Whamit!

Speaker: Edward Gibson (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT)
Title: Meaning explanations of two syntactic islands: Subject islands and Embedded-clause islands
Date and time: Thursday, May 17, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:  

Syntacticians have long proposed (a) that certain extractions from embedded positions are universally ungrammatical across languages and (b) that their ungrammaticality is not explainable in terms of meaning.  These two ideas together imply the existence of syntactic universals in Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (e.g., Ross, 1967; Chomsky, 1973; and many more recent studies including Sprouse et al (2012) and Sprouse et al (2016)). In this talk, I will present data from studies of two different kinds of syntactic islands that strongly suggest meaning explanations for both, without any need for syntactic universals.  First, I report collaborative work with Anne Abeillé, Barbara Hemforth and Elodie Winckel (CNRS, Paris), where we show that extractions out of subject position are actually easier to process than extractions from object position, in both English and French relative clauses, contrary to the claim of the universality of a so-called “subject island”.

The 25th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association took place May 10-12 at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.  TC Chen presented on Amis Case stacking. Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14) sends us this picture of TC standing next to an antique tea chest at the conference:

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

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

We are beyond delighted to announce that fifth-year student Athulya Aravind, who specializes in language acquisition, has accepted our offer of a tenure-track assistant professor position!

Speakers: Thomas Schatz and Naomi Feldman (UMD/MIT)
Title: A simple framework to study how phonological structure can emerge from the interaction of social, physical and cognitive evolutionary pressures
Date/Time: Monday, May 7, 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Nowak and Krakauer (1999) proposed a framework to study how combinatoriality in language can emerge from evolutionary pressures to communicate in the presence of noise in the communication channel. I will present this framework and discuss possible extensions that might lead to functional accounts for certain phonological phenomena. I will focus in particular on an extension of the framework that adds a pressure to limit the production costs of words in the language, for which I will present a few preliminary results.
This is very preliminary work in collaboration with Matthias Hofer and Naomi Feldman. The main object of the presentation will be to get feedback on the potential of the framework and to advertise the project to students with a formal background in phonology - which both Matthias and me lack - who might be interested in collaborating with us.

Speaker: Carolyn Spadine (MIT)
Title: Evaluating Syntactic Approaches to Interrogative Flip: Test cases from English and Malayalam
Date and time: Tuesday May 8, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

“Interrogative flip” describes a phenomena in which elements that appear to orient to the speaker in a declarative utterance shift perspective and orient to the addressee in an interrogative context — evidentials, perspective-sensitive anaphora, modals, adverbs, predicates of personal taste, and others have been reported to show this behavior. In proposing a mechanism for encoding discourse-pragmatic information in syntax, interrogative flip is one of the core phenomena that Tenny and Speas 2003 intend to address, and the same problem has been subsequently taken up in Woods 2014, Zu 2018, and many others.

This talk presents preliminary work on two constructions that display interrogative flip, and examines the ways in which existing syntactic approaches to modeling interrogative flip account for or fail to account for this data. The first is discourse participant-oriented modifiers in English, as in (1):

1. a. [As a film critic], this movie deserves an Oscar.
b. [As a film critic], does this movie deserve an Oscar?

In (1a), the preferred and perhaps only interpretation of the bracketed constituent is that the speaker is a film critic, whereas in (1b), English speakers report both speaker- and addressee-oriented interpretations for the same constituent. A similar but more constrained pattern emerges for embedded instances of these modifiers, posing a challenge for some proposals. The second comes from a reportative evidential marker ennu (glossed as REP) in Malayalam (2a), which can either scope under or over the question particle, yielding two different interpretations — either a question about a report heard by the addressee (2b), or a declarative report of a question overhead by the speaker (2c).

2. a. prime minister varunnu ennu
prime minister come.PROG REP
“I heard that the Prime Minister is coming”
b. prime minister varunnu enn-oo?
prime minister come.PROG REP-Q
“Did you hear if the Prime Minister is coming?”
c. prime minister varunn-oo ennu
prime minister come.PROG-Q REP
“I heard someone ask if the Prime Minister is coming”

In both cases, I suggest the data supports the general pattern that existing proposals intend to account for, but also raise concerns about the specific structures proposed to implement them.

Speaker: Naomi Francis (MIT)
Title: Presupposition-denying uses of even
Date and time: Wednesday, May 9, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk explores a puzzle about how even interacts with presupposition-denying discourse moves. Even can be used in declarative sentences that deny presuppositions, but only if it appears below negation (1).

(1) A: Did Kenji’s wife go to the picnic? Presupposes: Kenji has a wife, i.e. is married.
B: He isn’t even married!
B’: #He’s even unmarried!

I present a solution to this puzzle that makes crucial use of the additive presupposition of even. This presupposition requires that, in addition to the prejacent (the sentence that hosts even) being true, at least one of its focus alternatives must be true as well. I propose that the relevant focus alternatives in this context all contain the trigger (Kenji’s wife) for the presupposition that the prejacent denies, meaning that they are incompatible with it. This means that the additive presupposition of even can only be satisfied if the presupposition that Kenji has a wife is appropriately “cancelled” within the alternatives, which I argue is only possible when these alternatives contain sentential negation (1B). Drawing on data from German, Greek, Russian, and Hebrew, I show that the contrast in (1) is not unique to English and that the proposed solution makes good crosslinguistic predicitons.

Speaker: Sabine Iatridou (MIT)
Title: No commands
Date and time: Thursday, May 10, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:  

Speaker: Daniel Rothschild (University College London)
Title: What it takes to believe.
Time: Friday 5/11, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract: 

Much linguistic evidence supports the view that believing something only requires thinking it likely. I assess and reject a rival view, based on recent work on homogeneity in natural language, according to which belief is a more demanding attitude. I discuss the implications of the linguistic considerations about ‘believe’ for our philosophical accounts of belief. 

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 27 took place at Stanford over the weekend, and three MIT presentations were given.

• Colin Davis and Tatiana Bondarenko: Parasitic gaps and covert pied-piping in Russian LBE
• Rafael Abramovitz: Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Russian: Evidence from Unpronounced Subjects
• Maša Močnik: Where Force Matters: Embedding Epistemic Modals and Attitudes

Details about the memorial for Morris Halle, including a registration link, can be found at http://linguistics.mit.edu/hallememorialservice/.  If you are planning to attend, please register by this Wednesday if possible, so we can anticipate attendance. 

Speakers: Nabila Louriz (Hassan-II, Casablanca) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: On the adaptation of vowels in French loanwords into Moroccan Arabic
Date/Time: Monday, 30 April 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

 Moroccan Arabic has a simple three-vowel phonemic system /i, u, a/ plus epenthetic schwa. The vowels appear as /e, o, ɑ/ in the context of an emphatic (pharyngealized) consonant. As shown by examples such as boîte > /bwaT/ ‘tin can’ (cf. /bwiyT-a/ diminutive), French loanwords with /o, a/ (and sometimes /e/) are regularly borrowed with pharyngeal consonants—a striking example of enhancement dubbed “reverse engineering” in Kenstowicz & Louriz (2009). In this presentation we briefly review this finding and then focus on the adaptation of French nasal vowels. Three contexts are considered. Word-medial nasal vowels are adapted as oral vowel plus homorganic nasal consonant: congé [kɔʒ̃e] ‘holiday’ appears as /kuɲʒi/. Word-final nasal vowels sometimes appear with a nasal consonant and at other times as a simple vowel with no trace of nasality: Fr bouchon [buʃɔ̃] ‘bottle stopper’ > MA /buʃun/ but bâtiment [batimã] ‘building’ > MA /baTima/. Finally, word-initial vowels are often deleted: infirmier ‘nurse’ > /fərmli/. Our discussion focuses on some of the factors that may underlie the variation.

We are pleased to announce that Ryan Bennett will be visiting MIT this week. In addition to a colloquium talk on Friday, he will also be giving a mini course on Wednesday and Thursday, details found below.

Speaker: Ryan Bennett (UCSC)
Title: The sound patterns of Kaqchikel (Mayan): phonology, morphology, phonetics, and the lexicon
Time: 12:30-2:00 , Wednesday 5/2 and Thursday 5/3
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this mini-course, I report on two projects investigating the sound structure of Kaqchikel (Mayan). The first talk analyzes prosodic differences between prefixes in Kaqchikel. Prefix phonotactics provide evidence for abstract, recursively-nested prosodic structure. Importantly, alternative analyses using morphologically-oriented mechanisms to capture this data make problematic predictions about the broader morphology. The second talk considers perceptual confusions between plain and glottalized stops in Kaqchikel, arguing that such confusions owe, in part, to the statistical structure of the language (e.g. phoneme distributions, and their acoustic similarity in spontaneous speech). Connections to sound change are also discussed, along with practical issues in running corpus studies and field experiments with under-documented and under-resourced languages.

Speaker: Ryan Bennett (UCSC)
Title: Incorporation, focus and the phonology of ellipsis in Irish
Time: Friday 5/4, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

This talk analyzes a pattern of misalignment between syntax, semantics, and phonology in modern Irish. This mismatch turns on the interaction between focus and ellipsis, as realized in clauses with pronominal subjects. We argue that ellipsis can be over-ridden when phonological—-rather than semantic—-requirements of focus need to be satisfied. This motivates a theoretical framework in which post-syntactic computation involves the parallel optimization of at least some aspects of morpho-syntax and prosody. The analysis relies on a kind of head movement (from a specifier to a higher head) which is predicted by bare phrase structure, but little-documented.

The 54th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society was held over the weekend. The following members of our community presented:

• Abdul-Razak Sulemana: PRO as a Partial Copy A movement based account of Control 
• Emily Clem (visiting student; UC Berkeley): Exceed-comparative languages and the degree abstraction parameter 
• Danfeng Wu: Evidence from ellipsis suggests the low origination site of expletives “there” and “it” 
• Rafael Abramovitz: Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Russian: Evidence from Unpronounced Subjects 
• Sherry Yong Chen: From zero to bigger things: numerality, intensification, and NPI licensing 

Title: on Schlenker (2012) 
Date and time: Monday April 23th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

Vincent will be presenting Philippe Schlenker’s paper ‘Maximize Presupposition and Gricean Reasoning’.

As per usual, reading the paper is not mandatory, although feel free to read it if you’re feeling brave.

Speaker: Jaehyun Son (Duksung Women’s University)
Title: Pitch Accent Systems in Korean
Date and time: Monday, 23 April 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Research on the Korean accent has been carried out within the Korean linguistics community, but in that context, the Korean accent system has traditionally been compared to the tone system of Chinese, in which pitch contours are syllabic. In contrast, Japanese researchers have proposed that the Korean accent system should be analyzed from the point of view of word-level and phrase-level accentual systems seen in Japanese dialects. One possible reason for this difference of opinion is that recently in Japan, despite the growing influence of the accentual systems of Tokyo Japanese and the dialects of other major cities, a great variety of smaller dialects have been observed and documented, and as a result of this work researchers have discovered accent types that have played a crucial role in uncovering the history and evolution of the Japanese accentual system. In Korea, on the other hand, accent has been lost in the regions surrounding and including Seoul (the national capital) but there are still dialects, mainly in the south-eastern regions of the Korean peninsula, that retain an accentual system and can shed light on the history of accent in Korea. For the present study, I took the Japanese-oriented view rather than the traditional Chinese-oriented view and analyzed the accentual systems of Korean dialects using data from a purely synchronic field survey of several locations across the Korean-speaking region. The field survey includes dialects that have already been documented by Korean and Japanese researchers, but by including the whole Korean-speaking region in its scope and using a new theoretical framework, the current study was able to highlight the shortcomings of previous work. The current study presents the Korean accent types and their geographical distribution. Moreover, by comparing the various accent types, it was possible to look back and investigate how the Korean accent system has evolved up to the present day.

Speaker: Hendrik Strobelt (IBM)
Title:  Visualization for Sequence Models for Debugging and Fun
Date and time: Monday, April 23, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Visual analysis is a great tool to explore deep learning models when there is no strong mathematical hypothesis yet
available. I will present two visual tools where we used design study methodology to allow exploration of
patterns in hidden state changes in RNNs/LSTMs (LSTMVis) and exploration of Sequence2Sequence models (Seq2Seq-Vis).
Both model types have shown superior performance for NLP like language modeling or language translation.
Examples about both tasks will be shown on a variety of models.

As beautiful distraction, we also utilize data science methods to investigate large data in a more artistic way.
Formafluens is such a data experiment where we analyze a large collections of doodles made by humans in the Google
Quickdraw tool.

Speaker: Ryosuke Shibagaki (Nanzan University/MIT)
Title: Mandarin Resultatives in Syntax-Semantics Interface
Date and time: Tuesday April 24, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this presentation, I will offer an account of the linking issue of Mandarin Chinese Resultative V1-V2 consturction from the perspective of the syntax-semantics interface. Building up on the previous analyses such as Huang (2006), I will claim that it is indeed the semantics of V2, which determines the structure of the sentence and the linking pattern such as subject-oriented or object-oriented resultatives. I will also show that my account will successfully explain the fascinating inverse-linking type; Mandarin allows some resultatives such as “This kind of drug will eat-die you” where more proto-subject ‘you’ links to OBJ and more proto-object ‘this kind of drug’ links to the subject. In the beginning of my presentation, I will briefly introduced the history of Chinese V-V construction.

Speaker: Maša Močnik (MIT)
Title: Where Force Matters: Life under Doxastic Attitudes
Date and time: Wednesday, April 25, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

There has been much recent interest in the analysis and distribution of embedded epistemic modals (Yalcin 2007, Anand and Hacquard 2013, a.o.). We present novel data using the embedding verb dopuščati (‘to allow for the possibility that’) from Slovenian, analysed as an existential doxastic attitude. Building on Anand and Hacquard (2013), we focus on the distribution of existential and universal epistemic modals under doxastics. When anchored to the attitude holder, modals like must show a contrast: they are acceptable under positive universal doxastics (Suppose you wake up late one morning and, before opening your eyes, you remark: I think it must be sunny outside!), but are not as acceptable under: dopuščati, negated universal doxastics (regardless of neg-raising), and negated dopuščati. Building on Yalcin (2007) and Mandelkern (2017, ch. 1), we propose a new constraint on epistemic modals (while maintaining duality) and use blind scalar implicatures (Magri 2009, 2011) to capture their restricted distribution under doxastic attitudes. A sentence like #Dopuščam, da mora deževati (‘I allow for the possibility that it must be raining’) becomes contextually equivalent to I think it must be raining and therefore falls out as odd in the same way as Magri’s #Some Italians come from a warm country does.

This will be a practice talk for FASL. Here is the most recent version of the abstract.

Speaker: Moshe Bar-Lev (MIT, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Simplification by Inclusion (joint work with Danny Fox)
Date and time: Thursday, April 26, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

We are overjoyed to welcome nine new first-year students who will be starting next Fall — including two who will be studying in our MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative (MITILI) Masters program.

• Ruyue (Agnes) Bi (UC Berkeley)
• Enrico Flor (University of Vienna)
• Peter Grishin (University of Cambridge)
• Tracy Kelley (UMass Amherst; Wampanaog, MITILI program)
• Anton Kukhto (Moscow State University)
• Patrick Niedzielski (Cornell)
• Katie Van Luven (Carleton University)
• Roger Paul (University of Maine at Presque Isle; Passamaquoddy/Maliseet, MITILI program)
• Hyun Ji Yoo (UCLA)

Welcome!!

The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) took place at UCLA over the weekend. MIT department members were presented both talks and posters

• Kenyon Branan (5th-year) and Abdul-Razak Sulemana (4th-year) Covert movement licenses parasitic gaps
• Ömer Demirok (4th year) Events are Entities: Evidence from Turkish Nominalizations
• Matthew Tyler (Yale) and Michelle Yuan (5th-year) Nominal-clitic case mismatches
• Colin Davis (3rd-year) The Syntax of Stranding at Edges
• Danfeng Wu (2nd-year) English expletives “there” and “it” originate low: Evidence from ellipsis
• Emily Clem (visitor) and Virginia Dawson (UC Berkeley) The emergence of case matching in discontinuous DPs
• Kenyon Branan (5th-year) and Colin Davis (3rd-year) Edges and Unlocking: Evidence from Chichewa

Norvin Richards (faculty) spent the week of April 14-21 at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, learning about Basque and Spanish and teaching a week-long course on Contiguity Theory.

Michel DeGraff shares some good news about the Dual Language (English/Haitian Creole) Two-Way Immersion program at the Mattapan Early Elementary School which he has been helping with. The school was recently recognized with the Phil H. Gordon Legacy Award from EdVestors, a nonprofit focused on improving urban education. The award recognizes schools that are leveling the playing field for all students to learn. The Mattapan Early Elementary School was awarded $30,000 to help it grow.

The full story is available at the Boston Herald. A video presentation about the program at Mattapan Early Elementary is also available here.

In the weeks since our colleague Morris Halle passed away, many memories, stories, and other appreciations have been posted to linguistics-related sites such as Language Log, Phonolist, Facebook (and  others as well) — plus the stories and memories that many of us have shared more personally with each other and with ourselves in thought. We decided it would be good for these memories and thoughts to be collected in one place, with greater permanence. To this end, we have created a memories page on our departmental site, which will form part of a permanent collection of memorial pages for Morris (in progress):

http://linguistics.mit.edu/hallememories/

If your life crossed paths with Morris’s, please share your memories, stories, and thoughts on this page.  If you have already posted elsewhere, please feel free to just copy that text, if you wish, to our page. That is no problem at all.)

As previously noted here, a memorial for Morris will take place at MIT.  Here is an update concerning the location and time, plus important registration information.

Speaker: Hanzhi Zhu (MIT)
Title: Conditionals in although constructions
Date and time: Wednesday, April 18, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk, I’ll be looking at biclausal constructions with although/even though which convey the truth of two propositions as well as the oddness of their juxtaposition:

1. John went out for a walk, even though it’s raining.
2. Although Bailey is rich, she doesn’t give to charity.

The link between although constructions and conditionals has been explored in previous accounts, in which “although p, q” is analyzed as presupposing “normally, if p then ¬q”. However, these accounts ignore the compositional contribution of even, which appears in these constructions in English as well as cross-linguistically. Lund (2017), borrowing from Guerzoni and Lim’s (2007) account of even if, proposes an account in which “although p, q” asserts a conjunction and has a scalar likelihood presupposition: ¬p and q is less likely/expected than p and q. I’ll present a counterexample to this account which favors having a presupposition even closer to Guerzoni and Lim’s proposal for even if: “although p, q” presupposes that if ¬p, q is less likely/expected than if p, q. I’ll also discuss further consequences of this proposal regarding the role of the additive presupposition of even.

Speaker: Erin Olson (MIT)
Title: Stress, pitch, and schwa in Passamaquoddy-Maliseet
Date and time: Thursday, April 19, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

GLOW 41 took place last week at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. MIT department members presented both talks and posters.

Talks:

• Stanislao Zompì (1st-year): Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism 
• Kenyon Branan (5th-year) and Abdul-Razak Sulemana (4th-year): Covert movement licenses parasitic gaps 

Posters:

• Tingchun Chen (6th-year): Multiple case assignment and case-stacking in Amis
• Naomi Francis (4th-year): On even in presupposition denials
• Emily Clem (visitor): Disharmony and the Final-Over-Final Condition in Amahuaca

WSCLA 2018 (The Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas) was held at the University of Ottawa on April 13-15, 2018.

A contingent of MIT students and alumni studying the languages of the Americas participated in the conference:

• Michelle Yuan (fifth year student) gave a talk on Last Resort case licensing in Inuktitut.

The conference was organized by Andres Salanova (PhD ‘2007). Among other participants there were Nico Baier (former visiting student), Maziar Toosarvandani (former postdoc), Karin Vivanco (former visiting student), and Guillaume Thomas (PhD ‘2012).

A memorial for Morris Halle will take place at MIT on Saturday, May 5, 2018.  So we can estimate the number of attendees, please register at the following site if you are planning to come:

https://lingphil.scripts.mit.edu/hallereserve

The exact time and location will be announced once they have been determined — by email to those who have registered as well as on the MIT Linguistics website, here on Whamit, and on our Facebook page.  We hope to livestream the event, and make the video available online, but these details will also be confirmed in a later announcement.

Title: on Stalnaker (2004)
Date and time: Monday April 9th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This week’s paper is Stalnaker’s Assertion Revisited: On the Interpretation of Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics, available here. 

Christopher will be presenting the paper.

Speaker: Yunjing Li (Tianjin Foreign Studies University & MIT)
Title:  Rule Interaction in Mandarin Tonal Phonology
Date and time: Monday, April 9th, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

In Mandarin Chinese, there are some rules governing tone sandhi changes. In some cases, more than one rule may be applicable, hence rule interaction occurs.

This talk will introduce some basic facts about Mandarin tonesand their representation, followed by a description of the interaction between the Third Tone Sandhi Rule and the Neutral Tone Rule in disyllabic words. The ordering of these two rules causes phonological opacity. An analysis in the framework of Harmonic Serialism is proposed.

Speaker: Sze-Wing Tang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong/MIT)
Title: On the Syntax of Sentence-final Elements
Date and time: Tuesday, April 10, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Insights of Ross (1970) of the analysis of the clausal periphery have been revived under the cartographic approach (Rizzi 1997, 2004, Cinque 1999, see also Speas 2004, Tenny 2006, Hill 2007, Miyagawa 2012, 2017, and Wiltschko and Heim 2016). The goal of this talk is twofold. First, it is argued that there should be two distinct syntactic layers in the clausal periphery that are dedicated to “grounding” and “responding” (Wiltschko and Heim 2016), respectively, by examining the grammatical properties of the Mandarin sentence-final particle (“SFP”) ma and Cantonese SFP ge and the “h-family”. Second, it is argued that some sentence-final expressions, such as tags in tag questions in English should be in the highest syntactic position and form a coordination structure with a silent head, in the sense of Kayne (2016). A hierarchical structure/ordering “Proposition > SFP > Tag” is proposed, which may serve as a working hypothesis to study the syntax of speech act cross-linguistically.

Speaker: Frank Staniszewski (MIT)
Title: Wanting, Acquiescing, and Neg-raising
Date and time: Wednesday, April 11, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

I argue that neg-raised (NR) readings for negated sentences containing want are the result of want expressing an underlying weak (existential) quantificational force, which gives rise to the globally strong meanings under negation. To derive the universal interpretation that is attested for non-negated want, then, I adopt Bassi & Bar-Lev (2016)’s treatment of bare conditionals, and hypothesize that want undergoes strengthening in a manner analogous to Free Choice disjunction, as analyzed in Fox (2007).

As evidence for this view, I examine a puzzling paradigm discussed in Homer (2015), in which want appears to show scopal ambiguity w.r.t. the presuppositional adverbial no longer. I show how assuming an underlying existential semantics for want, motivated by a new observation about the data, provides a solution to the puzzle.

Homer’s puzzle: Assuming that the negative adverbial no longer presupposes that the proposition denoted by the clause that is in its scope used to be true, sentence (1a) is ambiguous between narrow and wide scope of want w.r.t. no longer (Homer 2015).

(1) a. Consumers no longer want to be kept in the dark about food.
b. I no longer want to be called an idiot.

Homer suggests that on its most salient reading, want takes wide scope over no longer, as it is not assumed that consumers ever had a desire to be kept in the dark about food, or that the speaker of (1b) used to want to be called an idiot. The absence of want from the presupposition of no longer on the most natural reading is taken to be evidence that want can QR over no longer, which is consistent with additional evidence that want may be a ‘mobile positive polarity item’ (PPI).

I provide evidence against a QR approach, and suggest that want is indeed within the scope of no longer in sentences like (1a-b). While I agree that they don’t presuppose that consumers used to have a desire to be kept in the dark (or be called an idiot), the meaning of want is not entirely absent from the presupposition. Instead, (1a-b) appear to require the weaker assumption that consumers in some way used to ‘be willing to’ or ‘be OK with’ being kept in the dark (or being called an idiot).

In the spirit of von Fintel and Iatridou (2017)’s discussion of weak variants of imperatives, I refer to these asacquiescence readings, which in addition to being detected in the presupposition of no longer, can also be detected in sentences like (2a-b).

(2) a. If you want to wait here for a minute, I’ll be right back.
b. Do you wanna give me a hand with this box?

The acquiescence readings in (2a-b), as well as the attested NR readings for want in other DE environments (sentential negation, scope of no NP, restrictor of comparatives/superlatives) suggest that an analogy with free choice is on the right track. There are, however, some DE environments (restrictor of no NP, additional questions/conditionals) that don’t show the predicted pattern. I address these, and other problems, and suggest possible solutions. I also explore how this analysis could extend to other priority modals, like should and for-infinitival relative clauses.

Speaker: Matthew Tyler (Yale) and Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Nominal-clitic case mismatches (WCCFL Practice Talk) 
Date and time: Thursday, April 12, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

When arguments are clitic-doubled, the clitic and the nominal it doubles typically bear the same case feature. However, recent theoretical work on clitic-doubling, including but not limited to so-called ‘Big DP’ analyses (e.g. Uriagereka 1995, Nevins 2011, Kramer 2014) treats clitics and nominals as separable entities in the syntactic derivation. Given this background, we propose that under the right syntactic conditions, nominals and their clitics should be able to mismatch in case features. In particular, we identify and investigate two classes of mismatch, which form the mirror image of each other. In Choctaw (Muskogean), nominals acquire case features that their associated clitics lack, while in Yimas (Lower-Sepik; data from Foley 1991), clitics acquire case features that their associated nominals lack. We argue that these mismatches are the consequence of case-assignment operations that target nominals or clitics individually.

Today we mourn the loss of Morris Halle, our colleague, our teacher, our friend, co-creator of MIT Linguistics, one of the most imaginative, insightful, and influential linguists in the history of the field.

We are told by his children that Morris passed away peacefully this morning at 3:45am. There will be a memorial - details to be announced.

Title: on Stalnaker (1978)
Date and time: Monday April 2nd, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This week’s paper is Robert Stalnaker’s Assertion. Pre-read is not required.

Mallory will be presenting the paper.

Speaker: Gašper Beguš (Harvard)
Title:  Learning the Blurring Process
Date and time: Monday, April 2nd, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Many artificial grammar learning experiments have provided strong evidence for the assumption that learning biases influence phonological typology: typologically rare processes have been shown to be more difficult to learn. Most of the experiments, however, fail to control for diachronic influences: in many cases, the observed typology can be explained by diachronic factors equally well. In this talk, I present a method for controlling for diachronic influences when testing learning biases. Unnatural processes provide a crucial solution to this problem. I show that a statistical model of diachronic development (that I call Bootstrapping Sound Changes) identifies a crucial mismatch in predictions between the learning and diachronic bias approaches. This mismatch allows me to design experiments such that diachronic factors are controlled for. I present results from two experiments that test learnability of complex vs. unnatural processes and suggest that learnability differences have to influence observed typology in cases that cannot be explained by historical factors. I also discuss implications of this approach for phonological theory in general.

Speaker: Idan Blank (MIT)
Title:  When we “know the meaning” of a word, what kind of knowledge do we have?
Date and time: Monday, April 2nd, 5:00-6:00pm
Location: 46-5156
Abstract: 

Understanding words seems to require both linguistic knowledge (stored form-meaning pairings and ways to combine them) and world knowledge (object properties, plausibility of events, etc.). In this talk, I will pose some challenges for common distinctions between these knowledge sources. First, I will ask whether rich information about concrete objects could be, in principle, learned from just the co-occurrence statistics of different words even in the absence of non-linguistic (e.g., perceptual) information. To this end, I will introduce a domain-general approach for leveraging such statistics (as captured by distributional semantic models, DSMs) to recover context-specific human judgments such that, e.g., “dolphin” and “alligator” appear relatively similar when considering size or habitat, but different when considering aggressiveness. Second, I will probe DSMs for “syntactic”, abstract compositional knowledge of verb-argument structure (e.g., “eat”, but not “devour”, can appear without an object). I will demonstrate that these syntactic properties of verbs can often be predicted from distributional information (i.e., without explicit access to “syntax”), indicating that DSMs capture those aspects of verb meaning that correlate with verb syntax. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of distributional information is needed for predicting verb argument structure - the rest appears to capture semantic properties that are relatively divorced from syntax. In fact, the overall similarity structure across verbs in a DSM is independent from the similarity structure across verbs as determined by their syntax, and both kinds of similarity are needed for explaining human judgments. Together, these two studies attempt to push against the upper bound on the potential complexity of distributional word meanings.

Speaker: Stanislao Zompí (MIT)
Title: Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism
Date and time: Thursday, April 5, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

This is a practice talk for GLOW 41. The abstract can be found here.

We are pleased to announce that Lyn Frazier will be visiting on Friday 4/6  to give a colloquium talk, details below:

Speaker: Lyn Frazier (UMass Amherst)
Title: An act apart:  Processing Not-At-Issue content
Time: Friday, April 6th, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

This talk will examine the representation and processing of not-at-issue content (content conveyed by appositives, parentheticals and expressives).  Potts (2005) characterized not-at-issue content in a multi-dimensional semantics.  Others have proposed a unidimensional semantic account (e.g., Schlenker 2013) or a pragmatic account (e.g., Harris and Potts 2009).

We will begin by establishing a puzzle concerning processing complexity.  It is generally true that sentences that are longer or more complex are judged to be less acceptable than their shorter/simpler counterparts.  But if exactly the same material is added to either at issue content or not at issue content, there is a larger penalty, a larger drop in acceptability, if the material is added to the at issue portion of the sentence. The results of several experiments show this interaction of length/complexity and at-issue status is general. After excluding  a simple attention allocation source for the effect, we will turn to other possibilities ultimately arguing that not-at-issue content expresses a distinct speech act from that of the at issue content. Its status as a separate speech act has various ramifications including for its representation in memory and for the effects it imposes on grammatical dependencies spanning the not-at-issue content. The final part of the talk will present processing arguments concerning the nature of the relation between an appositive relative clause and its containing utterance. 

Sherry Yong Chen (first-year) presented a few weeks ago at the CUNY sentence processing conference at UC Davis. With co-author E. Matthew Husband, she presented on Modelling Memory Retrieval Processes with Drift Diffusion.

Title: on Forbes (2018)
Date and time: Monday March 19th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This week’s paper is Graeme Forbes’ An Investigation of a Gricean Account of Free-Choice ‘Or’, available here.  Pre-read is gently suggested but not expected.

Kelly will be presenting the paper.

Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz and Adam Albright (MIT)
Title: Deriving allomorphic contingencies
Date and time: Monday, March 19, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

In this talk, we report on two loosely-related things we’ve been thinking about in connection with a handbook chapter on allomorphy that we are working on. First, we consider the analysis of portmanteau in Lakhota (Siouan). Lakhota verbs show both subject and object marking, but the combination of 1sg subject with 2nd person object is marked with a single, distinct affix /chi-/. Data from marking on embedded verbs shows that although /chi-/ indicates a subject/object combination, it must actually be analyzed as 2nd person object marker that is used in 1sg subject contexts. This is consistent with the hypothesis that portmanteau is actually complex contextual allomorphy of both heads (null + special allomorph). Moreover, the conditioning context for /chi-/ appears to be the morphosyntactic (featural) context of 1sg subject, and not the specific 1sg subject marker that it normally replaces. This is consistent with Bobaljik’s hypothesis that outward-looking contextual allomorphy is sensitive to morphosyntactic structure. The conditioning context appears to be non-local (in a higher XP), but evidence from stress and root allomorphy supports an analysis in which the root and both agreement suffixes have undergone head-movement to a single projection. Next, we discuss a case of cross-template blocking found in the Koryak (Chukotko-Kamchatkan) verb, whereby the appearance of the 3PL agreement marker /-w/ blocks the appearance of the general PL morpheme /-la/. Given that /-w/ is more peripheral in the verb-word than /-la/, this appears to be a case of outward-looking phonologically conditioned allomorphy, which is incompatible with Bobaljik (2000)’s hypothesis that vocabulary insertion proceeds cyclically. We argue that a reanalysis of these facts consistent with Bobaljik’s proposal is possible, but that it nonetheless requires some element of countercyclicity in the form of countercyclic application of impoverishment rules. 

 

Speaker: Abdul-Razak Sulemana
Title: Obligatory Controlled Subjects in Buli
Date and time: Tuesday March 20, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

It has long been noted that PRO makes no contribution to PF, as it is phonetically null. Several approaches to control have been developed based on this conclusion. These theories could be put into two broad categories. Under one (Bresnan 1978, 1982, Chierchia 1984, Dowty 1985, Jackendoff and Culicover 2003, a.o) this has been taken as evidence that there is no syntactic representation of this element. Under the other (Chomsky 1981, Manzini 1983, Landau 2000, 2001, 2013, 2015 a.o) PRO is syntactically present but its nullness is due to the licensing properties of the controlled structure. In this paper, I present data from Buli a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in Sandema (Ghana) that argue against theories that deny the syntactic presence of PRO. I argue that Buli is a language where PRO is overtly expressed and conclude that phonetic nullness is not an inherent property of PRO.

We are pleased to announce that Judith Tonhauser will be visiting this week. In addition to a colloquium talk on Friday, she will offer a mini course on Wednesday and Thursday, details below:

Speaker: Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University)
Title: Methods in semantic/pragmatic research
Time: Wednesday, March 21st, 12:30pm-2pm; Thursday, March 22nd, 12:30pm-2pm
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

Eliciting data from theoretically untrained speakers, as part of one-on-one elicitation or experiments, is a critical skill in research on meaning. In this mini-course, we’ll discuss two fundamental issues in empirically-driven research on meaning: first, on 3.21, we’ll talk about what constitutes a piece of data, how our theoretical hypotheses bear on the question of which response task to use or what to include in the context of a piece of data; second, on 3.22, we’ll address what constitutes empirical evidence, in particular which kinds of hypotheses are supported by different types of minimal pairs.

Speaker: Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University)
Title: Categorical and gradient distinctions between content: Implications for theories of speaker presuppositions
Time: Friday, March 23rd, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

One classic categorization of clause-embedding predicates is based on introspective judgments about what follows from utterances of sentences like those in (1) and their interrogative variants in (2). First, the content of the clausal complement in these examples, that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds, is taken to logically follow from (1a) with _be right_ and (1b) with _know_, but not from (1c) with _believe_. Thus, the content of the clausal complement of _be right_ and _know_ is classified as an entailment, but not that of _believe_. Second, the content of the clausal complement tends to follows from the interrogative variant with _know_ in (2b), but not from the variants with _be right_ in (2a) or with _believe_ in (2c). Thus, because the content of the clausal complement of _know_ tends to project from under the question operator, _know_ is a ‘factive’ predicate and its complement is a presupposition, but because the content of the clausal complement of _be right_ and _believe_ is not projective, these are ‘non-factive’ predicates and their complements are not presuppositions.

(1) a. Kim is right that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds.

1. Kim knows that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds.
2. Kim believes that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds.

(2) a. Is Kim right that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds?

1. Does Kim know that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds?
2. Does Kim believe that wasps lay their eggs in ladybirds?

In this talk, I present experimental evidence that suggests that distinguishing entailed from non-entailed clausal complements may not be as central to empirically adequate theories of speaker presupposition as sometimes assumed. Moreover, evidence from experiments and a corpus study challenges the categorical distinction between ‘factive’ and ‘non-factive’ predicates and instead suggests that projectivity is a gradient property of utterance content. In addition to discussing the implications of these findings for theories of projective content, I will deliberate on how they bear on the larger issue of categorical versus gradient generalizations about meaning.

The 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 49) will be held at Michigan State University from March 22-25, 2018. Colin Davis (3rd-year), Kenyon Branan (5th-year) , and Abdul-Razak Sulemana (4th-year) will give talks, and Kenyon and Abdul-Razak will also present a poster.

Title: on Goldstein- Free Choice and Homogeneity
Date and time: Monday, March 12th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

David Boylan will be presenting. No preread required.

Speaker: Shigeru Miyagawa (MIT/UTokyo), Danfeng Wu (MIT), Masatoshi Koizumi (Tohoku U/Harvard) 
Title:  Deriving Case Theory
Date and time: Thursday, March 15, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

Case Theory has been central to predicting where DPs occur in a clause. The idea is that (i) a DP is assigned Case by a local [-N] head; (ii) every DP must have Case; (iii) Case may be abstract, which requires adjacency with the [-N] head, or morphological, which does not require adjacency. In this paper we note problems with each of these assumptions, and suggest an entirely different approach based on labeling of structures (Chomsky 2013). This approach not only accounts for the typical Case Theoretic structures, but also the problematic cases we point out. Our account also extends to areas of the grammar that are outside the purview of Case Theory, such as wh-questions, the expletive construction, and topicalization. Also, the [-N]/[+N] distinction Vergnaud drew for case assignment is a reflection of a structural difference between these two groups of lexical categories (Emonds 1985) that is consistent with the labeling approach we propose.

The MIT-Haiti Initiative, led by Michel DeGraff was featured in Spectrum, a regular MIT publication that connects friends and supporters of MIT to MIT’s vision, impact, and exceptional community. The Winter 2018 issue, titled Pathways to Policy focuses on how collaborations with government, business, and organizations can help translate research findings from MIT into action. The MIT-Haiti Initiative was featured in the Tool Box  - a survey of the MIT-made online resources that are being used to bring about change in the world. You can read the whole story here.

Speaker: Ishita Dasgupta (MIT)
Title:  Evaluating Compositionality in Sentence Embeddings
Date and time: Monday, March 3, 5:00-6:00pm
Location: 46-5156
Abstract: 

An important challenge for human-like AI is compositional semantics. Recent research has attempted to address this by using deep neural networks to learn vector space embeddings of sentences, which then serve as input to other tasks. We present a new dataset for one such task, “natural language inference” (NLI), that cannot be solved using only word-level knowledge and requires some compositionality. We find that the performance of state of the art sentence embeddings (InferSent, Conneau et al. (2017)) on our new dataset is poor. We analyze some of the decision rules learned by InferSent and find that they are largely driven by simple heuristics that are ecologically valid in its training dataset. Further, we find that augmenting training with our dataset improves test performance on our dataset without loss of performance on the original training dataset. This highlights the importance of structured datasets in better understanding and improving NLP systems.

Speaker: Colin Davis
Title: Parasitic Gaps and the Structures of Multiple Movement
Date and time: Tuesday March 6, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk, I present some work in progress about the structure of derivations where multiple A’-movement chains overlap. These derivations show interesting complexities that do not (and could not) arise in derivations with only one A’-movement (Pesetsky 1982, Richards 1997). Towards deepening our understanding of this issue, I use Nissenbaum’s (2000) findings about parasitic gap licensing as a diagnostic for the multiple specifier structures created by successive-cyclic movement through vP in these derivations.

This test reveals a puzzle: While Richard’s (1997) theory of specifier formation predicts tucking-in structures at vP in these scenarios, I show via parasitic gap licensing that (at least sometimes) tucking-in fails to occur. Observations about parasitic gaps in superiority violating D-linking from Nissenbaum provide another instance of the same puzzle. It seems to be the case that the structure at vP, tucked-in or not, reflects the final order of the moved phrases. This is exactly what we predict under the hypothesis of Order Preservation (Fox & Pesetsky 2005). However, it remains mysterious how derivations can ‘know’ what vP configurations to form based on what the final result of the derivation will be. I do not have a good solution, but I hope discussing these puzzles will help.

Speaker: Itai Bassi
Title: Fake Indexicals without feature transmission
Date and time: Wednesday March 7, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In a footnote, Partee (1989) mentioned that 1st person pronouns can be semantically bound (“fake indexicals”), pointing to sentence (1). That footnote generated a line of research (Kratzer 1998, Kratzer 2009, Wurmbrand 2017; Heim 2008) according to which bound variables (can) enter the syntactic derivation lacking interpreted phi-features, and inherit features from their binder at the PF branch, as a result of some “feature transmission” mechanism(s).

(1) I am the only one around here who will admit that I could be wrong
—> the speaker is the only individual in {x: x is willing to admit that x could be wrong}

In this talk I offer a formal syntax-semantics for this construction which derives a bound reading for (1) while maintaining that the bound “I” has its person feature interpreted, rendering feature transmission unnecessary. My proposal is to reduce (1) to focus constructions like (2), for which there are alternatives to the feature-transmission story (Bassi and Longenbaugh 2017, a.o.). I will thus propose, building on a suggestion made in Bhatt (2002), that the construction in (1) involves silent association with focus. In addition, I show how my proposal can account for the contrast between (1) and the minimally different (3), which does not have a bound reading for “I” and constitutes a problem for existing feature-transmission analyses (Wurmbrand, Kratzer).

(2) Only I will admit that I could be wrong

(3) I met the only one around here who will admit that I could be wrong (no bound reading)

Speaker: Athulya Aravind (MIT)
Title: Principles of presupposition in development
Time: Thursday March 8th, 12:30-2:00pm 
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

Natural language affords us the means to communicate not only new information, but also information that we are already taking for granted, our presuppositions. The proper characterization of presuppositions–the way they enter into the compositional semantics and the way they fit into the exchange of information in communicative situations–has been at the center of long-standing debate. One class of theories treat presuppositions as categorically imposing restrictions on the conversational common ground: presuppositions must signal information that is already mutually known by all participants. While principled and elegant, these theories are often thought to be empirically inadequate, as the common ground requirement is not always met in everyday conversation. A second class of theories, therefore, adopt weaker and less categorical approaches to the phenomenon that are nonetheless a better fit to the empirical facts. 

 

This talk compares these two classes of approaches to presupposition in terms of their implications for language acquisition. I argue that children initially adopt a view of presuppositions as uniformly placing restrictions on the conversational common ground, even in situations where these requirements may be bent. More tellingly, I show that children initially lack the ability to use presuppositions in ways that violate the common ground requirement. The observed two-step developmental trajectory supports a common ground theory of presuppositions, according to which the “rule of thumb” is that presuppositions are already common knowledge, and informative uses involve strategic violations of this rule. In turn, the acquisition data vindicate some of the theoretical idealizations whose empirical validity is masked in part due to the pragmatic sophistication of adult language users.

Speaker: Sandhya Sundaresan (Leipzig)
Title: An Alternative Treatment of Indexical Shift: Modelling Shift Together Exceptions, Dual Contexts, and Selectional Variation
Date and time: Friday March 9, 3:30-5:00pm
Location: 32-155
Abstract:

I present the following three types of evidence that challenge both context-overwriting and quantifier-binding approaches to indexical shift (the phenomenon where the denotation of an indexical is interpreted, not against the utterance context, but against the index associated with an intensional verb). (I) Systematic exceptions to Shift Together (the constraint that all shiftable indexicals in a local intensional domain must shift together) in Tamil, varieties of Zazaki and Turkish, and potentially also Late Egyptian; (II) novel evidence from imperatives in Korean and supporting secondary data from imperatives in Slovenian, showing that the utterance context continues to be instantiated even in putatively shifted environments; and (III) results from personal fieldwork in Tamil dialects and secondary data from 26 languages (from 19 distinct language families) showing that there is structured selectional variation in the intensional environments in which indexical shift obtains and, furthermore, that such variation is one-way implicational. The following desiderata emerge: 1. Shift Together holds whenever possible, but systematic exceptions may nevertheless obtain; 2. the utterance-context is never overwritten; 3. indexical shift is an embedded root phenomenon that privileges speech predicates. To capture these, I develop an alternative model of indexical shift with the following properties. The context-shifter is not a context-overwriting operator, but a contextual quantifier. At the same time, unlike with standard quantificational approaches to shifting, this contextual quantifier (or “monster”) is a distinct grammatical entity severed from the attitude verb. Specifically, I present evidence from nominalization patterns and complementizer deletion to show that the monster is encoded on the complementizer selected by the attitude verb. I then propose that selectional variation for indexical shift ensues as the result of the monster being encoded on structurally distinct types of complementizer head, each selected by a different class of attitude verb (as has also been recently proposed in the literature).

Speaker: Richard Futrell (MIT-BCS) 
Title: Memory and Locality in Natural Language
Date and time: Thursday, March 1, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

I explore the hypothesis that the universal properties of human languages can be explained in terms of efficient communication given fixed human information processing constraints. First, I show corpus evidence from 54 languages that word order in grammar and usage is shaped by working memory constraints in the form of dependency locality: a pressure for syntactically linked words to be close to one another in linear order. Next, I develop a new theory of human language processing cost, based on rational inference in a noisy channel, that unifies surprisal and memory effects and goes beyond dependency locality to a new principle of information locality: that words that predict each other should be close. I show corpus evidence for information locality. Finally, I show that the new processing model resolves a long-standing paradox in the psycholinguistic literature, structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on language processing appear to be language-dependent.

Title: on Rothschild (2011) 
Date and time: Monday February 26th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This week’s paper is Rothschild (2011) Explaining presupposition projection with dynamic semantics. It is not pre-read.

Keny will be presenting the paper.

Speaker: Thomas Schatz (UMD/MIT)
Title: Leveraging automatic speech recognition technology to model cross-linguistic speech perception in humans
Date and time: Monday, February 26 5:00-6:00pm
Location: 46-3310
Abstract: 

Existing theories of cross-linguistic phonetic category perception agree that listeners perceive foreign sounds by mapping them onto their native phonetic categories. Yet, none of the available theories specify a way to compute this mapping. As a result, they cannot provide systematic quantitative predictions and remain mainly descriptive. In this talk, I will present a new approach that leverages Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to obtain fully specified mapping between foreign and native sounds. Using the machine ABX evaluation method, we derive quantitative predictions from ASR systems and compare them to empirical observations in human cross-linguistic phonetic category perception. I will present results both where the proposed model successfully predicts empirical effects (for example on the American English /r/-/l/ distinction) and where it fails (for example on the Japanese vowel length contrasts) and discuss possible interpretations.

Speaker: Shota Momma (UC San Diego)
Title: Aligning parsing and generation
Time: Tuesday, February 27th, 1:00-2:30pm 
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

We use our grammatical knowledge in at least two ways. On one hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to say what we want to convey to others. On the other hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to understand what others say. In either case, we need to assemble sentence structures in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of our language. Despite the fact that the structures that comprehenders and speakers assemble are systematic in an identical fashion, the cognitive systems that assemble the mental representation of sentence structures in comprehension and production might or might not be the same. The potential existence of two independent systems of structure building doubles the problem of linking the theory of linguistic knowledge and the theory of linguistic performance, making the integration of linguistics and psycholinguistic harder. In this talk, I will discuss whether it is possible to design a single system that builds mental representations of sentence structures in comprehension, i.e., parsing and in production, i.e., generation. I will discuss existing and new experimental data pertaining to how sentence structures are assembled in real-time comprehension and production, and attempt to show that the unification between parsing and generation is possible.

Speaker: Milena Sisovics
Title:  Embedded imperatives and voluntatives in Mongolian  
Date and time: Wednesday February 28, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Imperatives have long been considered immune to embedding, though recent research has found numerous counterexamples across languages. I introduce novel data showing that Mongolian likewise allows for genuine embedding of (hearer-directed) imperative as well as a speaker-directed non-assertive speech acts (“voluntative”). I propose a uniform analysis of voluntatives and imperatives (collapsed under the term “jussives”) as necessity modals. Moreover, I address the interesting question as to the analysis of jussive subjects: Subjects of embedded jussives are interpreted relative to the reported context in that they denote the reported speaker (in voluntatives) or hearer (in imperatives), rather than the actual discourse participants. I demonstrate how an analysis of imperative and voluntative clauses as PRO clauses can derive this fact, and provide arguments why such an analysis is preferable over an alternative, indexical shift analysis of embedded jussive subjects.

Speaker: Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney)
Title: Semantic theory and meaning acquisition
Date and time: Friday, March 2nd, 3:30-5:00pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

The overarching goal of my research program is to understand the nature of language by drawing on different empirical sources of data in a way that is informed by linguistic theory. In this talk, I will present three examples of recent work that highlight the interplay between theoretical issues in semantics and empirical facts about meaning acquisition. I will begin with the acquisition of the polarity-sensitive item ‘any’ in English (Tieu 2013). In this case, corpus and experimental data from child language suggest a potential learnability problem. A possible solution can be found in current linguistic theory; specifically, the cross-linguistic typology of polarity-sensitive items (Chierchia 2013) may provide a restricted hypothesis space for the learner to consider. In the second example, I discuss a series of recent developmental studies of various kinds of implicatures (Tieu et al. 2016, Tieu et al. 2017, and others). In this case, the child data suggest the presence of a developmental stage where children have mastered some implicatures but not others. Crucially, here too the relevant distinction turns out to quite naturally align with one made in current linguistic theories, specifically about scalar alternatives (Katzir 2007; Fox & Katzir 2011). In the final example, I discuss ongoing work that experimentally investigates the semantic contribution of co-speech gestures (gestures that accompany speech) and pro-speech gestures (gestures that replace spoken words) (Tieu et al. 2017, 2018, ongoing). In this case, experimental work with adults suggests people can very rapidly learn new meanings and project presuppositions from a single exposure to novel iconic gestures that they have never seen before, suggesting productive rules for triggering presuppositions.

Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty), Cora Lesure (2nd-year), and Vitor Nóbrega (former visitor, University of São Paulo) recently published an article on the relationship between prehistoric cave paintings, symbolic thinking, and the emergence of language in Frontiers in Psychology, available here. MIT News wrote an article about the research, and the story was subsequently picked up by the Boston Globe and National Geographic!

Title: on Lassiter (2018) - Talking about higher-order uncertainty
Date and time: Tuesday February 20th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This paper is for a Festschrift for Lauri Karttunen. In it, Lassiter discusses a property of epistemic modals in English that differentiates them from the S5 modal operators: the fact that they can be nested in a non-trivial way.

Note the meeting date for this week’s LPRG is on a Tuesday. Maša will be presenting.

Speaker: Itai Bassi (MIT)
Title: Redefining EXH
Date and time: Wednesday February 21, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

One of the challenges for the grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures (SIs), which takes SIs to arise as a result of an operator EXH in the syntax, is to explain their rather restricted distribution under negation (Fox and Spector 2013). For example, (1) might be analyzed as involving embedded SI, but this meaning requires a distinguished pitch contour (Meyer 2016). 

 

1) Debbie didn’t_H* talk to her mother OR_L+H* her father… she talked to both.

(coherent only under or-but-not-and meaning for “or”; infelicitous if default intonation is used instead)

 

In the first part of the talk I will suggest a way to understand the limited distribution of embedded SIs under negation. My proposal is based on the observation (Horn 1989) that presupposition cancellation under negation exhibits a similar pattern:

 

2) Mary isn’t_H* late to the meeting AGAIN_L+H* … she has never been late before!

3) Mary didn’t_H* STOP_L+H* smoking… she never used to!

4) Mary can’t_H* possibly climb THE_L+H* tree in the garden… because there are two of them!

 

Capitalizing on this observation, I’ll propose to reduce (1) to (2-4). I redefine EXH in a trivalent setting to represent that it carries a presupposition, and I assume that a ‘local accommodation’ operation (Heim 1983) can neutralize the presupposition of EXH locally, but that this possibility is not freely available.

In the second part of the talk I will show that my proposal accounts for a seemingly unrelated phenomenon in the realm of SIs which is considered problematic for current theories and has been discussed in Chierchia (2004). 

Speaker: Hanzhi Zhu (UMass-Amherst)
Title: A scalar presupposition for already
Date and time: Thursday, February 22, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

The particles still and already are commonly thought of and analyzed as particles that mirror the other (Löbner 1989, Krifka 2000, Ippolito 2007, inter alia).  The particle still has been robustly argued to have an additive presupposition in the same vein as particles like too.  Previous accounts attempt to formulate already as also having an additive presupposition, capturing the putative duality of the two particles.  However, I argue that such approaches are untenable, motivated by asymmetries between the two particles as exemplified in the following pair: 

(1)  You wake up after a full night of sleep, estimating that it’s 7am. You check your clock.

       Wow, it’s already 9am!

(2)  You wake up after a full night of sleep, estimating that it’s 9am. You check your clock.

       #Wow, it’s still 7am!

 

I propose that already does not have an additive presupposition but instead an even-style scalar ’likelihood’ presupposition enriched with an exhaustivity operator.  This analysis will offer empirical improvements over previous analyses, notably in its ability to capture the earlier-than-expected inference conveyed by already.     

Speaker: Sherry Yong Chen (MIT)
Title: Anaphoricity, Presuppositions, and Memory Retrieval Processes
Date and time: Friday February 23, 2-3pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

(Joint work with E. Matthew Husband (Oxford))

The anaphoric view of presupposition treats the trigger too analogously to anaphoric expressions such as pronouns and VP ellipses, where “anaphoric” is taken to mean “requiring a contextually provided antecedent” (Kripke, 1990/2009; van der Sandt, 1992; Zeevat, 1992; Beck, 2007; a.o.).

(1) John went swimming. Mary went swimming too.

Previous work has suggested that the processing of anaphoric expressions involves a memory retrieval process, where the memory representation of an antecedent is retrieved via direct access by using a content-addressable mechanism: comprehenders are able to directly access the representation of an antecedent, without serially searching through irrelevant intermediate materials before finding the desired representation in memory (Foraker & MeElree, 2007; Martin & McElree, 2008, 2011; cf. Dillon et al, 2014). We investigate the memory retrieval processes that underlie the real-time comprehension of the anaphoric trigger too. Using the Drift Diffusion Model, we show that the memory representation of the antecedent content that satisfies the presupposition of too is also retrieved via a direct access manner.

These findings contribute to a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that the memory representations of discourse dependencies formed during language comprehension are content-addressable in nature. They also raise an interesting question: a direct access mechanism is generally assumed to be cued-based; in the case of pronouns, morpho-syntactic cues such as gender and number features may serve as cues, but what cues are being exploited in the case of presupposition triggers? Finally, we discuss how the current study opens up further questions related to discourse structure, presupposition accommodation, and context update.

Speaker: Shayne Sloggett (Northwestern)
Title: Understanding reflexives: Combining psycholinguistic and theoretical perspectives
Time: Friday, February 23th, 3:30-5pm 
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

Should evidence from real-time sentence comprehension routines inform our grammatical models? In this talk I present evidence that they should, drawing on recent findings from investigations of on-line reflexive reference resolution. Reflexive pronouns in English are grammatically constrained to refer to local referents which agree with the reflexive’s morphosyntactic features (Chomsky, 1986; Pollard & Sag, 1992; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; i.a.), and many studies in sentence processing have found that comprehenders initially consider only these referents when determining a reflexive’s antecedent (Nicol & Swinney, 1989; Sturt, 2003; Dillon, Xiang, Dillon, & Phillips, 2009; i.m.a.). However, some recent work has found that comprehenders entertain long-distance reference when local referents present a particularly poor morphosyntactic match (Parker & Phillips, 2017). This raises an interesting question: are such findings the result of a processing mistake, or rooted in grammatical principles? I present evidence from two sets of studies which suggest the latter, demonstrating that native English-speaking comprehenders are less willing to entertain long-distance interpretations in the presence of an indexical (first/second person) pronoun. Notably, this pattern of behavior bears a striking resemblance to the “person blocking” phenomenon associated with the Mandarin long-distance reflexive “ziji” (Huang & Liu, 2001). In light of these findings, I propose a unified treatment of Mandarin and English reflexives which claims that comprehenders consider long-distance referents which could act as logophoric antecedents. Thus, by approaching the study of reflexive reference from theoretical and psycholinguistic perspectives simultaneously, insights from each inform the other. Moreover, this proposal has strong implications for both our understanding of real-time reflexive comprehension, and our grammatical models of reflexive binding. First, it suggests that the adoption of a long-distance interpretation in English does not reflect a processing “error”, but rather the function of a grammatically available, but otherwise dispreferred, alternative (c.f. Parker & Phillips, 2017). Second, it assigns a processing-based explanation to the fact that English speakers generally do not take such interpretations, rather than a grammatical one. Finally, the proposed model is more consistent with a specification of Binding Theory in terms of locality and c-command, rather than predicates, supporting recent theoretical work on French (Charnavel & Sportiche, 2016) which has reached similar conclusions.

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT will be hosting the 14th edition of WAFL, the Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics. The workshop will take place on October 19–21, 2018.

Abstracts are invited for presentations on topics dealing with formal aspects of any area of theoretical Altaic linguistics, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics. The deadline for abstract submission is March 30, 2018. 

Additionally, there will be a workshop in honor of Shigeru Miyagawa on October 18, 2018.

The organizing committee can be reached at wafl14@mit.edu. More information can be found on the workshop’s website.

Linguistic Evidence 2018 took place at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, February 15-17 and Dóra Kata Tákacs (first-year) presented a poster: On the presuppositional behavior of two sub-classes of factive predicates.

The annual ESSL/LAcqLab and friends Winter Hike happened on Sunday.  The hikers climbed Mount Pemigawassett in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Thanks to Martin for the photos.

Title: on Cappelen and Dever (2013)
Date and time: Monday, February 12, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Nathaniel  Schwartz (MIT) will present on chapter 4 of Cappelen and Dever’s The Inessential Indexical. 

The idea: Indexicals figure prominently in opaque contexts. For instance, if I am (unbeknownst to myself) spilling sugar all over the grocery store, I can believe that the messy shopper is spilling sugar without believing that I am spilling sugar—even though “the messy shopper” and “I” are coreferential terms. Do indexicals in opaque contexts raise difficulties for theories of content beyond those raised by opacity generally? In particular, is the Fregean account of opacity particularly difficult to implement in cases involving indexicals? The authors say no to both questions.

This meeting will not be pre-read.

Speaker: Emily Clem (UC Berkeley)
Title: Ergative case as agreement with multiple heads
Date and time: Tuesday February 13, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

The mechanisms underlying ergative case assignment have long been debated, with two main view emerging in the literature: 1) ergative is an inherent case assigned by a transitive v to an agent, 2) ergative is a dependent case assigned to a DP that c-commands another DP within a case domain. In this talk, I present novel data from Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru), in which ergative case is sensitive to the position of the transitive subject. The interaction of movement and morphological case assignment in Amahuaca cannot easily be captured by current inherent or dependent case theories. Ergative is not assigned in a theta-position, as predicted by an inherent case account, nor is it dependent on whether the subject and object DPs are in the same case domain, as predicted by a dependent case account. Instead, I argue for an account of ergative case as exponing Agree operations between a DP and two distinct functional heads, v and T. This approach is able to account for the Amahuaca data, while incorporating key insights from both inherent and dependent case theories of ergativity. I further demonstrate that this view that takes case to be the exponence of multiple features is able to be extended to account for elements of Amahuaca’s case-sensitive switch reference system. The Amahuaca data thus suggest that ergative case can be viewed as a feature bundle, rather than an atomic case feature, and that morphological ergative marking arises as the exponence of structural relationships between multiple heads and a nominal.

Speaker: Lucas Champollion (NYU)
Title: Two switches in the theory of counterfactuals: A study of truth conditionality and minimal change
Time: Friday, February 16th, 3:30-5pm 
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

I report on a comprehension experiment on counterfactual conditionals based on a context involving two switches (joint work with Ivano Ciardelli and Linmin Zhang). We found that the truth-conditionally equivalent clauses (i) switch A or switch B is down and (ii) switch A and switch B are not both up make different semantic contributions when embedded in counterfactual antecedents. Assuming compositionality, this contradicts the textbook view that meaning can be identified with truth conditions. This finding has a clear explanation in inquisitive semantics: truth-conditionally equivalent clauses may be associated with different propositional alternatives, each of which counts as a separate counterfactual assumption. Related results from the same experiment challenge the common Stalnaker-Lewis interpretation of counterfactuals as involving minimizing change with respect to the actual state of affairs. We propose to replace the idea of minimal change by a distinction between foreground and background for a given counterfactual assumption: the background is held fixed in the counterfactual situation, while the foreground can be varied without any minimality constraint. (This talk presents work reported in a paper to appear in the journal Linguistics and Philosophy. Preprint at http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003200.)

Michel DeGraff recently gave two presentations:

1. On January 18, 2018, Michel gave the inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative lecture for the University of Michigan’s Romance Languages & Literatures department. The Michigan Daily wrote an article about his lecture, which can be found here.
2. On January 24, 2018, Michel gave an invited presentation Science & Human Rights Coalition meeting at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Slides from the meeting can be found here.

Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Spring 2018! After our winter hiatus, Whamit! is back to regular weekly editions during the semester.

Whamit! is the MIT Linguistics newsletter, published every Monday (Tuesday if Monday is a holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Elise Newman, Mitya Privoznov, Neil Banerjee, and Itai Bassi.

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

Best wishes for the new year!

• Angelo Mercado (Grinnell College): “I am an Associate Professor of Classics at Grinnell College (Iowa) and participate in our interdepartmental Linguistics Concentration. My areas include Greek and Latin language, comparative Indo-European philology, and linguistic poetics and metrics. I continue to chip away at describing the metrical systems in Italic. Other work in progress pertain to the role of word stress in Classical Latin epic, and the development of Indo-European accent and meter, separately and together.”

We have several items of winter news from students and faculty:

• As usual, many our faculty members, students and alumni participated in the Linguistic Society of America’s 2018 Annual Meeting (see detailed account at our other post).
• In Berlin, Germany, MIT was represented at the Endpoints 2018 workshop at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Tanya Bondarenko presented a poster “Results, Repetitives and Datives: towards an account of cross linguistic variation” and Malka Rappaport-Hovav (PhD’84) gave an invited talk “(Non)Causative and (non)scalar spatial states”.
• Meanwhile in Paris, France, our second year student Keny Chatain talked about “Local contexts for anaphora” at the LANGUAGE seminar at his alma mater Ecole Normale Superieure.

• Speaking of bringing linguistics to the masses, one of MIT undergraduate students, Jessica Sun (‘18, Course 3) posted a new, very short and very educational video on language evolution, mentioning some of our own. In particular it overviews in two minutes (for those who are too lazy to read about it) the integration hypothesis, proposed in Shigeru Miyagawa et al’s “The emergence of hierarchical structure in human language”.

• As linguistic life goes on, the real life intervenes with all its brutal cruelty. Our first year student Tanya Bondarenko’s bag got stolen in Berlin with her passport and other documents. Tanya is safely back in Moscow now, but it is going to take time, before she gets a new passport and visa. We all hope that, despite all the childish rubbish that our international politicians love to play at, Tanya will get her documents back soon and will be with us, before we completely dive in the Spring semester (MIT linguistics and philosophy department, as well as ISO are going to help with that). As for Tanya’s bag, we wish it to land somewhere in good hands.
• On the bright side, speaking of the harmony of good and evil, Tanya Bondarenko also received a young researchers’ grant from Russian Academy of Sciences for her master thesis from Moscow State University.

The Linguistic Society of America’s Annual Meeting for 2018 was held in Salt Lake City, Utah in January. As per usual, MIT was well represented. The following department members presented talks and posters:

• Kenyon Branan - Determining what gets in the way
• Colin Davis - Cyclic Linearization Constrains Intermediate Stranding
• Suzana Fong - Featural definition of syntactic positions: evidence from hyper-raising
• Sherry Yong Chen and E. Matthew Husband - Comprehending anaphoric presuppositions involves memory retrieval too
• Carolyn Spadine - Overt realizations of syntactic perspective: evidence from Tigrinya
• Sherry Yong Chen and E. Matthew Husband - “Forward Lifetime Effects” and Non-Future Tense in Mandarin Chinese
• Hanzhi Zhu - Mandarin cai: a later-than-expected inference
• Matthew Tyler and Michelle Yuan - Case-assignment before and after clitic doubling: Evidence from Choctaw and Yimas
• Justin Colley - Object-preferring Agreement is derived by Object Movement
• Michelle Yuan - Inuktitut antipassive morphology and the Anaphor Agreement Effect
• Elise Newman and Danfeng Wu - A new analysis and prediction about Lubukusu agreeing complementizers

Alumni who presented or organised symposia include: Karlos Arregi (PhD ‘02), Benjamin Bruening (PhD ‘01), Aniko Csirmaz (PhD ‘05), Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14), Clair Halpert (PhD ‘12), Bruce Hayes (PhD ‘80), Ezra Keshet (PhD ‘08), Paul Kiparsky (PhD ‘65), Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14), Theodore Levin (PhD ‘15), Janet Pierrehumbert (PhD ‘80), and Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15).

Course Announcements in this post:

• 24.942 Topics in the grammar of a less familiar language
• 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
• 24.956 Topics in Syntax
• 24.963 Linguistic Phonetics
• 24.964 Topics in Phonology
• 24.966J Laboratory on the Physiology, Acoustics, and Perception of Speech
• 24.979 Topics in Semantics
• 9.19/9.190 Computational Psycholinguistics

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24.942 Topics in the grammar of a less familiar language

• Instructors: Kenstowicz, Richards
• Schedule: M 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D831

This year’s Less-Familiar Language will be Wolof (Niger-Congo, Atlantic).  We’ll spend the semester learning about Wolof’s structure (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics), and practicing techniques for working with a native speaker of a language to learn about that language.

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24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory

• Instructor: Fox
• Schedule: T 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

Formal theories of context-dependency, presupposition, implicature, context-change, focus and topic. Special emphasis on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Applications to the analysis of quantification, definiteness, presupposition projection, conditionals and modality, anaphora, questions and answers. 

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24.956 Topics in Syntax

• Instructor: Richards
• Schedule: T 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

This course will be an exploration of the relation between syntax and phonology, in the framework of Contiguity Theory (Richards 2016).  We’ll start by familiarizing ourselves with the main claims of Contiguity Theory, both in the 2016 book and in work done since.  This is an approach that posits a different kind of relation between syntax and phonology than is usually assumed; in particular, the syntax can be motivated to perform operations by the need to create phonologically well-formed objects.  We’ll discuss the implications of this approach for the architecture of the grammar.  Other topics of discussion will include the distribution of overt movements of various kinds, EPP effects, intervention effects, and conditions on pied-piping.

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24.963 Linguistic Phonetics

• Instructor: Flemming
• Schedule: MW 10-11:30am
• Room: 56-180

The study of speech sounds: how we produce and perceive them and their acoustic properties. The influence of the production and perception systems on phonological patterns and sound change. Acoustic analysis and experimental techniques.

We will be considering three fundamental questions:

• How do we produce speech?
• How do we perceive speech?
• How does the nature of these processes influence the sound patterns of languages?

We will also be learning experimental methods and analytical techniques that enable us to address these (and other) questions.

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24.964 Topics in Phonology

• Instructor: Feldman, Katzir, Levy
• Schedule: TR 5-6:30pm
• Room: T 32-D461, R 46-5165

Learning and Linguistic Representations

Models of unsupervised language learning are central to understanding human cognition and replicating it in machines.  Computational advances and the availability of large speech and text corpora make it more tractable than ever before to build and evaluate such models.  This seminar considers the rich latent structures that are present in human language, and recent computational work in unsupervised learning that can provide insight into what those structures are like and whether and how they might be learned.  Seminar participants will take turns leading discussions of original research papers.  The seminar is open to graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and well-prepared, highly-motivated undergraduates.  Participants should have a strong background in at least one of two areas: (i) linguistic representation; (ii) computational approaches to learning, and should have an interest in gaining expertise in the other area.  In addition to participating in and taking turns leading seminar discussions, registered students may be required to complete periodic homework assignments and will write a final paper, either individually or in a group, that relates to unsupervised learning of linguistic knowledge.

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24.966J Laboratory on the Physiology, Acoustics, and Perception of Speech

• Instructor: Braida, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Choi
• Schedule: TR 11am-1pm
• Room: 35-308

Experimental investigations of speech processes. Topics include computer-aided waveform analysis and spectral analysis of speech; synthesis of speech; perception and discrimination of speech-like sounds; speech prosody; models of speech recognition; speech development; analysis of atypical speech; and others. Recommended prerequisite: 6.002, 18.03, or 24.900. 

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24.979 Topics in Semantics

• Instructor: Fox, Heim, Schwarzschild
• Schedule: R 2-5pm
• Room: 32-D461

We will begin this seminar with a discussion of issues that arise in the semantics of plurality: when is a predicate true of a plural definite description and when is it false?, are there cases where it is neither true nor false (cases of homogeneity)?, Is there anything interesting to say about when a sentence which neither true nor false is taken to be true, how do answers to these questions bear on the semantics of various constituents dominating a plural definite description?, etc. We will then move to discuss other areas of grammar where similar questions have been raised (questions, generics, conditionals, neg-raising). This, as usual, will likely take us to problems that are not directly related to those with which we will start. 

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9.19/9.190 Computational Psycholinguistics

• Instructor: Levy
• Schedule: MW 9:30-11am
• Room: 46-4199

Over the last two and a half decades, computational linguistics has been revolutionized as a result of three closely related developments: increases in computing power, the advent of large linguistic datasets, and a paradigm shift toward probabilistic modeling. At the same time, similar theoretical developments in cognitive science have led to a view major aspects of human cognition as instances of rational statistical inference. These developments have set the stage for renewed interest in computational approaches to human language acquisition and use. Correspondingly, this course covers some of the most exciting developments in computational psycholinguistics over the past decade. The course spans human language comprehension, production, and acquisition, and covers key phenomena spanning phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Students will learn technical tools including probabilistic models, formal grammars, neural networks, and decision theory, and how theory, computational modeling, and data can be combined to advance our fundamental understanding of human language acquisition and use.

This course is open to undergraduate and graduate students in Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Linguistics, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and any of a number of related disciplines. Enrollees should have (i) one semester of programing experience (ideally Python, fulfillable e.g. by 6.00), plus (ii) either (a) one semester of probability/statistics/machine learning (e.g., 6.041B or 9.40) or (b) one semester of linguistics. The undergraduate section is 9.19, the graduate section is 9.190. Required work will include problem sets, exams, and (for enrollees in 9.190) a final project.  Postdocs and faculty are also welcome to participate!

The course will meet twice a week; course format will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises as class size, structure, and interests permit.

Colloquium talks will be held on Fridays from 3:30-5pm unless otherwise noted. Please visit the colloquium webpage for more details and updates. All questions should be directed to the colloquium organizers, Yadav Gowda and Danfeng Wu.

• February 16: Lucas Champollion (NYU)
• March 9: Sandhya Sundaresan (Uni Leipzig)
• March 23: Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State) - Extended Visit
• April 6: Lyn Frazier (UMass Amherst)
• May 4: Ryan Bennett (Yale/UCSC) - Extended Visit
• May 11: Daniel Rothschild (University College London) - Joint Linguistics/Philosophy Colloquium

Speaker: Petr Kusliy (UMass-Amherst)
Title: English Present tense is relative: evidence from VP-fronting
Date and time: Thursday, February 8, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

English Present-under-Past attitude reports are commonly believed to have only the so-called double-access reading (Smith 1978). Roughly, this means that the eventuality described in the embedded clause of the attitude report must overlap the time of the matrix eventuality as well as the utterance time. Present-under-Past attitude reports in languages like Japanese or Russian besides the double-access reading also allow for the so-called simultaneous reading (the embedded eventuality is contemporaneous with the matrix eventuality but not necessarily with the utterance time). The lack of the simultaneous reading in Present-under-Past attitude reports in English lead many researchers to believe that English Present tense is crucially different from Present tense in Japanese or Russian (e.g. Ogihara, 1989; von Stechow, 2003). According to this view, English Present is indexical (i.e. always indicates a time that overlaps the utterance time). Present tense in Japanese and Russian is relative because the time it indicates does not have to overlap the utterance time and can be simultaneous with a local temporal anchor.

In this talk, I focus on the interactions between simultaneous and double-access readings, on the one hand, and VP- and CP-fronting, on the other. To my knowledge, these interactions have never been examined in the literature on tense. I present new data showing that (i) fronted VP versions of Present-under-Past attitude reports allow for a simultaneous reading (together with a double-access reading); (ii) fronted CP versions of Present-under-Past attitude reports do not allow for a simultaneous reading and only have a double-access reading, (iii) in the fronted CP, as well as fronted VP versions of the famous Kamp-Abusch sentences, the most embedded Past does not have a simultaneous interpretation and has to backshift.

I discuss these data and propose an account that contains the following claims: (a) English Present tense has a relative interpretation just like Present tense in Japanese and in Russian; (b) if a tense in a complement CP has a relative interpretation, its temporal anchor is CP-external (not a lambda abstract in the left periphery of the CP); (iii) in a fronted construction, the highest tense cannot be vacuous.

Speaker: Danfeng Wu (MIT)
Title: A copy-based analysis of either in either…or… constructions
Date and time: Tuesday February 6, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

While it has been observed since Larson (1985) that either can occur in many different positions in either…or… constructions, no proposal successfully accounts for its various surface positions and restrictions on its distribution. In this talk I argue that the dual identity of either as both a disjunction marker and focus-sensitive operator requires it to c-command both the disjunction phrase and the focused elements. And I argue that it achieves this goal by origination in a c-commanding position relative to the focused constituent, followed by upward movement to c-command disjunction, and that the occurrences of either in different positions are copies in the same movement chain. Not only does this analysis successfully account for the distribution of either with respect to islands, but it also makes a few predictions. For instance, because these eithers are identical copies in a movement chain, when an independent restriction bans one of them, other copies can still surface to save the sentence.

This summer, from July 16 to July 27, 2018, there will be the second Crete Summer School of Linguistics at the University of Crete, in the beautiful city of Rethymnon.

Many MIT folk are involved. Current MIT faculty teaching there: Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Shigeru Miyagawa, Donca Steriade. There are also some who have taught at MIT at some point in the past: Elena Anagnostopoulou, Rajesh Bhatt, Kyle Johnson, Paul Kiparsky, Hedde Zeijlstra. Other MIT graduates on the faculty: Joan Mascaro, Doug Pulleyblank, Tim Stowell, Michael Wagner.

Current MIT students who will be TAing: Rafael Abramovitz, Daniel Asherov, Tanya Bondarenko, Omer Demirok.

Full information (including details on the student application due April 1st), can be found on the summer school website.

LingPhil Reading Group (LPRG) will be reprising this semester on Mondays, 1:00-2:00pm, in 32-D831 (the 8th floor conference room). Reading list and contact information can be found on the group’s website.

Phonology Circle will be meeting on Mondays, 5:00–6:30pm, in 32-D831 (the 8th floor conference room). Please contact Erin Olson and/or Rafael Abramovitz if you would like to reserve a slot.

Syntax Square will be held at the old time-slot: Tuesdays, 1:00-2:00pm, in 32-D461 (the 4th floor seminar room). As always, we welcome works in progress, presentation of papers on topics of interest, practice talks, etc. Please contact Suzana Fong and/or Mitya Privoznov if you would like to give a talk.

LF Reading Group meets on Wednesdays, 1:00-2:00pm in 32-D461. As always, rough ideas, work in progress, practice talks, and presentations of papers from the literature are all very welcome. To reserve a slot, contact Naomi Francis or Tanya Bondarenko.

Ling-Lunch is held on Thursdays, 12:30-1:50pm in 32-D461. Anyone who wishes to present their own linguistics-related research is welcome, although preference will be given to members of the MIT linguistics department. Please contact Cora Lesure or Ömer Demirok to reserve a date.

A statement from MIT faculty in Linguistics (January 12, 2018, updated January 16)

As linguists and human beings, we stand in appalled opposition to yesterday’s reported statement by Donald Trump that disparaged in grotesque racist terms the populations, cultures and circumstances of an array of countries. These include the native countries of treasured colleagues, students, and visitors to our department, past and present. We stress, now and forever, the utter incompatibility of such characterizations and sentiments with basic human values, the nature of scientific inquiry, and the fundamental lessons of our field: respect for human diversity in all its manifestations, enhanced by the continual discovery of deep threads of unity that underlie this diversity.

We take this opportunity to renew our own commitment to diversity — to building bridges that will enrich our humanity, not walls.

Adam Albright
Noam Chomsky
Michel DeGraff
Kai von Fintel
Edward Flemming
Suzanne Flynn
Danny Fox
Martin Hackl
James Harris
Irene Heim
Sabine Iatridou
Samuel Jay Keyser
Shigeru Miyagawa
Wayne O’Neil
David Pesetsky
Norvin Richards
Donca Steriade
Ken Wexler

UPDATE January 16:

MIT faculty in Philosophy (our sister program within the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy) strongly support the above statement from MIT faculty in Linguistics:

Sylvain Bromberger
E.J. Green
Sally Haslanger
Justin Khoo
Vann McGee
Tamar Schapiro
Kieran Setiya
Judy Thomson
Stephen Yablo

Speaker: Matt Mandelkern (Oxford)
Title: Constructing the conditional
Date and time: Monday, December 11, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract:

I argue, contra the dominant line in the linguistics literature, that conditionals validate Conditional Excluded Middle in full generality, and invalidate Duality:

Conditional Excluded Middle: ‘If p, q, or if p, not q’ is always true

Duality: ‘If p, q iff Not: if p, might not q’

I argue that we can, however, give a semantics for conditionals which makes these predictions, without abandoning the insights of Kratzer’s restrictor analysis.

Speaker: Sarah Zobel (University of Tuebingen/MIT)
Title: Do weak adjunct ‘as’-phrases restrict individual quantifiers?
Date and time: Wednesday December 13, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

The central observation in the literature on free adjuncts is that weak adjuncts can be understood as restricting temporal and modal quantifiers (see Stump 1985): weak adjuncts co-occurring with these types of quantifiers are ambiguous between a restricting and a non-restricting, causal-adverbial-clause like meaning, as in (1-a). Strong adjuncts, in contrast, can only have a non-restricting interpretation, as in (1-b).

(1) a. As a 10-year-old, Peter liked gingerbread. (weak)
(Possible: When Peter was 10 years old, he liked gingerbread. [interaction with [PAST])
(Possible: Since Peter is 10 years old, he liked gingerbread.)

b. Being 10 years old, Peter liked gingerbread. (strong)
(Not possible: When Peter was 10 years old, he liked gingerbread. [interaction with [PAST])
(Possible: Since Peter is 10 years old, he liked gingerbread.)

In this talk, I address the question whether weak adjuncts (using `as’-phrases), as in (2), can be understood as restricting nominal quantifiers, and, if not, how the intuitive interpretations found with these examples can be accounted for.

(2) a. As a child, every guest likes gingerbread.
b. As tourists, most visitors own cameras.

I show that the intuitive interpretation of the examples in (2) are not compatible with these `as’-phrases restricting the quantifiers `every guest’ and `most visitors’ in the same manner as observed for temporal and modal quantifiers. I propose that the intuitive interpretation found in these cases is the result of two properties of the ‘as’-phrases: (i) they associate with the individual quantifiers via Non-Obligatory Control, which I analyze similar to discourse anaphora, and (ii) they are not interpreted in the scope of their associated individual quantifiers.

Going Romance 31 took place over the weekend at the University of Bucharest. Donca Steriade (faculty) was a keynote speaker, presenting on Cyclic and pseudo-cyclic evaluations: evidence from Romanian. Kenyon Branan (5th-year) also gave a talk on Determining what gets in the way.

Videos of talks from the MIT Workshop on Simplicity in Grammar Learning are now available online! If you would like to see the talks, visit the workshop website.

Whamit! will be on its Winter (semi-)hiatus from now until the start of the Spring semester. Weekly posts will resume on February 5th, 2018. In the mean time, we will have rolling posts, publishing breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Thanks to all our contributors, editors, and you dear readers!

See you next year!

Title: Discussion of Pietroski 2015: Framing Event Variables
Date and time: Monday December 4, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

I find myself writing two papers that are due around the same time. This one develops an objection, based on Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action reports, to truth-theoretic accounts of linguistic meaning. The other one is about the relevance of Liar Paradoxes for such accounts; see Pietroski (forthcoming). In both papers, the first numbered sentence is (1).

(1) The first numbered sentence in “Framing Event Variables ” is false.

But here, (1) is simply a reminder of a familiar difficulty for the idea that declarative sentences of a Human Language have truth conditions; where for these purposes, a Human Language is a spoken or signed language that any biologically normal child can acquire given an ordinary course of linguistic experience. In my view, (2) and (3) present further difficulties for this idea.

(2) Alvin chased Theodore gleefully and athletically but not skillfully.

(3) Theodore chased Alvin gleelessly and unathletically but skillfully.

Following Davidson and others, I think action reports have “eventish ” logical forms like (2a-3a).

(2a) ∃e[Chased(e, Alvin, Theodore) & Gleeful(e) & Athletic(e) & ~Skillful(e)]

(3a) ∃e[Chased(e, Theodore, Alvin) & Gleeless(e) & Unathletic(e) & Skillful(e)]

We can stipulate that these existential generalizations—sentences of an invented language—have recursively specifiable truth conditions, and that ‘Chased(e, x, y)’ is true of <α, β, γ> if and only if α was an event of β chasing γ. But as we’ll see, there are good reasons for denying that (2) and (3) exhibit the specified truth conditions. There are potential replies. But I argue that they are implausible, especially given the many independent illustrations (e.g., via Kahneman and Tversky) of how human judgments are affected by linguistic framing.

The discussion will be led by Christopher Baron.

Speaker: Tiaoyuan Mao (MIT)
Title: Mandarin Chinese -ne revisited: Its basic properties and derivation
Date and time: Wednesday December 6, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Mandarin Chinese sentence final particles (SFPs) were, are and will be a hotly-debated topic. The vast majority of studies concentrate on the head-directionality, optionality and multiple semantic interpretation of SFPs, such as the first two issues fall within the domain of FOFC (the Final-Over-Fianl Constraint)(Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts 2014; Sheehan, Biberauer, Roberts and Holmberg 2017) and Pan and Paul (2016), a.o. In this talk, I will focus on -ne, the most complicated Mandarin SFP, trying to demonstrate a tentative proposal to resolve the tension among different projects about the head-directionality and syntactic derivation of -ne, and to interpret the multiple meanings of -ne in a principled way.

Speaker: Suzana Fong (MIT)
Title: A featural and edge-based analysis of hyper-raising
Date and time: Thursday, December 7, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

Hyper-raising (HR) consists in raising a subject of an embedded finite clause into the subject or object position in the embedding clause (Ura 1994, Tanaka 2002, Yoon 2007, Nunes 2008, Halpert & Zeller 2015, Halpert 2016, Bondarenko 2017, Deal 2017, Zyman 2017, a.o.). Because the clause a DP hyper-raises from is a finite CP, this introduces a challenge to common assumptions about the phasehood of this type of domain. Moreover, both the position a DP hyper-raises from and the landing site in the matrix clause are case-marked. This introduces a challenge to common assumptions about case assignment.

To circumvent the phase problem, I follow van Urk (2015)’s featural definition of syntactic positions. Specifically, I propose that the complementizer of HR sentences has A-features (i.e. not A-bar). The A-features in the HR complementizer trigger the movement of the subject to the edge of the embedded clause, [Spec, CP] (cf. Tanaka 2002, Takeuchi 2010, Zyman 2017, a.o.). As a consequence of being at the edge of a phase, the embedded subject is accessible to a probe in the dominating phase. This allows the embedded finite subject to be accessed by a matrix probe (T or v).

The postulation of features in C will be argued for by HR to object in Mongolian. As first discussed by Hiraiwa (2005) and Bondarenko (2017) regarding Japanese and Buryat, respectively, an embedded finite subject can receive accusative case while remaining in the embedded clause. I will call ‘medial-raising’ this variety of HR, where the accusative subject does not exit the embedded clause. In a canonical, non-HR sentence, if the embedded nominative subject contains a locally-bound reflexive, the reflexive cannot be bound by the matrix subject. However, in the medial-raised counterpart, binding is possible. [Spec, CP] is a position that can account for the dual properties of medial-raising: it is still inside the embedded clause, but it extends the binding domain of the medial-raised subject, and allows it to receive accusative case from the matrix v. [Spec, CP] will also be relevant to provide an explanation to the interaction between HR and (seemingly) long distance scrambling in Mongolian.

Also following van Urk (2015), I assume that probes can also come in a composite, A/A-bar variety. If HR is triggered by A-features in C and if there can be composite probes, we may expect for there to be an instance of HR that is triggered by composite probes. I tentatively analyze data from Kipsigis and Imbabura Quechua as this type of HR. In these languages, what seems to undergo HR is an embedded argument that is lower than the subject. This creates an additional minimality problem. If this lower argument bears the features that the composite probe in C is looking for, while the subject does not, the minimality question is avoided.

To circumvent the case problem, I first try to show that HR consists of a multiple case checking (Béjar & Massam 1999, a.o.). I propose that the same DP can be assigned more than one case, as long as it is able to move from one domain of case assignment into another (cf. Levin 2016). Under this view, we can characterize HR as an instance of movement across domains of case assignment.

Most sentences are unique … except the ones that aren’t. The frequency distribution in any corpus of natural language has a famously `long tail’ filled with unique phrases only ever used once.  Conversely, the other end of the distribution is filled with endless repetitions of familiar and formulaic phrases used to manage conversation (yeah, mhm, oh, y’know, right, okay, well), express reactions (aw man, wow, cool, whoa, yuck, yikes, phew), and serve social scripts (good morning, thanks, fuck off, I’m sorry).    

We observe three quirky properties that seem to be peculiar to the frequent and formulaic phrases at the fat end of the distribution. 
    1) phones — phones/phonotactics/phonation outside the productive phonology 
    2) tones — phrase-specific intonational contours and floating intonational contours
    3) emblems — manual gestures with highly conventionalized meaning that occur with (and substitute for) verbal equivalents 

These properties tend to occur together and seem to be restricted to the elements at the fat end of the distribution. We propose that this be explained by positing a co-grammar for English that operates over frequent and formulaic phrases. In addition to accounting for the presence and distribution of properties (1-3) a co-grammar makes it possible to account for an over-abundance of surface regularities in the fat end of the distribution (e.g., prosodic doubling: hear hear, there there, come come, now now, aye aye, nix nix, etc.) and the presence of proto-morphology in patterns which seem compositional but not productive ({welp, nope, yup, yep}, {wowza, yowza, wowzers, yowzers, yeppers, yuppers, right-o, neat-o}, {whatevs, natch, obvs, obvi}).

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) took place at MIT on Saturday. Two MIT students participated. Filipe Kobayashi (1st year) presented When modals scope below the progressive, and Keny Chatain (2nd year) presented The referentiality of generic indefinites: evidence from anaphora.

SNEWS 2018 will take place at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Photo credit: Dóra Takács