic realization, but relatively little is known about the form of the relevant component of grammar. We will study a model based on weighted constraints (Flemming 2001) and investigate interactions between phonetics and phonology in light of this model.

(4) Do speakers’ grammars contain phonetically-based constraints?

Phonological typology has been shown to reflect a variety of phonetically-based constraints, but it remains controversial whether these constraints play a role in individual grammars, or whether they are external to grammar, applying only through processes of sound change (e.g. Blevins 2004). We will try to clarify the empirical claims that are at issue here and examine experimental evidence that bears on those claims.

24.979 Models of Information Structure Meaning and Expression

Instructor: Noah Constant

Tuesday 10am-1pm, 32-D461

This course explores how information structure is conveyed across languages, with the goals of: (i) gaining familiarity with different conceptions of information-structural distinctions like topic/focus, given/new, and contrastive/non-contrastive, (ii) gaining familiarity with the facts of how these distinctions are signaled (or not signaled) in different languages, and (iii) comparing recent formalisms of information-structural categories and realizations, with attention to their ability to extend to the range of observed cross-linguistic phenomena.

On the semantic/pragmatic side, topics to be covered include different sub-types of topic and focus, thetic vs. categorical judgments, theories of the interpretation of focus and givenness, and formalizations of discourse structure.

As for how information structure is conveyed, we will look at reflexes in word order effects, in discourse particles, and in prosody. For syntactic reflexes, we’ll look at topicalization, left-dislocation, right-dislocation, focus movement and scrambling, and discuss to what degree cartographic approaches to the left periphery can handle these effects. For particles, we’ll look at a range of topic- and focus-marking particles and discuss the potential for treating these in a unified way. For prosodic reflexes, we’ll look at theories of pitch accenting based on givenness and/or contrast, and at the effects of information structure on phrasing and on pitch movements correlating to topic and focus marking (e.g. English “A and B” accents).

Participants will give in-class presentations of one or more assigned readings, and will write a short final paper. The course presupposes basic familiarity with the frameworks covered in the first-year graduate syntax and semantics sequence. We’ll connect with some issues in intonational phonology, but no prior experience with prosody is assumed.

24.S95 Computational Linguistics for Linguists

Instructor: Martin Rohrmeier

Monday and Wednesday 11-12:30, 56-180

This course provides an introduction to the foundations of formal language theory, computational linguistics and related topics in cognitive language research. It is particularly intended for linguistics graduate students with little background in computational and cognitive research. The class will cover various types of formal languages and related theorems, the Chomsky hierarchy, automata theory, types of parsers, formal models of minimalist grammars, corpus analysis, principles of probabilistic modeling, and probabilistic models of language and language processing. Throughout the class these theoretical topics will be discussed in perspective with current cognitive research trends. In addition to the theoretical foundations, another main goal of the class is to provide a hands-on introduction to programming and its specific applications in language processing and modeling. The class will provide you with foundations to follow computational and cognitive linguistics papers.

The class is intended as an introductory class. It does not presuppose prior programming or modeling experience; core skills will be acquired throughout the class.

Participants will be required to attend regularly and to participate actively in class discussion, to submit homework exercises, to do in-class presentations (of their research projects) and to hand in a final term paper on a topic related to the class.

24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
Instructors: Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim
Wednesday and Friday 10-11:30a, 32-D461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.954/

This intermediate level class will explore basic concepts and tools in five areas of linguistic pragmatics:

1. presuppositions
2. implicatures
3. indexicality
4. speech acts
5. focus

Throughout, we will provide pointers to current work on these topics.

The class presupposes familiarity with compositional intensional semantics, as developed in our introductory sequence (24.970, 24.973).

Students who take the class for credit are expected to attend class diligently, to do all required advance readings, to participate vigorously in class discussion, to submit occasionally assigned homework exercises, and to submit a final term paper on a topic related to the class.

24.956 Topics in Syntax
Uttering theory: topics in the relation between syntax and phonology
Instructor: Norvin Richards
Wednesday 12-3p, Room 32-D461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.956/

Current Minimalist theories posit a number of parametric differences between languages, which amount to stipulating the distributions of various types of overt movement. In this class we will spend the semester exploring the idea that we can reach deeper explanations for syntactic phenomena like these by allowing the syntax to make more reference to phonology thatn we are used to. I’ll argue for universal conditions on the phonological consequences of certain kinds of syntactic relations, and claim that some of the operations performed by the syntax (movement operations, in particular) are driven by the need to meet these universal conditions. In the end, the relevant parametric differences between languages will be independently necessary phonological and morphological ones, having to do with stress, prosody, and the distribution of various types of affixes.

The resulting theory will account for the distribution of overt wh-movement (in single wh-questions), EPP effects, and head-movement in a number of languages. Time permitting, we will go on to consider phenomena like scrambling and DP structure, and develop new answers to a variety of traditional and not-so-traditional questions (why is PRO always null? why are ergative languages with fixed word order typically either SOV or verb-initial? why do some languages, but not others, allow nominative subjects in infinitives (Szabolcsi 2007)? why can languages like Chichewa optionally leave wh in situ in all positions except for preverbal subjects, which must overtly move via clefting? why is extraposition to the right of the verb in German possible just when the VP has been topicalized (Haider’s puzzle)?). We’ll also discuss the consequences of the approach for the architecture of the grammar.

Registered students will be asked to do in-class presentations (either of relevant readings or of the student’s own research), and to hand in a (possibly very rough draft of a) final paper.

24.964 Topics in Morpho-Phonology
The analysis of cyclic and and pseudo-cyclic phenomena
Instructors: Donca Steriade, David Pesetsky
Mondays 2-5, 32-D461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.964/

Full syllabus is available here. (pdf)

In these lectures, we propose to explore some well-known problems in the functioning of the phonological cycle; to examine and debate some solutions. We will also document and solve some less well-known problems that bear some resemblance to the cycle. A central topic will be a proposed unified view of all cyclic-like interactions in phonology, based on recent work. A related important goal of the class will be the clarification or elimination (not yet sure which) of differences between cyclic computations, as motivated in phonology, and cyclic spell-out in syntax.

This is a collaborative venture. The two instructors will take turns proposing alternative solutions to problems laid out. Exercises will be designed to give a chance to all participants to engage in the debate. After completion, the problems will be discussed in class.

24.979 Topics in Semantics
“Free Relatives, Free Choice”
Instructors: Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou
Mondays 10-1, 32D-461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.979/

This semester, we will explore the syntax and semantics of free relative constructions and of free choice expressions.

24.943: Syntax of a Language (Family)
Seminar on Topics in East Asian Syntax and Semantics
Jim Huang & Shigeru Miyagawa

M2:30-5:30 (32-D461)
Alternate weeks at Harvard, M3:30-6:00 (Boylston 303).
The first class (9/10) will be at MIT.

We will cover some recent topics in East Asian linguistics that have important theoretical implications.

Issues include:
- agreement/topic/focus
- NP structure
- intervention effects
- wh-questions — “why”
- ellipsis
- case alternation
- argument structure

24.964: Topics in Phonology
The phonetics and phonology of sentence prosody
Edward Flemming

W 10-1 (32-D461)

This course will provide an overview of the phonetics and phonology of sentence prosody. Topics will include:
- English prosody - intonation, prominence and phrasing, ToBI transcription
- Phonetic implementation of prosody
- Focus-marking
- Prosodic and syntactic phrasing
- Cross-linguistic variation
- Instrumental and experimental techniques - pitch tracking, resynthesis

24.965: Morphology
Adam Albright & David Pesetsky

T10–1, 32-D461

Topics in the structure of words and their components. What is the evidence for structure below the level of the word? What (if anything) distinguishes word structure from sentence structure? What principles account for the order of morphemes? How does morphological structure influence the phonological shape of complex words? Why does morphology sometimes fail to express syntactic/semantic differences (one affix, two functions), and how do multiple morphemes compete to express the same meaning? The big question underlying the course will be: is there a distinct morphological grammar, or can morphological phenomena all be understood as arising from the interaction of syntax and phonology?

24.979: Topics in Semantics
Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou

F11-2, 32-D461

We will discuss current research on expressions of preference and priority, including deontic modals, imperatives, desiderative attitudes, and so on. The seminar will feature several guest speakers (Ana Arregui, Fabrizio Cariani, Cleo Condoravdi, Thony Gillies, Magda Kaufmann, Dilip Ninan, perhaps more), some of whom will be semi-regular participants as well.

24.S94: More on Questions
Danny Fox

Schedule: 3 hour meetings, twice a week (W-F-W-F-W-Th) during the weeks of September 24-October 5*
Location: 32-D461 (mostly)

In this class I will try to develop an argument for a treatment of pair-list readings of multiple wh-questions that I made in a 2010 seminar (taught with Irene and Kai). The starting point is Dayal’s proposal that questions are associated with a maximality presupposition – the requirement that one true member of the Hamblin-denotation entail all true members. As Dayal shows, maximality accounts for uniqueness in simple singular wh questions (Which boy came? is associated with the inference that exactly one boy came). Dayal’s proposal, which provides the basis for a family of accounts of negative islands and related phenomena, fails to derive the pair list readings of multiple wh-questions, such as `which boy read which book?’. I will try to argue that this problem can be resolved if multiple questions denote families of questions, derived from logical forms that obey Richards’ tucking-in generalization. The rest of the class will investigate various issues that have a potential bearing on the proposal: issues pertaining to quantificational variability in questions, to pair-list reading that arise from normal quantification (e.g. which book did every boy read?), and to the nature of superiority.

Maziar Toosarvandani’s class Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Iranian (24.943), described in last week’s WHAMIT, has been moved to Tuesdays 5-8 and will meet in 32-D461.

24.943: Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Iranian
Maziar Toosarvandani
M10-1, 32-D461

The Iranian languages are among the least studied in the Indo-European language family. In this class, we will explore the structure of the Iranian languages with an eye towards understanding them both from the outside and from the inside. Since the extant theoretical literature focuses almost entirely on either Persian (a national language of Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan) or Pashto (a national language of Afghanistan), we will start by reading about several of these two languages’ more unusual properties—including light verb constructions, ezafe, scrambling, ergative agreement, and second-position clitics—with the goal of understanding how preexisting analyses fit into a crosslinguistically-informed theory of syntax and semantics. We will then turn our attention to some of the other, eighty or so Iranian languages, for which various levels of description exist, extending and developing our accounts from the two better-studied languages. In the end, we will have a more sophisticated understanding of the Iranian languages and of what they tell us about language more generally.

24.960: Syntactic Models
Omer Preminger
M2–5, 32-D461

The course has two main goals —

1. Cross-framework “literacy”

   We will familiarize ourselves with two frameworks that compete with what we might call the Government & Binding / Principles & Parameters / Minimalist Program framework of syntactic analysis: HPSG (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar).

   The idea is to become comfortable enough with the notations and machinery that we can easily pick up an HPSG or LFG paper and understand it.

2. What is at stake? Where do these frameworks crucially differ from one another (and where don’t they)? And what is the historical development that has led us here?

   Here, we will deal with some of the “bigger questions”; we want to understand how frameworks rise and fall in general, and how they have in fact risen and fallen in the history of modern syntax; we will ask ourselves questions like “what can framework X can do that framework Y cannot?”, as well as “what can they both do equally well?”

   In other words, we want to understand which differences between the various frameworks are notational choices, and which lead to actual differences in expressive power and empirical coverage.

We will examine these questions both synchronically (for example, comparing GB/P&P/MP vs. HPSG vs. LFG) and diachronically (e.g. why did the “Aspects” framework give way to GB? why was “Generative Semantics” abandoned in the ’70s, and effectively resurrected in the late ’90s?)

24.964: Topics in Phonology
Edward Flemming
F12-3, 32-D461

24.964 this semester is intended to be ‘Phonology III’ or ‘More Advanced Phonology’ rather than a seminar on a single research topic. The course will be organized around four main topics, all of which feature in recent research at MIT (details below). We will cover more or less of each topic depending on time and interest.

1. The Dispersion Theory of Contrast

   There is good evidence for constraints against perceptually indistinct contrasts in phonology, but many issues surrounding the formalization of these constraints remain open. We will look at applications of these constraints in recent work from MIT, and explore issues of implementation.

   • Applications: Laryngeal cooccurrence restrictions (Gallagher 2010), stress-conditioned segmental phonology (Giavazzi 2010).
   • Issues of implementation:
     • The formulation of distinctiveness constraints (cf. Gallagher 2010 vs. Flemming 2004).
     • The comparison set for evaluation of distinctiveness constraints.
     • The nature of underlying representations (Flemming 2008).

2. Phonetic grammars

   It has long been known that the grammars of languages must regulate relatively fine details of phonetic realization, but relatively little is known about the form of the relevant component of grammar. We will study a model based on weighted constraints (Flemming 2001) that has been applied in recent research from our department, and investigate interactions between phonetics and phonology in light of this model.

   • Applications: tone timing (Cho 2010), segment duration (Katz 2010).
   • Working with weighted constraints.
   • Interactions between phonetics and phonology
   • Phonetic detail in phonological analyses (e.g. Flemming 2008).
   • Phonetic constraints in phonological analyses (e.g. Katz 2010).
   • Effects of phonological structure on phonetic realization.

3. Morphology-phonology interactions: what are the roles of morphology and phonology in accounting for allomorphic variation in paradigms?

   Case study: The distribution of stem allomorphs in Italian verb paradigms (Pirrelli and Battista 2000). Pirrelli & Battista argue for complex and arbitrary mappings from morphosyntactic specifications to the phonological forms of verb stems in Italian. However, they only consider phonological analyses of variation in stem form if they can be formulated in terms of exceptionless phonological processes. There is evidence that phonological constraints and constraints on the relationship between phonology and morphology can yield many patterns in which phonological processes show morphological conditioning (e.g. derived environment effects, inflection dependence etc). Do we arrive at a different view of allomorphy in Italian (and elsewhere) if we reanalyze the data in light of these phenomena?

   • Varieties of phonology-morphology interactions, e.g.
     • Derived-Environment Effects (Kiparsky 1973 etc)
     • Inflection dependence (Steriade 2008)
     • Phonological selection of listed allomorphs (e.g. Kager 1996)
     • Morphological contrast constraints (Löfstedt 2010)

4. Do speakers’ grammars contain phonetically-based constraints?

   Phonological typology has been shown to reflect a variety of phonetically-based constraints, but it remains controversial whether these constraints play a role in individual grammars or whether they are external to grammar, applying only through processes of sound change (e.g. Blevins 2004). We will try to clarify the empirical claims that are at issue here and examine experimental evidence that bears on those claims.

24.979: Topics in Semantics
Rick Nouwen
T2-5, 32-D461

The main focus will be the semantic representation of gradability/degree and comparison in natural language. In particular, we will review the semantic structures and mechanisms that play a role in various degree phenomena as well as the logical form of degree constructions. We will cover both core issues and phenomena in degree semantics, such as the comparative, as well as more peripheral aspects of the expression of degree. The first weeks are geared to gaining a deep understanding of the foundations of the main analyses on the market, such as the various kinds of degree-based theories and the increasingly more prominent (and in some sense degree-less) delineation proposals. The rest of the seminar is meant to cover a broad range of empirical data, gradually moving away from the usual suspects in the degree literature.

Topics include: the comparative, the positive form, the absolute/relative distinction, degree approaches to degree versus delineation approaches to degree, degree operators and scope, interadjective comparison and incommensurability, intensifiers, exclamatives, gradability of nouns, degree phenomena in numeral quantification, and more. We will use a reading list of recent as well as not so recent articles on degree semantics.

Instructors: Sabine Iatridou & David Pesetsky
Time: Tuesday 2-5
Place: 32-D461
Course website: here

We are all familiar with the proposals crystallized by Chomsky in his 1981 book Lectures on Government and Binding that describe the manner in which syntactic structure interacts with anaphora: Binding Theory. In the three decades since that work, a number of researchers have rethought and reworked these proposals. This new research reflects recent advances in syntactic and semantic theory and responds to many new cross-linguistic discoveries.

In this seminar, we begin by surveying some of the more prominent and thorough efforts to rethink Binding Theory (especially Principles A and B), including recent books and book manuscripts by Safir, by Reuland, and by Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd. We will then turn to several topics that interact closely with Binding Theory, including the internal composition of pronouns, implicit arguments (and their interaction with passive), interactions with case, and control theory.

Instructors: David Pesetsky & Sergei Tatevosov
Time: Thursday 2-5
Place: (32-D461)
Course website: here

This class will explore in depth several interconnected semantic and syntactic phenomena of the Slavic language group, in very much the spirit of “More Advanced Syntax” and comparable classes in semantics. After a quick survey of the language family, we will begin with a discussion of two broad topics that are fundamental to almost every other topic we might want to discuss in Slavic. The first of these is the internal structure of the verb stem, especially the rich system of verbal prefixation characteristic of Slavic. The second is the internal structure of the Slavic nominal phrase — where there is particularly lively debate about whether those Slavic languages that lack definite articles also lack a DP layer, as well as much discussion of the case systems found in all Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian.

After these topics have been discussed, we will look at a variety of puzzles found in Slavic (both semantic and syntactic) including: aspect; unaccusativity (and its interaction with case, especially the infamous genitive of negation); dative subjects; adjectives (which are morphologically and semantically complex across Slavic); as well scrambling; and the (also infamous) multiple-wh constructions.

Instructors: Masha Polinsky & Jessica Coon
Time: Thursday, 1-3PM (class began on 1/27)
Place: Boylston 303, Harvard

Researchers agree that not all verb-initial languages are built the same way, and this suggests that paths toward verb-initiality may differ. The course will examine cross-linguistic patterns of verb-initial languages, with the emphasis on micro-variation and its challenges for theoretical accounts. These patterns will be analyzed with the goal of deriving verb-initial orders in current syntactic theory.

Instructors: Jessica Coon & Michael Kenstowicz
Time: Monday 2-5
Place: 32-D461

24.942 will meet Mondays from 2:00-5:00 in the 4th floor seminar room, except for the first class, which will meet on Friday 2/4 from 9am-12pm (no class on Monday 2/7). If you are interested in attending the class, but are not registered, please email Jessica Coon and Michael Kenstowicz so they can update you about the classroom for the first day.

Ana López de Mateo will join the department this semester as a consultant for 24.942. Ana is originally from Patzún, Guatemala, and is a native speaker of Kaqchikel, a Mayan language of the K’ichean branch. Ana has worked with the Peace Corps, as an elementary school teacher, and is currently teaching in the Spanish department at Harvard.

Part 1: Units of rhythm: intervals and syllables
Part 2: OT with Ranked Violations

Instructors: Edward Flemming & Donca Steriade
Time: Friday 12-3PM
Place: 32-D461
Course website: here

Part 1. Units of rhythm.

Stress and meter operate on rhythmic units that consist of a nucleus plus some neighboring consonants. These units are currently assumed to be syllables. In the first part of the course, we compare syllables with a different unit, the Vowel-to-Vowel interval. An interval is contains the nucleus plus any segments following it, up to the next nucleus or the end of the domain. Phenomena that depend on counting rhythmic units get identical accounts under both analyses, but the location of unit edges is predicted to differ. This difference has a wide range of consequences for the analysis of quantitative phenomena, for rhyming and alliteration, for segmental phonology and prosodic morphology. We will explore as many of these differences as we can fit in 6 sessions.

Part 2: Optimality Theory with Ranked Violations

In the second half of the semester we will explore a new model of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory. The main motivation for pursuing this variant is to provide a better analysis of scalar constraints in phonology.

Standard OT adopts a mechanism based on constraint ranking to resolve constraint conflicts: in cases of conflict the higher-ranked constraint prevails. In this framework, there can be no compromise between scalar constraints. This is potentially problematic because trade-offs appear to be common. For example, preferences to minimize effort and maximize the distinctiveness of contrasts can be given natural formalizations in terms of scalar constraints, but in an OT setting, one constraint has to dominate the other so it is only possible to derive maximum distinctiveness or minimum effort where we actually observe compromises between the two: moderate distinctiveness in exchange for moderate effort. In standard OT, compromise can only be accommodated by decomposing scalar constraints into multiple sub-constraints.

In the new model of constraint interaction, constraints are weighted and each violation of a constraint incurs a cost equal to the magnitude of the violation multiplied by the constraint weight. Evaluation then proceeds much as in standard OT except that ranking of violations is based on their costs rather than being fixed for a given constraint, so a large violation of scalar constraint C₁ can rank above a violation of constraint C₂ while a lesser violation of C₁ ranks below a violation of C₂. This makes it possible to derive trade-offs between constraints.

We will compare these lines of analysis in case studies of markedness and faithfulness scales, including those pertaining to sonority, distinctiveness, and P-map correspondence.

24.949/9.601 Graduate Language Acquisition this Fall
Instructor: Ken Wexler
Mondays 11 to 2, Linguistics seminar room

• Lecture 1: Foundational Intro, the role of input, learning, nature of UG and development.
• Lectures 2-4: The basic properties of early clause structure, finiteness, parameters of clauses, INFL, C, case, agreement, head-movement, raising of subjects, knowledge of morphology, necessity of copulas/aux, why are they omitted?, null-subjects, clitics, modality/negation, movement and its motivations. All of this developmental. Are the classical linguistic-theory (biolinguistic) approaches right, or can we get more than we thought from environmental/computational difficulties (e.g. Yang’s recent papers; in particular we should look at Legate and Yang and its critics).
• Lecture 5: Deviance
• Lectures 6,7: Argument-chains, phases, the role of derivation by phase, movement, passives, raising, unaccusatives, clefts, specificational sentences, tough-movement, control (complement and adjunct), control with promise, etc. “Smuggling” in theory and its relation to development and to empty operators, etc (see also lecture 8).
• Lecture 8: Wh-Movement in Acquisition, questions, relative clauses, A-bar movement in general, etc.
• Lecture 9/10/11: Semantics of determiners, quantification, scope, maximality, semantics of free relatives, information structure, relation to Theory of Mind experiments, Scalar Implicatures.
• Lecture 12: Binding Theory.

24.965 Morphology
Instructors: Adam Albright and David Pesetsky
Meetings: Monday 2-5pm, 32-D461
Web site (to be populated shortly): http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa10/24.965

Where does morphological structure come from, and why is it realized the way it is? What (if anything) distinguishes word structure from sentence structure? Could it be claimed that “morphology is just a rule of syntax” (filtered through some phonological constraints)? Why do theories of morphology so often posit mechanisms that go beyond what appears necessary in theories of sentence structure? (That is, why do they so often answer “no” to the previous question?)

Attempting to answer these questions leads us into some of the central problems that analyses of morphological systems have grappled with:

1. To the extent that morphological structure is predictable from syntactic structure, how? [Topics include: the Mirror Principle and scope-based ordering, in Athapaskan and beyond; nanosyntax]
2. To the extent that morphological structure is constrained in a manner that does not directly follow from obvious facts about sentence syntax, what accounts for these effects? [Topics include: templates; phonologically motivated ordering; level ordering effects, the debate over phases and word-structure, complexity-based ordering]
3. How do structurally simpler and more complex forms interact? [Topics include: blocking effects (syntax/morphology interactions, word/word interactions, phonologically driven interactions)]
4. What accounts for complex relations between feature-specifications and their exponents? [Topics include: rules of referral, syncretism, fusion, fission, impoverishment, phonological markedness effects; inflection classes]
5. What accounts for mismatches among phonologically, semantically and purely morphologically motivated word-structures [Topic: bracketing paradoxes]

The big question underlying the course will be: is there a distinct morphological grammar, or can morphological phenomena all be understood as arising from the interaction of syntax and phonology?

Requirements: three in-class presentations, short paper based on one of them

24.964 Topics in Phonology: Constraint interaction in Phonetics and Phonology
Instructor: Edward Flemming
Thursday 9:30am-12:30pm, 32-D461
Web site: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa10/24.964/
(Preliminary readings are already posted).

One of the fundamental insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) is that phonology operates in terms of conflicting constraints. For example, the mapping from input representation to surface form is subject to markedness constraints that cannot all be satisfied without violating some faithfulness constraints. In order to be able to select a surface form in the face of constraint conflict it is necessary to have a mechanism for prioritizing constraints to adjudicate those conflicts. The standard approach, following Prince & Smolensky, is based on constraint ranking: conflicts are resolved in favor of the higher-ranked constraint. In this seminar we will compare this standard approach to alternatives based on numerical weighting of constraints (e.g. Harmonic Grammar , Maximum Entropy Grammars). These alternatives have been often been motivated by computational or learnability considerations, but we will focus on their implications for grammatical analysis and typology in phonetics and phonology.

24.946, Linguistic Theory and Japanese Language
Instructor: Shigeru Miyagawa
Fall 2010, Tuesdays, 10 -1 (will end by 12:40 for those traveling to Harvard for Jim Huang’s class on Chinese linguistics at 1:15).

We will look at a variety of issues in linguistic theory from the perspective of Japanese with critical comparisons to other languages. Topics include the following:

• Modularity (causatives, with reference to work on blocking in English, e.g., Embick, Kiparsky)
• Agreement (with comparison to Basque)
• Wh-movement (including work on Fukuoka dialect and sign language)
• Genitive marking on the subject and specification of Phase (comparisons to Turkish, Slavic, and possibly Uyghur)
• Status of argument structure (ditransitives, with reference to work on nominalization in English, e.g., Kayne, Pesetsky)
• Optionality (comparision of QR and scrambling)
• Postposting/Rightward movement (comparisons to Hindi, Turkish, Uyghur)

For reading materials, see the course stellar site: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa10/24.946/

Special Topic: New Media Projects For Haiti
2-0-7 (9 credits)

A project-based class to develop new technologies and educational tools that will contribute to progressive social changes in Haiti. We will explore viable contexts for promoting self-expression, communication, literacy and numeracy, and digital governance, given current challenges and strengths within the society. Topics will include sensors, language, music, computational methods for teaching and learning, civic engagement and social media.

Participants will choose a societal problem and devise a solution, with the goal of spending the last week of April in Haiti field testing and documenting their solution.

Guest lecturers will include Joe Paradiso, Michel DeGraff, Henry Lieberman, Judith Donath, Claudia Urrea, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Charles Kane.

Barry Vercoe, Dale Joachim

Instructors: Danny Fox and Martin Hackl
Room: MIT 32-D461
Time: Tuesday 2-5 PM

In this seminar we will be discussing some recent experimental work that could bear on questions in semantics and in the syntax semantics interface, as well as relevant theoretical background. We will start with questions about the nature of quantification, and in particular about the syntactic and semantics mechanisms needed for the representation of quantificational expressions. We will then move to questions pertaining to the theory of scalar implicatures and degree semantics. Throughout we will try to characterize further experimental work that could be conducted, in the hope that people will pick up on our suggestions or come up with alternatives of their own.

In addition to class participation (and reading), registered student will be asked to write a paper broadly related to the topics and methodologies discussed. Experimental work is encouraged, but not required.

Instructors: Edward Flemming and Irene Heim
Room: 32-D461
Time: Monday 2-5
Course website: here

Different ways of pronouncing the same sentence can convey different messages. In at least some cases, the differences concern aspects of meaning of the type modeled by formal semantics and pragmatics (e.g. truth conditions, presuppositions, implicatures, context change potential). These are the sorts of phenomena we will study in this class, with the ultimate aim of sharpening phonological and semantic concepts that enter into their explanation.

Examples of semantic-pragmatic concepts that we will examine include focus, different kinds of focus (e.g. information focus, contrastive focus), givenness, topic, question-under-discussion, speaker’s and hearer’s commitment sets, and others. Examples of phenomena include question-answer congruence, association with focus, prosodic disambiguation of quantifier scope, “question intonation” on declaratives. We will discuss classic and recent work by Rooth, Schwarzschild, Büring, Truckenbrodt, Gunlogson, Wagner, Constant, and others. In the process, we will investigate the nature of the prosodic representations that are relevant to these phenomena, examining the roles of prominence/stress, intonational melody and phrasing in signaling meaning distinctions.

The first lecture will be partly based on the material in Jackendoff (1972) ch. 6, and will preview in more detail the research questions that will guide us for the remainder of the semester.

24.964 (MIT) Topics in Phonology / Ling 219r (Harvard) Advanced Phonology Topics in phonotactic learning

Instructors: Adam Albright and Michael Becker
Location: alternate weeks @ Harvard (Boylston 306) and MIT (32-D461)
Time: Thursdays 3-6 (see scheduling info below)
First meeting: Thurs 2/4 at Harvard

Description:
In this seminar, we will explore approaches to several related issues in the analysis and learning of phonotactic patterns. The format will be collaborative: for each issue, we will focus in detail on a small set of languages that exemplify the problem. Registered participants will make regular presentations on proposals from the literature, and we will work together to evaluate their potential applicability to the problem at hand. In each case, the goal will be to develop a possible analysis to the point of implementing a “proof of concept” model of how the pattern could be learned. The emphasis will be on both grammatical mechanisms (primarily within OT) and learning models (constraint ranking, Bayesian approaches, etc.)

Background:
We assume basic familiarity with Optimality Theory

Scheduling info:
We will meet alternate weeks at MIT and Harvard. Please note the following:
- The first meeting is 2/4 at Harvard (Boylston 306)
- We will not meet 3/18 or 3/25
- The last meeting is 5/13

Topics (subject to revision)

1. Morpheme Structure Conditions
   Languages frequently exhibit phonotactic restrictions that hold of roots or underived words, but are not enforced in derived forms. For example, English has no monomorphemic words ending in fricative-fricative clusters, but they may be created by affixation (myth-s, fif-th, cave-z). Such restrictions have often been taken to require a distinct level of evaluation, e.g., through conditions on lexical entries (Halle 1959), but this approach has generally been avoided in OT. We consider the arguments for various alternatives.

• Representative cases:
  English final clusters
  Semitic OCP restrictions
  

• Some possible tools:
  Output-output faithfulness; stratal OT; domain-sensitive markedness; accidental gaps

1. Exceptions to Morpheme Structure Conditions
   Another challenge posed by MSCs that are not enforced in derived forms is that they are frequently tendencies rather than absolute restrictions. We review proposals for protecting individual words from conforming to broader generalizations, which include representational and grammatical mechanisms. We ask how exceptions are defined in a theory where the generalizations are gradient, or violable, or imposed on differing domains.

• Representative cases:
  Semitic OCP restrictions
  Romance diphthongization
  

• Some possible tools:
  Constraint indexation; faithfulness to listed forms; dual route models

1. Conditions on subclasses: lexical strata, parts of speech, etc.
   MSCs frequently hold over a subset of the lexicon. We consider evidence that lexical strata are more than simply sets of exceptions, considering speakers’ ability to integrate potentially independent facts into broader observations. For example, in Hebrew, complex codas are only found in items with fixed stress, and in Turkish, long vowels are only found in nouns. Independent facts can also be combined gradiently: In Turkish, a long vowel reduces, but does not eliminate, the chance of finding voicing alternations in a stem-final stop.

• Representative cases:
  Turkish (long vowels, voicing alternations)
  Japanese (syllable structure, inventory, voicing alternations)
  Spanish (intervocalic voiceless stops, clusters, diphthongization)
  

• Some possible tools:
  Constraint indexation; co-phonologies; hierarchical Bayesian models

Language processing: An introduction to the experimental investigation of language, above the word level
Instructors: Ted Gibson (egibson@mit.edu), Evelina Fedorenko (evelina9@mit.edu)
Location: 46-3015
Currently scheduled: Mondays 2-5. We already know of some conflicts with students who would like to take this class. So we may re-schedule the class to 4-7 or 6-9 on Mondays, or possibly some other time slot, depending on the schedules of the students who want to take the class.

This course has two goals: (1) to teach students about experimental design and basic results in language processing; and (2) to tutor students through the design and execution of an experiment of their choosing, in a language research area above the word level (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, working memory).

This is a project-oriented class. Because of the time needed to work on each project, registration is limited in this class to 10 people. If more than 10 people sign up, we will form groups so that the total number of projects does not exceed 10. We will meet with students individually (or in groups) early in the semester in order to decide on a topic area for an experiment to be run during the term. During the semester, students will design, run and analyze at least one psycholinguistic experiment. A paper presenting the study will be due at the end of the semester.

The course will meet once a week for three hours at a time. The lectures will survey some critical results from the field of sentence processing. Throughout the course we will emphasize quantitative methods for investigating language. We will also discuss how to design experimental materials to evaluate hypotheses (including basic statistics, using the language R) from all areas of language, controlling for factors not relevant to the hypothesis in question. Some later lectures will be devoted to discussing students’ experiments.

Students taking the course may come with their own hypotheses to evaluate. Alternatively, we have suggestions for projects in different areas of language. One requirement of any proposed experiment is feasibility. Consequently, most experiments will need to evaluate a question using English participants, because of the availability of this group locally. Proposed experiments on other languages are possible, but only if the experimenter can demonstrate feasibility of getting access to the relevant participant group during the term.

Instructor: Norvin Richards
Room: 32-D461
Time: Tuesday 10-1

In Minimalist approaches to syntax, movement operations are sometimes said to occur in order to satisfy requirements imposed by the interfaces. In this class we will try to develop explicit theories of some of these requirements, on the PF side. We will take as our starting point the theory developed in Richards (2006, in press), which attempts to predict the distribution of overt and covert wh-movement by allowing syntax to make direct reference to prosodic structure.

We will spend the semester applying this general way of thinking to a variety of traditionally posited parametric differences between languages, eventually attempting to develop explanations of cross-linguistic differences in A-movement, the EPP, and head-movement that are rooted in observable differences between languages. Time permitting, we will then go on to consider phenomena such as scrambling and head direction (attempting to derive the effects of the Final-over-Final Constraint). Along the way, we will develop new answers to a variety of traditional and not-so-traditional questions (why is PRO always null? why is French participle agreement only possible with objects that undergo movement? why do some languages, but not others, allow nominative subjects in infinitives (Szabolcsi 2007)? why can languages like Chichewa optionally leave wh in situ in all positions except for preverbal subjects, which must overtly move via clefting? why do some languages (e.g., Niuean, Chol) perform phrasal fronting of their predicates? why is extraposition to the right of the verb in German possible just when the VP has been topicalized (Haider’s puzzle)?)

The class will thus have two major goals: we will try to deepen our explanations for a variety of syntactic phenomena, and to improve our general understanding of the relationship between syntax and phonology. We will also do some general reading of current work on the prosody-syntax interface.

Registered students will be asked to do in-class presentations (either of relevant readings or of the student’s own research), and to hand in a (possibly very rough draft of a) final paper.

Language acquisition, variation and change
24.921, Fall 2009
Michel DeGraff and Ken Wexler

There’s a long and strong tradition, going back to at least the Neo-Grammarians, of attempting to explain language change via the processes of language acquisition. Yet, in each of the relevant sub-disciplines of linguistic theory, historical linguistics and language-acquisition research there are several competing hypotheses that enlist incompatible assumptions about the nature of grammar and variation.

The purpose of this seminar is to discuss the most up-to-date approaches in the study of language acquisition and language change, as well as linguistic theory, toward providing the best possible framework for the connection among the corresponding empirical domains. We understand “language change” broadly—-to include diachronic syntax (in the history, say, of English) alongside the creation of “new” languages (in the history of, say, Haitian Creole). We’ll examine all of these diachronic patterns as examples of the human linguistic capacity coming to terms with varying input in the linguistic ecology. Thus, processes of first- and second-language acquisition, and the differences between the two, should be crucial to understanding language-change phenomena. The results of our discussion should contribute to our understanding of the nature of language in the human mind and the conditions and limits whereby language can vary.

The first couple of lectures will discuss central issues in, and a sample of models from, the study of historical change and language acquisition, including:

• the relationship between language contact and language change;
• whether language change is ever possible in absence of language contact;
• the nature of “creolization”;
• the relationship between first- and second-language acquisition and language change;
• whether the language acquirer comes equipped with a set of “cues” that enable parameters to be set.

Then we’ll turn to particular domains of language variation related to basic parameters of clause and nominal structure, possibly including the following issues:

• Does the language have V-to-I? Yes: French / No: Haitian Creole
• Does the language have (non-residual) V-to-C? Yes: German / No: English
• Is a (phonetically overt) copula required for non-verbal predication? Yes: English / No: Haitian Creole
• Distribution and interpretation of determiners

For each of these domains we’ll look for evidence in comparative syntax, historical change, and language acquisition.

We expect the seminar to be of interest to colleagues interested in:

• linguistic theory;
• first- and second-language acquisition;
• language change/creation;
• the relationship between language and larger issues of cognition.

24.981 Topics in computational phonology and morphology
M 2:30-5:00pm, plus lab sessions to be determined
Location: TBA

Description:

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.

This class is intended to serve two distinct functions:

• We will discuss recent theoretical work informed by computational implementations, and tools for modeling phonological knowledge of various kinds. Special attention will be paid to the relation between formal learning models and empirical data concerning phonological acquisition.
• The class also functions as a practical introduction to some scripting techniques, allowing those who have no programming background to gain some hands-on experience with modeling. No previous programming experience is assumed or required.

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.

24.956 Seminar on Topics in East Asian Linguistics
T 10-1, 66-156 (when meeting at MIT, including the first class on 9/15)
C-T James Huang, Shigeru Miyagawa

We will take up some recent studies of East Asian syntax that have important theoretical relevance.

Issues include:

• agreement/topic/focus
• NP structure: the status of classifiers, plurality, and no/de, etc.
• ellipsis and null arguments in clauses and nominals
• comparatives
• intervention effects
• Case alternation

While the focus will be on Chinese and Japanese, we will make an attempt to bring in data and analysis from Korean whenever possible. Students are expected to do one class presentation and a final paper. We will alternate the meeting location between Harvard and MIT. See Calendar for the location of each class.

24.993*: Topics in Syntax
Leftward, Rightward, Overt, Covert: Rules of Linearization
Danny Fox, David Pesetsky
Time: Wednesdays 10-1
Place: 32-D461 (but first class will meet in a different room; look for e-mail)

*Note about the subject number: This class was announced as 24.956, but since that same number is being used by Shigeru Miyagawa and Jim Huang for their seminar, we will be teaching ours under 24.993. If you register for the class, please register for the new number, 24.993. This class will satisfy any requirements that mention 24.956.

TOPIC

On the surface, syntactic movement appears to raise two independent questions for the phonology:

1. Leftward vs. rightward movement: How is the moved element ordered relative to the constituent with which it has just merged — to its left or to its right?
2. Overt vs. covert movement: Which of the two positions occupied by a moved constituent is relevant for its ordering — its new position or its old position (the trace)?

In this class, we will investigate the possibility that these two questions are closely connected. In particular, we will argue that when a moved element is ordered to the right of the constituent with which it has just merged, the result is covert movement. More generally, we will argue that the answer to question 1 for each instance of movement determines the answer to question 2.

We further propose that the answer to question 1 itself might be predictable from Rules of Linearization that are not specific to movement, but order the constituents of the language more generally. That is, the direction of particular movement operations in a given language may be predictable from other basic word order facts of the language.

Among the topics relevant to this investigation are:

• (a) Extraposition: Why do extraposed modifiers appear on the right, and why does this type of extraposition appear to influence scope?
• (b) Scrambling and scope rigidity: Why do OV languages generally allow scrambling but disallow inverse scope in the absence of scrambling?
• (c) Parasitic gaps: Why does covert A-bar movement license parasitic gaps only in very restricted configurations?
• (d) Righthand subject phenomena: Why do certain types of fronting, including Locative Inversion and wh-movement, allow or require an otherwise preverbal subject to appear on the right in many languages?
• (e) Object shift and quantifier movement in Scandinavian languages: Why is Object Shift subject to a requirement of order preservation (Holmberg’s generalization) and Quantifier Movement subject to a seemingly opposite constraint?

Particular attention will be devoted to the implications of our ideas for the timing of linearization—in particular, for the Cyclic Linearization proposal of Fox & Pesetsky (2005).

PLAN FOR THE COURSE

Part 1: We will begin by sketching our proposals and conjectures over the first few weeks. This presentation will leave many questions open, and will certainly yield many unsolved problems.

Part 2: After this, we will back up and spend the middle portion of the class investigating many of the topics raised in the first part in greater depth. The discussion of these topics will be along the lines of other syntax classes in which such topics are discussed, and will not necessarily be limited to questions that are relevant to our proposals in any obvious way.

Topics will include those listed above, but will also include discussion of other recent work on linearization and movement — especially some extremely interesting discoveries recently reported by Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts (and colleagues).

Part 3: We hope to be able to return to part 1 (re-teaching it, in fact) in light of what we have learned from part 2 and earlier discussion.

REQUIREMENTS

• Reading assignments throughout the semester.
• In part 1, we will give some small problems and questions to be investigated.
• For part 2, students will be asked to collaborate with us and with each other on the presentation of particular topics.
• Finally, there will be a squib or short paper on some topic related to the class. This squib could reflect questions you have asked, investigations you have conducted, or scathing attacks on our proposals. It is up to you!

ASSIGNMENT FOR THE FIRST CLASS

Read the paper and handout on extraposition by Fox & Nissenbaum. Many of you have seen this material in 24.952 (or discovered some of it for yourself in a problem set from that class). This work will be our starting point for the topics discussed in this class.

There will be a class website on Stellar, to which subsequent readings will be posted.

24.960 Syntactic Models
Pesetsky

Time: Tuesdays 2-5
Place: 32-D461
Website: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa09/24.960/

The course has twin goals:

First, it gives a quick introduction to at least two “frameworks” for syntactic research that compete with the Government-Binding/Minimalist tradition in the current syntax world: HPSG and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). We work speedily through much of the HPSG textbook by Sag, Wasow and Bender, and also look at the LFG textbook by Bresnan.

Next, the class turns historical, tracing the development of generative syntax from Syntactic Structures (1957) up to the early 1980s, when HPSG and LFG first separated themselves off from the research program that became GB/LSLT. An overarching theme of the course is the issue of derivational vs. representational views of syntax — a theme that offers some surprising observations about who said what at various points in the history of the field, but also gives the course a focus relevant to the most current work.

You can get a good sense of what the class will be like from its old Stellar pages: >http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp07/24.960/ and http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa03/24.960/. I plan to follow essentially the same structure, but I will work extra hard to make room for the book by Jackendoff and Culicover, which I did not end up teaching the last two (!) times I announced it and still want very much to.

The requirements are:

1. regular attendance and participation
2. problem sets in the first half of the class, and
3. three class presentations or co-presentations (depending on numbers): of an HPSG paper, an LFG paper, and a paper from the period of generative semantics/interpretive semantics debates

No paper! (A major attraction in the past.)

Many students have reported finding this class both fun and enlightening (and not just because there is no required paper). Ask some of your predecessors for their reviews.

The most important book to order right now is the following one:

• Sag, Wasow and Bender “Syntactic Theory” (e.g., here or here)

…and please start reading it. It will be great if you come to the first class already somewhat prepared. This book is intended as an introduction to syntax for undergraduates, so you will find the early chapters go quickly. But the syntax it introduces is HPSG, so fairly soon you will be learning new things.

The books we will be using later in the semester are:

• Bresnan “Lexical-Functional Grammar”
  [Out of print in paperback, but ">available used. I will, however, post relevant parts to Stellar, so we can make do even if you don’t get the book.]
• Chomsky “Syntactic Structures” (e.g., or here)
• Culicover and Jackendoff “Simpler Syntax” (e.g., here or here)

Other readings (papers and excerpts from books) will be downloadable from the Stellar website for the class.

Hope to see you there!

24.979 Topics in Syntax & Semantics
von Fintel, Iatridou
MW 1:30-3
66-160

“Without glue, what do we do?”

The theme of our seminar is the question of how meanings are put together when there seems to be a lack of explicit marking of how things fit together. One famous example (seminally studied by Stump) is the variety of meanings a free adjunct can take on:

(1) Having long arms, John can reach the ceiling.
(2) Standing on a chair, John can reach the ceiling.

We will talk about the syntax & semantics of such adjuncts, of parentheticals, of free relatives, of appositive relatives, of conjunction, of concessives, of conditionals, and of paratactic coordinations. The reading list will evolve over the course of the semester, since this is a topic that is mostly new to us. We will be learning with you as we go along.

In a departure from our usual seminar format, we are meeting twice a week in more bite-sized chunks of time. To make this format be productive, preparatory reading will be even more important than usual.

Apart from keeping up with the reading and participating vigorously in the seminar discussions, which is an expectation for all seminar participants, registered students will write a term paper that is at least tangentially related to the topic(s) of the seminar. Early consultation about the term papers is advised.

For the first meeting on Wednesday September 9 at 1:30pm in Room 66-160, the preparatory reading is a (not completely randomly chosen) article on the meaning of conjunction:

Txurruka, Isabel Gómez. 2003. The natural language conjunction and. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(3). 255–285. doi:10.1023/A:1024117423963.

Everybody who intends to attend the seminar should read this article beforehand and think of questions and comments about it for the seminar discussion.

Mike Frank and Ed Vul
Statistics and Visualization for Data Analysis and Inference

Mon Jan 26 thru Fri Jan 30, 1:00 - 3:00PM
Room 46-3189 M-R 1/26 – 1/29 and 46-3310 for F 1/30
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/9/ia09/9.savfdaai/index.html

Description:

A whirl-wind tour of the statistics used in behavioral science research, covering topics including: data visualization, building your own null-hypothesis distribution through permutation, useful parametric distributions, the generalized linear model, and model- based analyses more generally. Familiarity with Matlab, Octave, or R will be useful, prior experience with statistics will be helpful but is not essential. This course is intended to be a ground-up sketch of a coherent, alternative perspective to the “null-hypothesis significance testing” method for behavioral research (but don’t worry if you don’t know what this means).

Course Outline:

Visualization. Creating a visualization to understand experimental results. Simple univariate displays. Conventional multivariate displays. The repertoire of visual variables. Introduction of examples to be used throughout the course: simple behavioral experiments, complex behavioral experiments, and eye-tracking.

Permutation. Understanding what would have happened “by chance” through non-parametric tests, confidence bounds, and measures of effect size. Discussion of null-hypothesis significance testing and its limitations.

Distribution. Understanding the spread of data. Inferring parametric forms (Binomial, Gaussian, Poisson, etc.) as a convenient way of describing the structure of data. Effect size and Bayesian derivation of tests for parametric distributions, inc. binomial test, t-test, Cohen’s d, etc.

Models of Data 1: The Linear Model. What is a “model of data.” Basic assumptions of the linear model. The standard and generalized linear model and relationship to ANOVA. Bayesian derivation of the LM. Link functions and logistic regression. Effect size in a linear model. Introduction to multilevel models.

Models of Data 2: Bayesian Models. Constructing and testing more complex models of data. Bayesian models as a tool for creating models with complex task assumptions. Brief introduction to basic techniques for Bayesian inference.

Title of Event: MathMod SPQR — Statistics, Probability Theory, Quantitative methods and R
Organizer: Peter Graff
13th-16th of January 2009, 2pm-5pm, Room TBA

Enrollment limits and prerequisites: Permission of instructor (email graff@mit.edu).
No background in Statistics assumed.
Enrollment limited to 10 students.
Priority will be given to Linguistics, Psychology and Brain and Cognitive Science students and faculty.

Description:

This mini-course will introduce basic concepts of probability theory and statistical models applicable to the quantitative study of linguistic phenomena. Participants will learn how to implement statistical models and graphically depict data in the statistical programming language R. Concepts that will be covered include: scales, distributions, hypothesis testing, experimental design, random variables, Central Limit Theorem, Bayes’ Rule, sampling, t-test, ANOVA, regression, logistic regression, mixed models.

Day 1: R language, Graphics, Descriptive Statistics, Scales, Variables
Day 2: Probability Theory - Random Variables, Distributions, Hypothesis Testing, Bayes’ Rule, Sampling, Central Limit Theorem
Day 3: Statistical Models - T-Test, Regression, ANOVA, Mixed Models, Logistic Regression
Day 4: Experimental Design

Participants are expected to complete all assigned readings and problem sets.
URL: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/mathmod/index.html

Attendance requirements: Participants requested to attend all sessions

Linguistic Theory and the Japanese Language (24.946) will be taught on Tuesdays, 10 - 1, in 4-144. The tentative schedule is as follows. For a list of readings (more will be added), see the Stellar site:

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa08/24.946/index.html

Tentative syllabus

In this course we will explore some of the major topics studied in Japanese linguistics over the past 15 years or so. Each topic not only represents an important construction in Japanese, but its analysis has significant implications for linguistic universals.

September 9 Genitive Subjects
September 16 Floating Quantifers
September 23 Ditransitives, Nominalization
September 30 Scrambling/Focus/Agreement/EPP
October 7 Pro-drop and related matters, Ellipsis
October 14 Indeterminate Pronouns
October 21 TBA
October 28 Wh-questions
November 4 Causatives, Double-o Constraint
November 11 No Class, Veteran’s Day
November 18 TBA
November 25 Subject and object honorification
December 2 TBA
December 9 TBA

24.964 (Topics in phonology) meets Wed 12-3 this semester, in 32-D831.

The topic is: Mechanisms of morpho(phono)logical change

Description: The early days of generative phonology saw a flurry of work applying the tools of the new theory to the problem of characterizing language change (e.g., Kiparsky 1965, King 1969). More recent phonological and morphological frameworks have brought with them a range of new mechanisms and perspectives on why and how morphological and phonological systems might change, but on the whole, there has less of a concerted effort to link synchronic and diachronic analysis.

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the mechanisms that recent grammatical theories offer for explaining morphological and morphophonological change. We will review the contributions of early generative phonology to the study of language change, and then consider how more recent developments may change the predictions about likely changes. Along the way, of course, we will also need to consider the contribution of extra-grammatical factors, and the interplay of competence, performance, and learning in shaping morphological change.

Topics will include: (subject to substantial revision, according to needs or interests of participants)

• Overregularization (lexical simplification); Grammar simplification
• Phonological markedness, morphological markedness
• Paradigm uniformity constraints
• Implicational relations between forms
• Informativeness and lexical distinctness; Antihomophony, morphological distinctness

9.591 / 24.495 Language processing: An introduction to the experimental investigation of language, above the word level

Instructors: Ted Gibson, Evelina Fedorenko

Location: 46-3015

Requirements: Students need to have either (a) a good experimental psychology background; or (b) a good linguistics background.

Currently scheduled: Mondays 2-5. We already know of some conflicts with students who would like to take this class. So we may re-schedule the class to 4-7 or 6-9 on Mondays, or possibly some other time slot, depending on the schedules of the students who want to take the class. Please send me or Ev email if you plan on taking the class for credit, and if so, please tell us your scheduling constraints.

This course has two goals: (1) to teach students about experimental design and basic results in language processing; and (2) to tutor students through the design and execution of an experiment of their choosing, in a language research area above the word level (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, working memory).

This is a project-oriented class. Because of the time needed to work on each project, registration is limited in this class to 10 people. If more than 10 people sign up, we will form groups so that the total number of projects does not exceed 10. We will meet with students individually (or in groups) early in the semester in order to decide on a topic area for an experiment to be run during the term. During the semester, students will design, run and analyze at least one psycholinguistic experiment. A paper presenting the study will be due at the end of the semester.

The course will meet once a week for three hours at a time. The lectures will survey some critical results from the field of sentence processing. Throughout the course we will emphasize quantitative methods for investigating language. We will also discuss how to design experimental materials to evaluate hypotheses (including basic statistics, using the language R) from all areas of language, controlling for factors not relevant to the hypothesis in question. Some later lectures will be devoted to discussing students’ experiments.

Students taking the course may come with their own hypotheses to evaluate. Alternatively, we have suggestions for projects in different areas of language. One requirement of any proposed experiment is feasibility. Consequently, most experiments will need to evaluate a question using English participants, because of the availability of this group locally. Proposed experiments on other languages are possible, but only if the experimenter can demonstrate feasibility of getting access to the relevant participant group during the term.

The new time and room for Graduate Language Acquisition 9.601/24.949J is:

Mondays 2 to 5

46-4199

This was determined at first meeting, by all who were there. If you missed the first meeting, feel welcome to come to the next one, which will be this Monday, September 8, 2 PM.

24.956
Topics in Syntax
Kyle Johnson
T 2-5
32-D461

In the 1980’s, Elisabet Engdahl responded to the problems posed by reconstruction effects with an interesting proposal concerning the representations that the “movement” relation invokes. She suggested that movement produced multidominant phrase markers, and adopted the “Phrase Linking Grammars” that Stanley Peters was developing at the time. This seminar will examine how this thesis might play out with today’s syntactic tools. While her focus was almost exclusively on producing a working semantics for movement, ours will be to, first, better match that semantics with a working syntax and, second, relate those multidominant representations with the strings that movement creates. Our journey might include dalliances in: resumptive pronoun strategies, the structure of relative clauses, the internal organization of DPs, events and the semantics of quantification, linearization schemes, island effects, remnant movement, pied-piping, and the roots of the “Empty Category Principle.” We’ll review, and build upon, work by Sauerland, Fox, Elbourne, Nunes, Kayne and, of course, Engdahl.

Course requirements: a paper on a topic related to movement, linearization, quantification, ellipsis, binding theory, DPs, pronouns or syntax, and a short presentation of that paper in class.

The statistics workshop from IAP will continue meeting every two weeks this semester. The plan is to meet at 12:10 on non-colloquium Fridays. Participants alternate in presenting a mathematical model and showing how to analyze some interesting linguistic data with it. Models we will be covering this semester include: Correlation, Regression, Logistic Regression, Mixed Models, Bootstrapping, ANOVA, MANOVA, ANCOVA and many more. (The agenda is open to suggestions.)

The first meeting will be Friday, February 22 at 12:10, in the phonetics lab (32-D958). Adam Albright will present Pearson and Spearman correlations, and how to do them in R.

Instructors: Adam Albright, David Pesetsky
Thursdays 2—5, 32-D461

Course description:

Topics in the structure of words and their components, including why such things should exist in the first place (if, indeed, they do). What is the evidence for structure below the level of the word? What (if anything) distinguishes word structure from sentence structure? What principles account for the phonological shape of complex words? Why does morphology sometimes fail to express syntactic/semantic differences (one affix, two functions), and why does it sometimes “overexpress” them (two affixes, one function). The big question underlying the course will be: is there a distinct morphological grammar, or can morphological phenomena all be understood as arising from the interaction of syntax and phonology?

Course website: http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp08/24.965

Schedule of Topics (subject to revision):

Instructors: M. Kenstowicz and D. Steriade
Fridays 9—12, 32-D461

Brief description:

This class discusses the analysis of opaque phonological processes, beginning with the latest proposal, John McCarthy’s OT-with-Candidate-Chains (OT-CC). The broad aim of the class is to reach a conclusion about the need for any unified approach to opacity within OT (as against a divide-and-conquer approach that deals separately with the different phenomena comprising the set of opaque structures); and to explore related issues about the origins and continued productivity of opaque systems.

Instructors: E.O. Aboh and M. DeGraff
Thursdays 9:30—12:30, 32-D461

Course description

In this class, we will study various aspects of Gungbe (a Gbe language of the Kwa family) and Haitian Creole. A question that one may want to ask immediately is why these two and not any other combination, say Gungbe versus Mandarin Chinese or Haitian Creole versus Mohawk?

One motivation for focusing on Gungbe and Haitian Creole is historical: Some of the creators of Haitian Creole were native speakers of Gbe languages (Ewe, Fon, Gun, etc.). Accordingly, we can naively think that certain properties of their native languages were transmitted, via “relexification,” into the new language variety—-the “Creole”—-they created in the colonial Caribbean. Yet, while Gbe and Haitian Creole appear to share certain general syntactic properties, close scrutiny reveals that they also display drastic and fascinating contrasts. Therefore comparing Haitian Creole to Gungbe is, in some sense, an exercise in relatively fine-grained comparative syntax where we try to elucidate the principles that govern variation across languages that are historically related and that exhibit a substantial inventory of morphosyntactic parallels.

This exercise is also relevant for understanding variation across certain language types. Gungbe and Haitian creole display certain core properties of isolating languages like Mandarin Chinese (e.g., “bare” noun, serial verb construction). But again, it appears under inspection that the languages differ radically in certain domains (e.g., DP). Therefore, one of the questions we are concerned with in this class is to what extent the similarities between Gungbe and Haitian Creole are due to the structural make-up of isolating languages and how the unraveling of this structural make-up will help understand the commonly assumed typological partition between isolating and non-isolating languages.

Provisional outline:

[From Andrew Nevins:]

In case you’ve always wanted to write papers with beautifully formatted trees, automatically numbered examples and footnotes, smooth IPA fonts without feeling guilty about supporting SIL, platform independent PC/Mac compatible, straight-to-PDF, free software that involves no fighting with animated paperclips but only pure logical function application, I’ll hold a 3 day tutorial on the basics of LaTeX Tuesday 1/22 through Thursday 1/24 in Boylston 303 at Harvard. All are welcome. If you could let me know in advance whether you are a Mac or PC user, I can send you some pointers to get LaTeX installed before you come. Bring your laptop if you want — but our primary focus will be on the syntax of LaTeX and how to do linguistics-specific things.

Mac: http://www.tug.org/mactex/
PC: http://miktex.org/2.7/Setup.aspx

A Brief Introduction to the Kinande Language and Kinande Linguistics

This IAP class (organized by Jessica Coon and Patrick Jones) will introduce basic elements of the morphology, syntax, and phonology of Kinande, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the course of the 3 day class, students will develop a basic understanding of how words and sentences are formed in the language, and will also be introduced to the body of work on Kinande currently extant within the linguistics literature.

Specifics linguistic topics will include: vowel harmony, vowel coalescence, tone, nominal and verbal morphology, the role of word-internal domains, agreement, clause structure, topicalization, and question formation.

Time: 2:00—4:00 PM on Jan 28, 29, 30.
Place: 8th floor conference room in the Linguistics and Philosophy Dept.

Food will be provided!

Reminder: The IAP statistics/R tutorial will take place this week M-F 11am-1pm in 32-D831. Contact Peter Graff (graff@mit.edu) for details.

We will be learning about probability theory and how to implement it in the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. No previous knowledge of Statistics is required. The tutorial will take place in daily 2 hour long sessions from the 21st until the 24th of January 2008.

(For details, stay tuned, or contact Peter Graff: graff@mit.edu)

Patrick Jones and Jessica Coon are planning a short introduction to Kinande for the last two weeks of IAP. The intro is primarily intended for students who will be taking Topics in a Less Familiar Language next semester, but is of course open to all. More details will follow.

6.911 Transcribing Prosodic Structure of Spoken Utterances with ToBI
Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Nanette Veilleux, Alejna Brugos
Tue, Thu, Jan 8, 10, 15, 17, 22, 24, 29, 31, 11am-01:00pm, 32-044

Training in the ToBI system (for ‘To’nes and ‘B’reak ‘I’ndices) to transcribe the prosodic structure of spoken utterances in American English. 8 sessions will combine new ToBI tutorial presentation with extensive practice and discussion; opportunities to practice labelling outside of class. Participants are encouraged to submit sample utterances of particular interest to them, for general discussion. Class is appropriate for undergrad or grad students with background in linguistics (phonology or phonetics), cognitive psychology (psycholinguistics), speech acoustics or music, who wish to learn about the prosody of speech, i.e. the intonation, rhythm, grouping and prominence patterns of spoken utterances, prosodic differences that signal meaning & phonetic implementation.

More info: Web page from 2006 version of the class