Whamit!

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

Speaker: Moshe Bar-Lev (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Don’t mind the gap: an implicature account of Homogeneity
Date and time: Wednesday November 29, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

I will present an implicature-based view of Homogeneity with definite plurals (following Magri 2014’s lead) in which the universal meaning definite plurals give rise to in positive sentences is the result of implicature calculation, while the existential meaning they give rise to in negative sentences reflects the basic meaning.

The proposed account builds on the implicature approach to free choice disjunction, which I claim behaves similarly to Homogeneity. Given this perspective, Non-maximal readings of definite plurals can be taken to follow from the context-sensitivity of implicature calculation, and neither-true-nor-false judgments can be the result of context-indeterminacy. This is in contrast with a view in which they motivate semantically encoding a truth-value gap (recently Križ 2016).

To support the implicature-based account I will discuss asymmetries between positive and negative contexts in children’s interpretation of definite plurals (Tieu et al. 2015), non-maximal readings, and neither-true-nor-false judgments (Križ & Chemla 2015).

Speaker: Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Anaphors and antipassives in Inuktitut
Date and time: Thursday, November 30th, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

The Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE) refers to the cross-linguistic (possibly universal) inability for anaphors to be cross-referenced with co-varying phi-agreement (Rizzi 1990, et seq.). In this talk, I investigate the AAE in Inuktitut (Inuit; Eskimo-Aleut) as a window into its antipassive construction and clause structure more generally. It has been claimed that the Inuit languages avoid phi-agreement with anaphoric objects by resorting to the antipassive construction, which demotes the object to an oblique (Woolford 1999; Sundaresan 2015). However, a closer look reveals that the interaction of anaphors and antipassives in Inuktitut is both more nuanced and more complex than previously assumed.

Despite surfacing with identical case morphology, I argue that anaphors enter the derivation with inherent case, while true (non-anaphoric) antipassive objects receive structural Case (building on Spreng 2006, 2012). Thus, Inuktitut obviates the AAE by enclosing its anaphors in a PP layer, not by antipassivization. Evidence for this distinction comes from the possibility of case stacking on anaphors (not otherwise possible in Inuktitut), as well as from the parallel behaviour of phi-agreement and verbal antipassive morphology in anaphoric contexts. I also explore the wider implications of this analysis for Inuktitut clause structure and argument licensing.

Speaker: Takashi Morita (MIT) & Timothy O’Donnell (McGill)
Title: Bayesian learning of Japanese sublexica
Date/Time: Thursday, November 30th, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Languages have been borrowing words from each other.
A borrower language often has a different list of possible sound sequences (phonotactics) from a lender’s.
While loanwords may be reshaped so that they fit to the borrower’s phonotactics, they can also introduce new sound patterns into the language.
Accordingly, native and loanwords can exhibit different phonotactics in a single language and linguists have proposed that such a language’s lexicon is better explained by a mixture of multiple phonotactic grammars: words are classified into sublexica (e.g. native vs. loan), and words belonging to different sublexica are subject to different phonotactic constraints.
This approach, however, raises a non-trivial learnability question: Can learners classify words into correct sublexica?
Words are not labeled with their sublexicon, so learners need to infer the classification.
In this study, we investigate Bayesian unsupervised learning of sublexica.
We focus on Japanese data (coded in international phhonetic alphabet), whose sublexical phonotactics has been proposed in linguistic literature.
It will turn out that even a simple Dirichlet process mixture of ngram leads to remarkably successful classification.

According to the widely cited definition by Charles Hockett, “genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words” (Hockett 1958: 231). In other words, genders are defined via agreement. At the same time, in most languages with gender systems, the speakers cannot determine the gender of an arbitrary noun neither by its meaning nor by any formal properties – it is a lexical feature of the noun and should be kept in the lexicon.

However, there is a whole number of languages whose gender systems are described as totally semantic as well as some languages where (almost) all nouns are assigned to particular genders by applying some simple and highly regular formal rules. In this talk, I shall discuss some languages of these two types.

First, I shall present the data of Dargwa (East Caucasian), a language with a “semantic” gender system. I hope to show that gender assignment in Dargwa is rather based on the properties of the NP referents than on the lexical features of the nouns.

Second, I shall discuss the possibility of systems where gender is assigned solely by a set of rules and probably does need to be stored in the lexicon. The language of Landuma (Mel < Niger-Congo) is a unique example of a language where the choice of agreement markers seems to be conditioned by a purely phonological rule. The “gender” system in Landuma needs a serious discussion, since it looks as a violation of the well-known principle of phonology-free syntax (Zwicky 1969; Zwicky, Pullum 1986, etc.).

The data of Dargwa and Landuma were obtained in course of fieldwork in Daghestan (Russian Federation) and in the Republic of Guinea, respectively.

SNEWS (the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics) is happening at MIT on Saturday, December 2nd! This is an informal graduate student workshop featuring presenters from MIT, Harvard, UMass Amherst, UConn, Brown, and Yale. More information, including a program, can be found on the workshop website.

Sam Zukoff (PhD ‘17, post-doc) gave an invited talk at Grinnell College last week. The handout for the talk, entitled Reduplication in Ancient Greek, is available on Sam’s website, here.

Title: Discussion of Koev (under review): Parentheticality and Assertion Strength
Date and time: Monday November 20, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

The traditional picture in linguistics and philosophy is that descriptive content and illocutionary force are cleanly separated. This paper argues that this orthodoxy is incorrect: descriptive content can modify the strength of the main assertion of the sentence, thus blurring the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. One prominent such case are sentences with SLIFTING PARENTHETICALS (e.g. The dean, Jill said, greeted the secretary; Ross 1973), which grammaticalize an intriguing interaction between compositional meaning and speech act function. In such sentences, the main clause (the non-parenthetical part of the sentence) pragmatically depends on the parenthetical, which provides evidential information. The discourse effect of this setup is that slifting parentheticals modulate the strength with which the main clause is asserted (cf. Urmson 1952; Asher 2000; Rooryck 2001; Jayez & Rossari 2004; Davis et al. 2007; Simons 2007; Murray 2014; Maier & Bary 2015; AnderBois 2016; Hunter 2016). Building on Lewis (1976) and Davis et al. (2007), this paper develops a probabilistic dynamic model that captures the role of parentheticality as a language tool for qualifying commitments. The model also derives three properties that set apart slifting sentences from regular embedding constructions (e.g. Jill said that the dean greeted the secretary), i.e. (i) the fact that slifting parentheticals invariably express upward-entailing operators, (ii) the fact that they modify root clauses and do not occur in subordinate clauses, and (iii) the fact that slifted claims are more difficult to reject or doubt by the speaker than claims expressed in complement clauses.

The discussion will be lead by Maša

Speaker: Stanislao Zompí
Title: *ABA in case morphology and what it may teach us
Date and time: Tuesday November 21, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

In this presentation, I try to lay out a comprehensive survey of *ABA effects in case morphology, with an emphasis on case syncretism, case-based wholesale suppletion, and case-based stem-formative allomorphy. Building on work by Baerman et al. (2005), McFadden (2017), and Smith et al. (2017), I claim that all three of these phenomena are constrained by the following universal: No Vocabulary-Insertion rule can apply to both an inherent case and an unmarked core case (nominative/absolutive) without also applying to another core case (accusative/ergative). The case hierarchy that such *ABA effects motivate is thus one where the ergative consistently occupies the same ‘middle field’ as the accusative, instead of patterning with inherent cases. This offers a new kind of argument against approaches that treat the ergative as just another inherent case, and it favors instead those case-assignment theories that do put ergative and accusative in the same box. Prominent among these is Marantz’s (1991) dependent-case theory, whereby accusative and ergative are both treated as dependent cases—i.e. assigned to nominals that stand in an asymmetric c-command relation to another as-yet-caseless nominal nearby (cf. also Yip et al. 1987). In this light, I reinterpret Marantz’s disjunctive case-assignment hierarchy as a proper containment hierarchy: [[[UNMARKED] DEPENDENT] INHERENT].

LF Reading Group meeting with a talk from Moshe Bar-Lev on Homogeneity will take place on November 29th 1-2pm.

Shigeru Miyagawa, who was recently appointed Senior Associate Dean for the MIT Office of Digital Learning (ODL - responsible for OpenCourseWare, MITx, and other digital initiatives), has given an interview for MIT News discussing his goals for ODL and the future of digital learning and cross-institute collaboration. The full article can be found here.

Title: Discussion of Romero & Han 2004: On Negative Yes/No Questions
Date and time: Monday November 13, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

Preposed negation yes/no (yn)-questions like Doesn’t John drink? necessarily carry the implicature that the speaker thinks John drinks, whereas non-preposed negation yn-questions like Does John not drink? do not necessarily trigger this implicature. Furthermore, preposed negation yn-questions have a reading “double-checking” p and a reading “double-checking” ≠ p, as in Isn’t Jane coming too? and in Isn’t Jane coming either? respectively. We present other yn-questions that raise parallel implicatures and argue that, in all the cases, the presence of an epistemic conversational operator VERUM derives the existence and content of the implicature as well as the p/≠ p-ambiguity.

The discussion will be led by Milica.

Speaker: Erin Olson (MIT)
Title: Influence of schwa duration on stress/pitch patterns in Passamaquoddy
Date/Time: Monday, 13 November, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Passamaquoddy-Maliseet (Eastern Algonquian; Maine and New Brunswick) is well-known for the fact that reduced vowels are in many cases invisible to the stress/pitch accent system (LeSourd 1988, 1993; Hagstrom 1995). While previous analyses have assumed that this invisibility is due to some sort of structural deficiency of these vowels, I assume that it is at least in part due to the phonetics of stress/pitch accent. I will present a preliminary phonetic study of pitch and vowel duration in the language, based on data from the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary Project (Language Keepers & Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary Project 2016). I will show that the syllables marked as stressed in the literature crucially involve a rise in pitch, and I hypothesize that the odd behaviour of schwa can be derived from the fact that it is too short to host either this rise in pitch or a fall from one pitch to the next. A brief sketch of this hypothesis in OT is provided.

Speaker: Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Last Resort licensing in Inuktitut
Date and time: Tuesday November 14, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

The traditional Case Filter (Chomsky 1981, et seq.) regulates the syntactic distribution of nominal arguments; nominals cannot appear in positions where they are inaccessible for licensing (e.g. Case assignment). It has also been argued that nominals in such positions may nonetheless be later licensed by a Last Resort mechanism that rescues the derivation. In much of this literature, Last Resort Case assignment is modeled as the countercyclic insertion of a Case-bearing head directly onto the nominal in question (e.g. Harley & Noyer 1998, Rezac 2011, Levin 2015, van Urk 2015).

I argue for the existence of this kind of Last Resort Case assignment in Inuktitut (Eskimo-Aleut), thus providing evidence in favour of this idea more generally. Along the way, I also show how this analysis sheds light on various other aspects of Inuktitut morphosyntax. In Inuktitut, regular nominal licensing strategies may be blocked or disrupted in certain environments. When this happens, these nominals uniformly receive a certain kind of oblique case. Crucially, this oblique case morphology must be countercyclically inserted once the clause structure has been fully built. In Inuktitut, this derivational logic is particularly transparent: phi-agreement, the language’s regular nominal licensing strategy, is in C0, meaning that failure to license a lower nominal via phi-agreement can only be seen once the CP layer is Merged. Finally, I argue that, despite surface similarities, this Last Resort Case-insertion process is distinct from default case (e.g. Schutze 2001).

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Tanya Bondarenko (MIT)
Title: Results, Repetitives and Datives: towards an account of the crosslinguistic variation
Date and time: Wednesday November 15, 4-5pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Repetitive adverbs like ‘again’ are ambiguous in sentences with dative (= indirect) arguments in some languages (ex., in English, (1)), but not in others (ex., in Russian, (2)):

(1) Thilo gave Satoshi the map again.
REP(etitive): ‘Thilo gave Satoshi the map again, and that had happened before.’
RES(titutive): ‘Thilo gave Satoshi the map, and Satoshi had had the map before.’
(Beck & Johnson 2004: 113)

(2) Maša opjat’ otdala Vase kartu.
Masha.NOM again gave Vasja.DAT map.ACC
REP(etitive): ‘Masha gave Vasja the map, and that had happened before.’
RES(titutive): *’Masha gave Vasja the map, and Vasja had had the map before.’

Following the structural ambiguity approach to repetitives ((von Stechow 1996), (Beck 2005), among others), I will argue that the availability of the restitutive reading in constructions with dative arguments depends on the syntactic configuration. The restitutive reading in ditransitives has been previously attributed either to presence of a small clause in the structure (Beck & Johnson 2004), or on the presence of an applicative phrase (Bruening 2010). I will explore another hypothesis: that the restitutive reading arises due to existence of a prepositional phrase in the structure.

Speaker: Tom Roeper (UMass-Amherst)
Title: Strict Syntax/Semantic Interfaces and Ellipsis: an explanatory role for acquisition theory
Date and time: Thursday November 16, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

It has often been said that linguistic theory should account for acquisition. Modern work extends this claim to the more important goal: account for steps on the acquisition path itself, where micro-operations are often visible. The abstract claim has particular relevance when it can resolve long-standing questions in theory. We show that the acquisition path for ellipsis must entail a shift from an Open Interface, dependent upon inference, to a Strict Syntax/semantic Interface which involves a perfect correspondence of syntax and semantics and minimizes pragmatics:

Strict Interface Hypothesis: The acquisition device assumes that there should be an isomorphic connection between LF-semantics, syntax, and phonology.

This is based upon an acquisition principle:

Minimization Goal: Minimize pragmatic inference and maximize the information determined by explicit grammar.

One tradition, epitomized in the work of Hardt (1999), claims that a broad empty category like pro and general cognitive biases toward parallelism (Jackendoff and Culicover (2005)) are needed to account for ellipsis. Another tradition is captured in Kennedy’s (2008) Syntax-Semantics Identity Hypothesis:

A recovered syntactic representation generates an LF form with variables that allow sloppy readings.

Merchant (2015, to appear) and Craenenburg (2014) argue for a “hybrid” account which is theoretically unsatisfying. They claim the system is strict, but then the system assumes pronominal forms (or just do that) when necessary. The literature has also shown an ongoing debate about less than full reconstruction in syntactic representations, given various deviations known as “mismatches”. The acquisition path perspective makes this outcome natural.

The empirical basis of this argument works with evidence about VP ellipsis, NP-ellipsis, and Partitive interpretation. Children overgenerate possible reconstructions beyond sloppy identity and then must somehow retreat. eg. They allow John patted his dog and so did his grandfather to mean grandfather pats an uncle’s dog. This creates a learnability problem since interpretations both include and exceed the adult grammar. Evidence on early VP-ellipsis from Santos, and Wijnen and Roeper (2003) on NP-ellipsis and Hulk and Schleeman (2014) on partitives, and Perez et al (to appear) on empty pro objects support this account.

The acquisition path claim is: Children will step by step, following Minimize Pragmatics, replace a pronominal representation with an explicit syntactic representation and a fixed link to semantic representations.

This Strict Interface perspective is deliberately much more stringent than a claim that interfaces involve “Third Factor” effects (Chomsky (2005) which weakens learnability. A big challenge is to develop a notation that makes the connection transparent and simple for the child and natural within UG.

Speaker: David Alvarez Melis (MIT CSAIL)
Title: Interpretability for black-box sequence-to-sequence models
Date/Time: Thursday, November 16th, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Most current state-of-the-art models for sequence-to-sequence NLP tasks have complex architectures and millions —if not billions—of parameters, making them practically black-box systems. Such lack of transparency can limit their applicability to certain domains and can hamper our ability to diagnose and correct their flaws. Popular black-box interpretability approaches are inapplicable to this context since they assume scalar (or categorial) outputs. In this work, we propose a model to interpret the predictions of any black-box structured input-structured output model around a specific input-output pair. Our method returns an “explanation” consisting of groups of input-output tokens that are causally related. These dependencies are inferred by querying the black-box model with perturbed inputs, generating a graph over tokens from the responses, and solving a partitioning problem to select the most relevant components. We focus the general approach on sequence-to-sequence problems, adopting a variational autoencoder to yield meaningful input perturbations. We test our method across several NLP sequence generation tasks.

On Friday, Donca Steriade was honored as a Professor Honoris Causa by the Faculty of Letters at the University of Bucharest. Congratulations Donca!

Title: Discussion of Cariani 2013: `Ought’ and Resolution Semantics
Date and time: Monday November 6, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

I motivate and characterize an intensional semantics for ‘ought’ on which it does not behave as a universal quantifier over possibilities. My motivational argument centers on taking at face value some standard challenges to the quantificational semantics, especially to the idea that ‘ought’-sentences satisfy the principle of Inheritance. I argue that standard pragmatic approaches to these puzzles are either not sufficiently detailed or unconvincing.

The discussion will be led by David.

Speaker: Andrew Peters (University of Toronto)
Title: Keeping Finiteness Syntactic: Propositions, bare events and the lack of a finite distinction in Mandarin Chinese
Date and time: Tuesday November 7, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

Lacking morphological diagnostics, arguments for or against the presence of a finiteness contrast in Mandarin Chinese (MC) have focused primarily around the distribution of modal verbs and aspectual markers, and the analysis of control and raising. Lin (2011, 2015), for example, posits (1) that MC raising verbs take finite TP complements, control taking non-finite TP complements, (2) that epistemic modals are raising verbs and root modals are control verbs, and (3) that root and epistemic modals’ differing distribution with respect to aspect requires a finiteness distinction. This talk departs from Lin’s argument by positing that the fundamental clause-type distinction in Mandarin is between propositions and bare events. This distinction relies on a PROP(osition) feature (Cowper, 2005; 2016) which I argue is hosted on AspP in Mandarin, and is responsible for taking bare events and returning propositions. Epistemic modals require propositions in their prejacent (Kratzer, 1991; Butler 2003 inter alia), while root modals may take bare events in Mandarin (Grano, 2015). Thus, finiteness may remain a purely syntactic distinction involving the licensing of structural case (Cowper, 2016), and need not be defined semantically. Lacking further evidence for its existence, I posit that there is no finiteness distinction in Mandarin. 

Speaker: Verena Hehl (MIT)
Title: From times to worlds
Date and time: Wednesday November 8, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this work in progress I will examine the meaning of sentences with German eher ’sooner’/’rather’ which exhibits temporal and modal meanings, in light of Gergel’s 2010, a.o. analysis of English rather, taking into account the historical development of both particles. I will develop an analysis for German eher that has at its core the notion of a scale, basically an ordered set of degrees. The degree approach simplifies the formal account of how this particle came to be used in temporal as well as modal domains. Temporal and modal readings of eher have in common that they consist of a gradable property which combines with a comparative morpheme. They are, however, distinguished in terms of the scale they operate on, leading to different LF attachment sites for the temporal vs. the modal reading.

The MIT-Haiti Initiative, dedicated to making STEM education accessible to Haitians in Kreyòl, their native language, has gained a new ally: Google. As part of an expansion to Google Translate, Google and the MIT-Haiti Initiative have teamed up to add scientific and technical terminology, including recent coinages, to the translation software’s database. Now anyone can access translations of technical terms in Kreyòl, greatly expanding the reach of the technical terminology the Initiative works on creating and disseminating. More details can be found at MIT News.

Title: Discussion of Jacobson 1995: On the Quantificational Force of English Free Relatives
Date and time: Monday October 30, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

The late 70’s and early 80’s witnessed considerable debate as to the correct syntactic analysis of free relatives in English and other languages with a similar construction: is the internal structure of an NP free relative basically like that of an ordinary NP, or is its internal structure instead like that of other wh constituents such as wh questions? The underlying concern surrounding this debate was whether the gap in a free relative could be analyzed as the result of wh movement; this question in turn, of course, bore on the status of Subjacency and on the feasibility of reducing a large class of phenomena to wh movement. But the correct syntactic analysis of free relatives also has significant implications for the syntax/semantics map and for the theory of NP meanings, and it is to this question that this paper is addressed. In particular, I wikk present some ecidence suggesting that English free relatives do indeed have the internal strcture of other wh constituents — they contain no overt lexical head and therefore also contain no overt quantificational element.1 Just how and why, then, du these have NP-type meanings and — given the claim that there is no overt lexical quantifier — what is it that supplies them with their particular quantificational force?

The discussion will be led by Kelly.

(Joint work with Hyang-Sook Sohn)

The canonical Korean name consists of a monosyllabic surname followed by a disyllabic given name: Kim, Yu-na. The surname is normally not used alone and must be combined with a given name or title. As a result, underlying contrasts among high, low, and rising accents are partially neutralized in this phrasal context. This presentation reports and analyzes the tonal contours that arise when Kyengsang speakers are tasked with inflecting the surname by itself (Kim, Yu-na -> Kim, Kim-i, Kim-ɨl, etc.)—a type of wug-test. The results suggest that speakers take recourse to the most reliable rules underlying the lexical distribution of the accents relative to specific strata of the lexicon as well as to default rules of word-level inflection.

Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz (MIT)
Title: Verb-stranding vP Ellipsis in Russian: Evidence from unpronounced subjects
Date and time: Tuesday October 31, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

In this presentation of work in progress, I contribute to the debate on the status of verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VVPE) in Russian with novel evidence from the interpretation of unpronounced subjects. I argue that a heretofore unnoticed construction involving a silent subject in clauses embedded under an attitude verb is the result of VVPE, supporting Gribanova (2013, 2017)’s conclusion that Russian has this type of ellipsis, contra Erteschik-Shir et. al. (2013) and Bailyn (2014). Based on a surprising ban on quantificational elements in the subject of the ellipsis sites, I propose a modification to Takahashi and Fox (2005)’s definition of parallelism domains to allow them to contain certain instances of unbound traces. The ban on quantificational subjects, as well as vehicle change from R-expressions to pronouns (Fiengo and May 1994), follows naturally from this modification.

Speaker: Frank Staniszewski (MIT)
Title: Modal ambiguity and neg-raising
Date and time: Wednesday November 1, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In a constrained range of environments, some modal operators appear to show an ambiguity in modal force between weak (existential) readings and strong (universal) readings. In English, this weak/strong ambiguity has been discussed with respect to For-Infinitival Relative clauses (Hackl and Nissenbaum (2010)). In this presentation based on work-in-progress, I will examine additional environments in which modal ambiguity can be detected. These include modal mismatches in sluicing (Klein (1985), Merchant (2001), Rudin (2017)), as well as instances in which weaker than expected meanings for want and should can satisfy the presupposition of anymore (based on observations by Keny Chatain p.c.). I will explore the hypothesis that these ambiguities are the result of an underlying weak semantics for the modal operators in question, and that this is the also source of their strengthened ‘neg-raised’ meanings under negation.

Speaker: Asia Pietraszko (UConn)
Title: Obligatory clause nominalization in Ndebele
Date and time: Thursday November 2, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

Clausal DP shells (CPs embedded directly in a DP) have been argued to have a different distribution than bare CPs (e.g. in-situ vs derived sentential subjects), which in turn led to treatments of clausal DP shell as a last resort phenomenon (e.g. Hartman 2012). In this talk, I present evidence for the existence of obligatory clausal DP shell. In Ndebele, a Bantu language of Zimbabwe, DP-contained CPs appear in non-derived positions, rendering the last resort status of a clausal DP shell unlikely in this language. Furthermore, I show that a DP shell must appear even in contexts where it is problematic, namely in N-complement clauses and relative clauses (Ndebele does not allow adnominals of category D). Instead of “dropping” the DP-shell in those contexts, extra functional structure is necessary to combine the clause with the head noun.

NELS 2017 was held in Reykjavík, at the University of Iceland, from October 27th-29th. This NELS is the first one to not be on continental North America. However, Reykjavík is located on the edge of the North American tectonic plate, making this perhaps the most North-Eastern NELS possible while still (geologically) in North America.

A large contingent of MIT students participated in the conference:

• Ezer Rasin, Iddo Berger, Nur Lan and Roni Katzir (visiting faculty) - Rule-based learning of phonological optionality and opacity
• Ezer Rasin and Roni Katzir (visiting faculty) - Learning abstract URs from distributional evidence 
• Tingchun Chen - Successive-cyclic case assignment in Amis: evidence from case-stacking
• Justin Colley - Object movement derives object preference
• Carolyn Spadine  - Tigrinya attitude reports: arguments for syntactic perspective
• Itai Bassi and Nicholas Longenbaugh - Features on bound pronouns: an argument for a semantic approach
• Ömer Demirok - A Modal Approach to Dative Subjects in Laz
• Athulya Aravind and Kristen Syrett (Rutgers) - Investigating Context Sensitivity and Vagueness in Nominals in Child and Adult Language 
• Michelle Yuan - M-merger and copy spell-out in Inuktitut noun incorporation

Additionally, alums Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002), Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (PhD 2011), Julie Anne Legate (PhD 2002), Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (PhD 2007), Rafael Nonato (PhD 2014), Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2014), Omer Preminger (PhD 2011), Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015), and Susi Wurmbrand (PhD 1998) all presented work, along with many friends and former visiting scholars.

Title: Discussion of Fodor & Sag 1982: Referential and Quantificational Indefinites
Date and time: Monday October 23, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

The formal semantics that we have proposed for definite and indefinite descriptions analyzes them both as variable-binding operators and as referring terms. It is the referential analysis which makes it possible to account for the facts outlined in Section 2, e.g. for the purely instrumental role of the descriptive content; for the appearance of unusually wide scope readings relative to other quantifiers, higher predicates, and island boundaries; for the fact that the island-escaping readings are always equivalent to maximally wide scope quantifiers; and for the appearance of violations of the identity conditions on variables in deleted constituents. We would emphasize that this is not a random collection of observations. They cohere naturally with each other, and with facts about other phrases that are unambigously referential. We conceded at the outset of this paper that the referential use of an indefinite noun phrase does not, by itself, motivate the postulation of a referential interpretation. Our argument has been that the behavior of indefinites in complex sentences cannot be economically described, and certainly cannot be explained, unless a referential interpretation is assumed. It could be accounted for in pragmatic terms only if the whole theory of scope relations and of conditions on deletion could be eliminated from the semantics and incorporated into a purely pragmatic theory. But this seems unlikely.

The discussion will be led by Keny.

MaxEnt grammars have become the tool of choice for analyzing phonological phenomena involving variation or gradient acceptability. MaxEnt grammars are a probabilistic form of Harmonic Grammar in which harmony scores (sums of weighted constraint violations) of candidates are mapped onto probabilities (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). But MaxEnt grammar is not the only proposal for deriving probabilities from Harmonic Grammars – one alternative is Noisy Harmonic Grammar (Boersma & Pater 2016), in which variation is derived by adding random ‘noise’ to constraint weights, and further variants of this scheme are discussed by Hayes (2017). I will report on an investigation into the properties of these stochastic grammar formalisms, with the ultimate goal of identifying predictions that could be used to evaluate them empirically.

In spite of the superficial differences between MaxEnt and Noisy Harmonic Grammar, they can both be formulated as NHGs where the noise is added to the harmony scores of each candidate. This common format facilitates analysis and comparison of the two formalisms. The differences identified are difficult to assess empirically, but in the absence of evidence in favor of NHG, MaxEnt is to be preferred for its simplicity and tractability.

Speaker: Sherry Chen (MIT)
Title: Double topicalization, I find really interesting
Date and time: Tuesday October 24, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

Whether Chinese topics are syntactically constrained remains a debatable issue. In this talk, I present on-going work suggesting that in double topicalization constructions, the base- generated topic must precede the moved topic, and if both topics are derived via movement, the two intersecting movement paths must be in a “nested” relation (i.e. the Path Contain ment Constraint, Pesetsky (1982)). This challenges the view that Chinese topics are only constrained by a semantic “aboutness” relation with the comment clause (cf. Xu and Lan- gendoen, 1985), and provides new cross-linguistic evidence for PCC effects (see Appendix).

For the second part of this talk, I discuss a new puzzle regarding topicalization in embedded environments. Specifically, I observe that for certain predicates in non-asserted contexts (Hooper & Thompson, 1973; Miyagawa, to appear), embedded topicalization is possible only if the matrix subject binds a pronoun or a reflexive ziji in the embedded clause. 

Speaker: Hanzhi Zhu (MIT)
Title: Mandarin cai: ‘only’ and what else?
Date and time: Wednesday October 25, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

The Mandarin focus particle cái has (at least) three readings: a scalar only reading (1), a temporal reading (2), and an “only if” conditional (3).

1. Lee is only/merely a novice.
2. John arrived only at midnight.
3. Only if the weather’s good will I go jogging.

I’ll explore existing accounts of the semantics of cai. Although the exclusive component of this particle is generally agreed upon, accounts differ on how to treat the additional meaning component(s) that the various readings of cai contribute.

Speaker: Deniz Özyıldız (UMass-Amherst)
Title: The interaction between factivity and prosodic structure in Turkish attitude reports
Date/Time: Thursday, October 26, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk articulates two puzzles raised by the interaction between the availability of the factive inference in Turkish attitude reports, and their prosodic structure.

Puzzle 1: Where is a trigger?
For a class of attitude reports, we observe the following contrast. 1a) and 1b) are string identical. The position of the sentences Nuclear Pitch Accent (on the matrix verb in 1a), on the embedded object in 1b), seems to correlate with the availability of the factive inference (available in 1a), unavailable in 1b)).

1a) Aybike [Dilara’nin Ankara’da oldugunu] BILIYOR.
  Aybike Dilara.GEN Ankara.LOC be.NMZ know.PRES
  Aybike knows that Dilara is in Ankara (factive).

1b) Aybike [Dilara’nin ANKARA’da oldugunu] biliyor.
  Aybike Dilara.GEN Ankara.LOC be.NMZ know.PRES
  Aybike believes that Dilara is in Ankara (non-factive).

Faced with this contrast, we must ask: Is it the prosodic structure of an attitude report that is driving the availability of the factive inference? Or is it the availability of the factive inference that has an effect on prosodic structure? The former option is appealing, but I argue for the latter. 1a) and 1b) are associated with two distinct semantic representations. Prosody follows. But how?

Puzzle 2: Getting from presupposed to given?
In out of the blue contexts, non-factive attitude reports must be realized with embedded NPA.

2a) What’s up?
  Aybike [Dilara’nin ANKARA’da oldugunu] saniyor.
  Aybike Dilara.GEN Ankara.LOC be.NMZ believe.PRES
  Aybike believes that Dilara is in Ankara.

2b) What’s up?
  #Aybike [Dilara’nin Ankara’da oldugunu] SANIYOR.
  (Out because the embedded clause isn’t given.)

On the other hand, in out of the blue contexts, factive attitude reports are realized with matrix verb NPA.

3a) What’s up?
  Aybike [Dilara’nin Ankara’da oldugunu] unuttu.
  Aybike Dilara.GEN Ankara.LOC be.NMZ forget.PST
  Aybike forgot that Dilara is in Ankara.

3b) What’s up?
  #Aybike [Dilara’nin ANKARA’da oldugunu] unuttu.
  (Out because a contrastive interpretation is triggered, but not licensed in context.)

There is mixed evidence as to whether presupposing a proposition p makes the clause that denotes p given (which would explain why the NPA migrates to the matrix verb in 3). Kallulli (2006, 2010) argues that it does. Others argue that presupposition and givenness are two independent dimensions of meaning (Wagner 2012, Rochemont 2016, Buring 2016). Do the Turkish facts offer a way out? We will see.

Speaker: Jon Gauthier (MIT BCS)
Title: What does NLP tell us about language?
Date/Time: Thursday, October 26, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing achieve top performance in challenging shared tasks while doing little to explicitly model the syntax or semantics of their input. In light of these results, I will attempt to pitch two of my own past projects in natural language processing with a philosophical spin. I first present a model which reduces syntactic understanding to a by-product of more general pressures of semantic accuracy. I next present evolutionary simulations in which word meanings spontaneously arise due to nonlinguistic cooperative pressures. We close with potentially heretical and hopefully interesting discussion on the ideal relationship between AI engineering and cognitive science.

Michel DeGraff (faculty) gave a talk Cornell University as part of a new lecture series on language and inequality. On October 20th,
Michel presented Language, Education and (In)equality in Haiti: Struggling Through Centuries of Coloniality, a talk which focuses on linguistic inequality and the exclusion of “local languages” in education. While at Cornell, Michel also gave a colloquium talk on Thursday titled Walls vs. Bridges Around Creole Languages and Their Speakers. More details can be found at the Cornell Chronicle.

Speaker: Carrie Spadine (MIT)
Title: Tigrinya attitude reports: arguments for syntactic perspective [NELS practice talk]
Date and time: Tuesday October 17, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk presents novel data from Tigrinya (Semitic) for a perspectival projection (“PerspP”) in the left periphery of the clause. Previous works (Speas 2004, Sundaresan 2016, and others) have argued that such a projection is necessary to account for morphosyntactic phenomena that is sensitive to discourse and pragmatic factors, such as evidentiality marking, indexical shift, and perspectival anaphora. However, the existing proposals that make use of this projection extrapolate its existence from indirect factors, like auxiliary choice, agreement, and binding. Tigrinya can realize this projection overtly; the head Persp is spelled out as “ilu”, and introduces a perspective holder argument in the specifier of PerspP.

The construction under discussion also has the novel property of allowing indexical shift in root clauses. If indexical shift relies on a semantic property of the matrix verb in shifty construction (as proposed in (Munro et al. 2009) for Matses), this would be unexpected. Instead, this data suggests that indexical shift is a property of certain types of clauses, and the compatibility or incompatibility of certain verb classes with shifty embedded clauses is the result of selectional restrictions on clause size, rather than the particular semantics of those verbs.

Speaker: Alexander Wimmer (Universität Tübingen)
Title: Outscoping exclusion
Date and time: Wednesday October 18, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

The Chinese focus particle jiù is known to have both exclusive and nonexclusive readings, and to carry an evaluative component of easiness (Hole 2004, Liu 2016). I follow Liu (2016) in assuming that jiù has an exclusive assertion and a scalar presupposition according to which the prejacent ranks lowest on a scale of alternatives.

My first aim is to support this presupposition, and to check whether it should be supplemented by the truth of jiù’s prejacent.

I then want to consider the option of getting the nonexclusive reading by having a covert existential modal take scope above jiù at Logical Form, reducing the particle’s exclusiveness to a mere possibility. This option is inspired by a passage in Beck & Rullmann (1999), who decompose sufficiency into the components POSSIBLE and ONLY.

This week’s Ling-Lunch consists of two NELS practice talks
Date/Time: Thursday, October 12, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Justin Colley (MIT)
Title: Object movement derives object preference
Abstract:

Some languages exhibit object preference, in which agreement is with the object, if possible, and otherwise with the subject. For example, in Erzya Mordvin (Uralic), person agreement is with the object if it is 1st or 2nd person (1a), and otherwise the subject (1b) (Béjar 2003; Georgi 2010).

1) a. kunda-d-ad-yz
   catch-ᴛɴs-2:ᴏʙᴊ-ᴘʟ
   I/we/(s)he/they catch you(pl).

 b. kunda-s-y-k
   catch-ᴛɴs-ᴘʟ-2:su
   You(pl) catch him/her.

Object preference is problematic for a theory of Agree in which a Probe agrees with the closest c-commanded Goal (Rizzi, 1991; Chomsky, 2000, 2001). If a Probe c-commands the subject, then all things being equal, the result is expected to be subject agreement.

There are two kinds of theories of object preference. One is a low Probe theory, in which object-preferring Probes are on v, with extra assumptions invoked to explain the possibility of subject agreement (Béjar and Rezac, 2009; Lomashvili & Harley, 2011). I will argue instead for a movement theory, in which object-preferring Probes are high, and object preference is the result of movement above the subject (Bruening, 2001). Evidence for object-preferring Probes being high comes from cross-linguistic generalisations about morpheme ordering and suppletion. Evidence for movement of the object comes from various sources, including variable binding, word order, differential object marking, and the behaviour of unaccusatives.

Speaker: Ezer Razin (MIT) and Roni Katzir (MIT, TAU)
Title: Rule-based learning of phonological optionality and opacity
Abstract:

Optionality and opacity pose obvious challenges for the child learning the phonology of their ambient language: a process to be acquired loses support because of environments in which it was supposed to apply but didn’t (both optionality and counterfeeding opacity) or in which it wasn’t supposed to apply but did (counterbleeding opacity). Not surprisingly, no learners in the literature can handle optionality or opacity distributionally, from unanalyzed input data alone. Children, however, do manage to acquire optionality and opacity in a variety of languages (Dell 1981, McCarthy 2007). This talk shows how optional processes and opaque interactions (including both counterfeeding and counterbleeding) can be acquired using the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL; Solomonoff 1964, Rissanen 1978). Specifically, we use an adaptation of Rasin & Katzir 2016’s MDL learner (originally used for OT phonology) to rule-based phonology and show how it applies to various cases of optionality and opacity. We then show simulations on artificial-language data illustrating the mechanization of the idea.

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

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

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

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

(i) Maximize Presupposition

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

(ii) Interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions

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

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

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

(iii) Blind implicatures (Magri oddness cases)

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Itai Bassi and Nick Longenbaugh (MIT)
Title: Features on bound pronouns: an argument for a semantic approach [NELS practice]
Date/Time: Thursday, October 12, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Phi-features (person, gender, number) seem not to be semantically interpreted when they appear on bound pronouns. For example, in (1) the bound “my” appears to contribute an unrestricted variable, rather than a variable restricted to the speaker.

(1) Only I did my homework
(bound reading: no x other than the speaker did x’s homework: for any x)

On one influential approach (Kratzer 1998, Heim 2008, a.o.), bound pronouns enter the derivation without phi-features, which are then transferred to them at PF from the binder. The spelled out phi-features are therefore absent at LF. Recent works (Sauerland 2013, Jacobson 2012, Spathas 2010 a.o.) have taken a more semantic approach which denies this ‘LF-PF mismatch’ view. Those works have argued that phi-features on bound pronouns in cases like (1) do get semantically interpreted, except that they don’t contribute to focus alternatives. This talk provides a novel argument for the semantic approach. The argument comes from the observation that (non-trivial) phi-features appear on donkey pronouns - pronouns that show covariance without c-command:

(2) Only the woman who is dating ME introduced me to her parents
(sloppy reading available)

We show why cases like (2) are a problem for the morpho-syntactic approach and how they are derived on the semantic approach. We further demonstrate how our implementation of the semantic approach is advantageous over the morpho-syntactic approach in accounting for the phenomenon of split binding (Rullmann 2004).

Speaker: Benjamin Spector (CNRS)
Title: Plural predication, vagueness and principles of language use
Time: Friday, October 13th, 3:30-5:00 pm
Venue: 32-155
Abstract:

(Based on joint work w/ Manuel Kriz)

The interpretation of plural definites (among others) displays two somewhat unexpected properties: non-maximality and homogeneity.

- Non-maximality refers to the fact that, sometimes, plural definites have less-than-universal quantificational force:

(1) Non-Maximality

[Context: A job interview]
The committee members smiled.
>> Can be appropriately used if, say, 8 out of 10 committee members smiled.

- Homogeneity refers to the fact that plural definites tend to have (near)-universal force in affirmative sentences, but only existential force in the scope of negation:

(2) Homogeneity
(a) John read the books on the reading list.
>> He must have read roughly all of them.
(b) John didn’t read the books on the reading list.
>> He must have read roughly none of them.

These two properties are not restricted to plural definites, but are pervasive over other types of constructions (embedded interrogatives, conditionals, singular predication over complex objects, etc.). They are also both removed when the quantifier ‘all’ is added, as in The committee members all smiled.

We show how, by adopting (a) an underspecified semantics for plural predication making it intrinsically vague, and (b) certain principles of language uses, we can account for both properties in a way that makes very specific and apparently correct predictions. Time-permitting, I will discuss the interactions of homogeneity/non-maximality with binding and quantification.

Title: Discussion on Mourelatos 1978: Events, processes, and states
Date and time: Monday October 2, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

The familiar Vendler-Kenny scheme of verb-types, viz., performances (further differentiated by Vendler into accomplishments and achievements), activities, and states, is too narrow in two important respects. First, it is narrow linguistically. It fails to take into account the phenomenon of verb aspect. The trichotomy is not one of verbs as lexical types but of predications. Second, the trichotomy is narrow ontologically. It is a specification in the context of human agency of the more fundamental, topic-neutral trichotomy, event-process-state.The central component in this ontological trichotomy, event, can be sharply differentiated from its two flanking components by adapting a suggestion by Geoffrey N. Leech and others that the contrast between perfective and imperfective aspect in verbs corresponds to the count/mass distinction in the domain of nouns. With the help of two distinctions, of cardinal count adverbials versus frequency adverbials, and of occurrence versus associated occasion, two interrelated criteria for event predication are developed. Accordingly, Mary capsized the boat is an event predication because (a) it is equivalent to There was at least one capsizing of the boat by Mary, or (b) because it admits cardinal count adverbials, e.g., at least once, twice, three times. Ontologically speaking, events are defined as those occurrences that are inherently countable.

The discussion will be lead by Christopher.

Speaker: Chiyuki Ito (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, ILCAA & MIT)
Title: A Sociophonetic Study of the Ternary Laryngeal Contrast in Yanbian Korean
Date/Time: Monday, 2 October, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

This paper investigates the three-way tense-lax-aspirated laryngeal contrast for stop consonants in Yanbian Korean. Data from 61 speakers (DoB 1935-1992) finds three phonetic correlates dependent on laryngeal type, place of articulation, tone, gender, age, and sub-dialect. VOT has significantly shortened over apparent time. The difference between lax and tense is relatively small but still distinguished reliably.

We compare our Yanbian result with the sound changes reported for Seoul Korean, and analyze them based on the dispersion theory of contrast (Flemming 2004). We show that both the Yanbian and Seoul Korean developments were motivated by the same mechanism: minimizing articulatory effort (*Long VOT) while maximizing the number of contrasts (Maximize Contrasts) and the distinctiveness of contrasts (Mindist=VOT: Xms). An economy constraint (*Over-specify) is postulated to ban the ternary laryngeal contrast in the VOT dimension, which is over-differentiated, suggesting a change from ternary → binary distinction.

We point out that another alternative acoustic cue for the relevant laryngeal contrast existed before the VOT merger took place in both dialects. Thus, we conclude that Korean never had a laryngeal contrast based solely on the VOT dimension, and that the sound change that occurred in Seoul Korean is not a (typical case of) tonogenesis.

Speaker: Sarah Zobel (University of Tübingen and MIT)
Title: On the semantic variability of weak adjunct “as”-phrases
Date/Time: Thursday October 5, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Stump (1985) discusses the behavior of free adjuncts, like the sentence-initial adjuncts in (1). He observes that certain free adjuncts (which he calls “weak”) are interpreted as restrictors of co-occurring quantifiers (i.e., modals, adverbs of quantification, Gen/Hab), see (1a), while others (which he calls “strong”) only allow for a non-restrictive, causal interpretation, see (1b).

(1) a. Playing with his toys, Peter is often content. (weak)
   (Possible: When Peter is playing with his toys, he is often content.)

 b. Having three toy cars, Peter is often content. (strong)
   (Not possible: When Peter has three toy cars, he is often content.)

My work focuses on English “as”-phrases (and German “als”-phrases), which are weak adjuncts according to Stump’s distinction. Compare (1a) and (2).

(2) As a passenger of Lufthansa, Peter is often content. (weak)
  (Possible: When Peter is a passenger of Lufthansa, he is often content.)

Starting out with a straightforward analysis of the interactions between “as”-phrases and co-occurring operators (inspired by Stump 1985), I take a closer look at the restrictive possibilities of “as”-phrases (and weak adjuncts in general), and I show that these are in fact more restricted than previously assumed.

Speaker: Kasia Hitczenko (UMD & MIT)
Title: Exploring the efficacy of normalization in the acquisition and processing of the Japanese vowel length contrast
Date/Time: Thursday, October 5, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Infants must learn the sound categories of their language and adults need to map particular acoustic productions they hear to one of those learned categories. These tasks can be difficult because there is often a lot of overlap between the acoustic realizations of different categories that can mask which sounds should be grouped together. Previous work has proposed that this overlap is caused, at least in part, by systematic and predictable sources of variability, and that listeners could learn about the structure of this variability and normalize it out to help learn from and process the incoming sounds. In this work, we further explore this idea of normalization, by applying it to the problem of Japanese vowel length contrast – a contrast that current computational models fail to learn due to high overlap between short and long vowels. We find that, at least in the way it is implemented here, normalizing out systematic variability does not substantially improve categorization performance over leaving acoustics unnormalized. We then present an alternative path forward by showing that a strategy that uses both acoustic cues and non-acoustic top-down information in categorization is better able to separate the short and long vowels.

Speaker: Emma Nguyen (UConn) & William Snyder (UConn)
Title: It’s hard to coerce: a unified account of Raising-Past-Experiencers and Passives in Child English
Date/Time: Thursday, October 5, 5-6PM
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Snyder & Hyams (2015) adopt an idea from Gehrke & Grillo (2009) to account for children’s delay of non-actional passives: the problem is children’s inability to perform “semantic coercion” that non-actional verbs require before passivization. Orfitelli (2012) finds a tight correspondence between any given child’s ability to comprehend some non-actional passives and the same child’s ability to comprehend raising-past-experiencers like “John seems to Mary to be nice”. Yet, it is unclear how the idea of semantic coercion can extend to raising-past-experiencers.

Pinker (1989) argues the “core” of the English passive is the verb’s dyad of Agent-Patient theta-roles, with counterparts in other fields, like Perceiver-Perceptum. We propose that the locus of development is the ability to coerce a theta-role like Perceiver/Possessor into Agent. If a similar type of semantic coercion is necessary for raising-past-experiencers, children are delayed with both raising-past-experiencers and non-actional passives because they are late to master semantic coercion.

Shigeru Miyagawa’s article, “Integration hypothesis: A parallel model of language development in evolution,” just appeared in Evolution of the Brain, Cognition, and Emotion in Vertebrates (S. Watanabe, M. A. Hofman, T. Shimizu, eds.), Springer, pp. 225-247.

Congratulations Shigeru!

Title: Discussion on (Stone 1994) The reference argument of epistemic must
Date and time: Monday September 25, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

Epistemic must is used to present a conclusion. In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that this should be modeled computationally using the notion of argument presented by Simari and Loui. An utterance of must p in conversational context K is interpreted as asserting that the argument ‹A,p› is justified in K. The parameter A provides a set of reasoning rules which, along with factual premises from which they derive p, must be salient in K for the utterance to be felicitous.

Simari and Loui’s formulation describes a relationship of defeat between arguments. Thus, in this account as in previous ones, the conclusions presented by epistemic must may be defeasible. This proposal improves on previous accounts in three key respects. First, the criterion that the argument be justified ensures that the speaker believes p when uttering must p. Second, the requirement that the speaker intend the hearer to recover the argument helps to explain the distribution and of must in discourse and the accommodation sometimes involved in understanding uses of must. Third, the link between the claim made by must and a specific argument correctly predicts the variation in apparent force of the modal in different contexts: it varies according to the strength of the argument and the speaker’s intentions in providing the argument.

Because this interpretation for must incorporates restrictions based on salience into a frame- work designed to be relatively tractable, it may be uniquely suited for implementation.

The discussion will be lead by Maša Močnik.

Speaker: Kasia Hitczenko (UMD & MIT)
Title: Exploring the efficacy of normalization in the acquisition and processing of the Japanese vowel length contrast
Date/Time: Monday, September 25, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Infants must learn the sound categories of their language and adults need to map particular acoustic productions they hear to one of those learned categories. These tasks can be difficult because there is often a lot of overlap between the acoustic realizations of different categories that can mask which sounds should be grouped together. Previous work has proposed that this overlap is caused, at least in part, by systematic and predictable sources of variability, and that listeners could learn about the structure of this variability and normalize it out to help learn from and process the incoming sounds. In this work, we further explore this idea of normalization, by applying it to the problem of Japanese vowel length contrast – a contrast that current computational models fail to learn due to high overlap between short and long vowels. We find that, at least in the way it is implemented here, normalizing out systematic variability does not substantially improve categorization performance over leaving acoustics unnormalized. We then present an alternative path forward by showing that a strategy that uses both non-acoustic and acoustic cues to categorize the sounds is better able to separate the short and long vowels.

Speaker: Naomi Francis (MIT)
Title: There’s something odd about presupposition-denying even
Date/Time: Thursday September 28, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk will explore a puzzle about even. Even can be used in denials of presuppositions, but only when it is below negation in the surface string, as shown in (1).

1. A: Did Kenji bring his wife to the picnic?
  B: He isn’t even married!
  B’: #He’s even unmarried/a bachelor!

I show that this asymmetry is not straightforwardly reducible to independent properties of even or of presupposition denials, but is instead a property unique to sentences that are both presupposition denials and contain even. I present a solution to this puzzle that makes crucial use of the additive presupposition of even. This presupposition is controversial; I argue that the evidence used to challenge its presence does not show what it is usually claimed to show, and that when examined more closely these data turn out to be an argument in favour of the additive presupposition rather than against it. I show that this asymmetry is not unique to English and sketch crosslinguistic implications of the proposed analysis.

Speaker: Ray Jackendoff (Tufts)
Title: Morphology and Memory
Date/Time: Thursday, September 28, 5:00-7:00pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

(in collaboration with Jenny Audring)

We take Chomsky’s term “knowledge of language” very literally. “Knowledge” implies “stored in memory,” so the basic question of linguistics is reframed as

What do you store in memory such that you can use language, and in what form do you store it?

Traditionally – and in standard generative linguistics – what you store is divided into grammar and lexicon, where grammar contains all the rules, and the lexicon is an unstructured list of exceptions. We develop an alternative view in which rules of grammar are lexical items that contain variables, and in which rules have two functions. In their generative function, they are used to build novel structures, just as in traditional generative linguistics. In their relational function, they capture generalizations over stored items in the lexicon, a role not seriously explored in traditional linguistic theory. The result is a lexicon that is highly structured, with rich patterns among stored items.

We further explore the possibility that this sort of structuring is not peculiar to language, but appears in other cognitive domains as well. The differences among cognitive domains are not in this overall texture, but in the materials over which stored relations are defined – patterns of phonology and syntax in language, of pitches and rhythms in music, of geographical knowledge in navigation, and so on. The challenge is to develop theories of representation in these other domains comparable to that for language.

The Manitoba Workshop on Person happened in Winnipeg at the University of Manitoba on Friday and Saturday. This was the tenth annual workshop in a series dedicated to the syntax and semantics of person. The invited student speaker was our very own Michelle Yuan (5th year) who gave a talk about Plural person and associativity. MIT was also very well represented by our alumni and former visitors: both keynote speakers were graduates and at least one co-author on every invited talk was either a graduate of or a visitor to our department!

Speaker: Kelly Gaus and Thomas Byrne
Title: Discussion on (Ninan 2015) Two Puzzles about Deontic Necessity
Date and time: Monday September 18, 1-2pm
Location: 7th Floor Seminar room
Abstract:

The deontic modal must has two surprising properties: an assertion of must p does not permit a denial of p, and must does not take past tense complements. I first consider an explanation of these phenomena that stays within Angelika Kratzer’s semantic framework for modals, and then offer some reasons for rejecting that explanation. I then propose an alternative account, according to which simple must sentences have the force of an imperative.

Speaker: Suyeon Yun (University of Toronto)
Title: Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in Korean dialects
Date and time: Monday, September 18, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

This study presents large-scale production data of the word-initial liquid allophones in North and South Korean dialects. In South Korean dialects, liquids cannot occur in word-initial position, and Sino-Korean word-initial liquids undergo deletion (e.g., /Lipjəl/ → [ipjəl] ‘parting’) or nasalization (e.g., /Lotoŋ/ → [notoŋ] ‘labor; Iverson & Kim 1987, a.o.). It is reported, however, that the initial liquid /l/ or /r/ in recent English loanwords may be realized as [ɾ] (e.g., Lee 1999) or as [l] (Seo 2004). On the other hand, in North Korean dialects, word-initial liquids are retained (e.g., Bae 2011) albeit based on a small number of Sino-Korean words. This study examines the allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in North Korean as well as in South Korean, involving a considerable number of words, both Sino-Korean and loanwords, and participants that consist of different age groups. 35 speakers of North Korean defectors who speak Northern Hamkyeong dialect and 20 speakers of Seoul Korean read 41 /L/-initial words in isolation. Results show that the most common variant of the word-initial liquid is the tap [ɾ], and there are also several conditioned and free allophonic realizations, including the trill [r], approximant [ɹ], lateral [l], nasal [n], and stop [t]. The current data serve as an interesting case of variation, in which one phonemic liquid /L/ shows a lot of variability in its phonetic realizations as a result of the interactions between universal phonological constraints (rhotics occur less frequently and stops occur more frequently before /i/ than before other vowels (cf. Hall & Hamann 2010)), different lexical stratifications ([n] occurs more frequently in Sino-Korean than other loans), and speakers’ exposure to L2 ([r] occurs more frequently for Russian L2 speakers and [l] occurs more frequently for English L2 speakers).

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: E2P2: The Extended Extended Projection Principle
Date and time: Tuesday, September 19, 1:00-2:00pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Current definitions of EPP properties stipulate a preference for checking features via specifier creation rather than merging as a complement. I argue that this is an unnecessary stipulation, and that we can generalize EPP properties such that they may be satisfied by either specifier creation or complementation. I will use facts about English V to T movement and do-support to motivate this extension of the EPP. I propose a syntactic account of V to T movement, which builds off of Matushansky (2006), in conjunction with this new extension of EPP (henceforth E2P2) to explain not only facts about the English auxiliary system, but also facts about the interaction between negation and auxiliary verbs, and negation and non-finite T. I will discuss how this view can also extend to T to C movement, as well as notions about Anti-locality.

Speaker: Keny Chatain (MIT)
Title: Defining local contexts for anaphora
Date and time: Wednesday September 20, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Schlenker (2008, 2010) has shown how one can define an incremental notion of local context for presupposition. This removes the need for encoding projection behaviour in particular lexical entries, as in Dynamic Semantics. In subsequent unpublished work, Schlenker attempts to apply the same ideas to define an incremental notion of local context relevant to anaphora. The proposal, while broad in its empirical coverage, falls short of predicting existential/universal readings of donkey anaphora. It also predicts that universal quantifiers introduce singular discourse referents, just as indefinites.

In work-in-progress, I pick up on this project and show how one could deal with the exceptionality of indefinites, taking stock on their alternative semantics, and sketch ideas on how to produce the weak/strong distinction.

Speaker: Jessica Rett
Title: Explaining ‘EARLIEST’
Date and time: Thursday, September 21, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

The semantics of degree constructions has motivated the implementation of a MAX operator, a function from a set of degrees to its maximal member (von Stechow 1985, Rullmann 1995, a.o.). This operator is unsatisfying: it’s arbitrary (cf. MIN), and therefore not explanatory. There have thus been several calls to reduce MAX to a more pragmatic principle of maximal informativity (Dayal 1996, Beck & Rullmann 1999, Fox & Hackl 2007, von Fintel et al. 2014).

Intriguing differences between before and after have caused some to posit an EARLIEST operator in the temporal domain (Beaver & Condoravdi 2003, Condoravdi 2010). This operator is unsatisfying for similar reasons (cf. LATEST), and some have suggested it, too, can be redefined in terms of informativity (Rett 2015). However, recent cross-linguistic evidence (reported here) complicates the reduction of EARLIEST to `maximize informativity’: while counterparts of `before’ and `after’ across languages share many foundational semantic properties, they appear to differ in a principled way in how certain before constructions are interpreted. I discuss this and other related observations with respect to the future of a domain-general `maximize informativity’ program.

Speaker: Laurel Perkins (University of Maryland)
Title: Perceiving Transitivity: Consequences for Verb Learning
Date and time: Friday, September 22nd, 2pm-4pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

There is a paradox in language acquisition concerning the perception of the input. If learners can veridically parse the input, then there is nothing to learn from it; but if they cannot parse the input, then it is unclear how they avoid faulty inferences about structure, or even learn from it at all (Valian 1990, Fodor 1996). In this talk, I examine how children deal with their input, given only partial knowledge of the target grammar. Specifically, I focus on the intersection of transitivity, wh-movement, and verb learning.

Infants can use a verb’s distribution in transitive and intransitive clauses to draw inferences about its meaning (e.g. Fisher et al., 2010) and its argument-taking properties (Lidz, White, & Baier, 2017). In this talk I’ll address two questions about the nature of these inferences. First, are infants’ inferences about verb meaning best characterized as one-to-one matching between arguments in a clause and participants in an event described by that clause (Naigles, 1990; Fisher et al., 2010)? To differentiate this participant-to-argument matching hypothesis from other possibilities, we investigate whether children think an intransitive clause could be a good fit for a two-participant event. Second, at early stages in development, infants may not recognize transitivity in certain “non-basic” clauses, like What did Amy fix? (Gagliardi, Mease, & Lidz, 2016). If a learner does not yet recognize that what stands for the object of fix, might she erroneously infer that fix does not require an object? We probe when infants are able to recognize the transitivity of non-basic clauses like wh-object questions, and how infants who do not yet have that ability might learn to “filter” non-basic clauses from the data they use for verb learning. Thus, learners may be able to overcome the limits of partial knowledge by unconsciously filtering data that may lead to faulty inferences about their grammar.

The MIT Workshop on Simplicity in Grammar Learning will take place on September 23, 2017 in 32-155. The workshop will bring together members of MIT’s Linguistics and Brain & Cognitive Sciences departments to share current work that revisits the relevance of simplicity criteria in the study of language. Visit the website for more information.

The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2017 took place at New York University over the weekend and MIT was well represented by students, faculty, and alumni.

Current MIT-ers:

• Edward Flemming (faculty): Stochastic harmonic grammars as random utility models (poster)
• Ezer Rasin (5th-year) and Roni Katzir (TAu and MIT): Minimum description length subsumes free ride effects in UR learning (poster)
• Ezer Rasin (5th-year), Iddo Berger (Tel Aviv), Nur Lan (Tel Aviv), and Roni Katzir (TAU and MIT): Acquiring opaque phonological interactions using minimum description length (poster)
• Sam Zukoff (Postdoc, PhD ‘17): Segmental ordering and alignment in Arabic nonconcatenative morphology (poster)

Alumni:

• Arto Antilla (Stanford) and Giorgio Magri (CNRS/Paris 8, PhD ‘09): T-orders across categorical and probabilistic constraint-based phonology (talk)
• Heather Campbell (NYU), Doug Whalen (CUNY) & Tara McAllister (NYU, PhD ‘09): Quantifying complexity of children’s tongue contours using ultrasound imaging (workshop)
• Benjamin Storme (PhD ‘17): A theory of phonologically-derived environment effects (poster)
• Suyeon Yun (Toronto, PhD ‘16) and Yoonjung Kang (Toronto, PhD ‘00): Allophonic variation of the word-initial liquid in North and South Korean dialects (poster)

Haitian poet, singer & song-writer Roosevelt Saillant, better known as B.I.C. Tizon Dife (B.I.C. = Brain. Intelligence. Creativity) is one-of-a-kind Haitian artist, and he’s giving a free concert at MIT.

B.I.C. is one of the best known and most creative and prolific artists in Haiti. He has been writing and singing his poems for the past 20 years. B.I.C.’s songs, now taught at Haitian universities, reveal a unique philosophy of development and justice. His trenchant criticism about, and positive messages for, Haitian society are expressed in mordant, yet beautiful, lyrics in his native Haitian Creole, replete with word play and rhyme crafting. His songs—a mix of hip hop, rap, folk and traditional Haitian rhythms—express a profound love for his Haiti, along with an active engagement for the defense of human rights.

Thanks to a grant from Arts at MIT, B.I.C. is visiting MIT to help develop digital poetry in Kreyòl with Prof. Michel DeGraff (MIT Linguistics, Inisyativ MIT-Ayiti / MIT-Haiti Initiative) and Prof. Nick Montfort (MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing), and he will present a concert that will include some discussion, and will be free and open to the public. Details are available on the facebook page, and repeated below.

Date: Tuesday, September 19, 5:15 pm
Location: 32-155

B.I.C.’s music can be sampled via: https://g.co/kgs/wDXfU6

This is a follow up on last week’s post about our visiting scholars this semester. Happy circumstances led to a delay in bringing you information about Senem Şahin. Here is her description below. Good luck Senem!

Senem Şahin  (Universität Augsburg): graduated from Hacettepe University in Ankara (Turkey), Department of English Language Teaching in 2002. She holds a M.A. and PhD degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from the University of Munich (Germany), specializing on nonverbal communication, intercultural communication and teacher training. She has been teaching and researching as associate professor at the Chair of TEFL at Augsburg University (Germany) since 2010. Her teaching experience includes courses about individual differences, intercultural learning, research methods, and multilingualism in TEFL. Her current research projects focus on bilingual education, second and third language acquisition, and multilingualism.

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University & MIT) and Ezer Rasin (MIT)
Title: Learning opacity, optionality, and abstract URs using Minimum Description Length
Date and time: Monday, September 11, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

We discuss two posters that we will present at the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2017:

1. Acquiring opaque phonological interactions using Minimum Description Length

Opacity poses an obvious challenge for the child learning the phonology of their ambient language: a process to be acquired loses support because of environments in which it was supposed to apply but didn’t (e.g., counterfeeding) or in which it wasn’t supposed to apply but did (e.g., counterbleeding). Not surprisingly, no learners in the literature can handle opacity distributionally, from unanalyzed input data alone. Children, however, do manage to acquire opacity in a variety of languages (Dell 1981, McCarthy 2007). This talk shows how opaque interactions (including optionality, counterfeeding, and counterbleeding) can be acquired using the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL; Solomonoff 1964, Rissanen 1978). Specifically, we use an adaptation of Rasin & Katzir 2016’s MDL learner (originally used for OT phonology) to rule-based phonology and show how it applies to various cases of opacity. We then show simulations on artificial-language data illustrating the mechanization of the idea.

2. Minimum Description Length subsumes Free Ride effects in UR learning

Human learners have been argued to infer URs that are sometimes different from their corresponding surface representation (SR) even without being forced to do so by an alternation. McCarthy (2005) proposes the Free Ride Principle (FRP), which allows the learner to extend non- identical mappings in alternating forms to non-alternating forms. Recently, Rasin & Katzir (2016) proposed Minimum Description Length (MDL) as an evaluation metric for OT. The present work shows how MDL supports the induction of nonidentical URs both in cases that have motivated the FRP and in cases that have been argued to involve nonidentical URs in the absence of supporting alternations (and are thus outside the scope of the FRP). As a result, the FRP is redundant.

Speaker: Danfeng Wu (MIT)
Title: Ellipsis As A Diagnosis Of Movements In The Expletive There and It Sentences
Date and time: Tuesday, September 12, 1:00-2:00pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk, I present an argument from ellipsis that there and it are initially merged within vP or lower in the structure. I adopt Takahashi and Fox’s (2005) proposals concerning MaxElide and parallelism and Hartman’s (2011) extension of their proposal. Hartman attributes the contrast between TP-ellipsis and VP-ellipsis of (1) to an interaction between A-movement of the subject and wh-movement.

(1) John will buy something, but I don’t know what (*he will).

Building on his analysis, I show that there and it behave just the same:

(2) There will be something in the room, but I don’t know exactly what (*there will).

(3) We all know that it will be possible for scientists to achieve something in ten years, but we don’t know what (*it will be).

By showing that the expletives behave exactly like non-expletive subjects across the entire ellipsis paradigm, I argue that they are similarly base generated internal to the vP.

My analysis suggests that semantically vacuous elements can create variable-binding configurations at LF by movement, similar to the effects created by the movement of a null operator previously proposed in semantics. This also adds to Hartman’s observation that semantically vacuous movement of otherwise contentful elements creates the same effects, such as head movement. Movement brings about semantically relevant consequences in a mechanical way, independent of the semantics with which they may interact.

Speaker: Ted Gibson (MIT)
joint work with Richard Futrell, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Kyle Mahowald, Leon Bergen, Sivalogeswaran Ratnasigam, Mitchell Gibson, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Bevil R. Conway
Title: Color naming across languages reflects color use
Date and time: Thursday, September 14, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present the first analysis of color statistics in a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for salient objects, and show that objects tend to have warm rather than cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness, and provide an account of a principle (color use) that governs how color categories come about. We show that potential methodological issues with the WCS do not corrupt information-theoretic analyses, by collecting original data using two extreme versions of the color-naming task, in three groups: the Tsimane’, a remote Amazonian hunter-gatherer isolate; Bolivian-Spanish speakers; and English speakers. These data also enabled us to test another prediction of the color-usefulness hypothesis: that differences in color categorization between languages are caused by differences in overall usefulness of color to a culture. In support, we found that color naming among Tsimane’ had relatively low communicative efficiency, and the Tsimane’ were less likely to use color terms when describing familiar objects. Color-naming among Tsimane’ was boosted when naming artificially colored objects compared to natural objects, suggesting that industrialization promotes color usefulness.

Last weekend, several MIT faculty, students, postdocs and alumni gave talks at Sinn und Bedeutung 22 in Potsdam. Danny Fox was an invited speaker, and gave a talk on Exhaustivity and the Presupposition of Questions. Other talks by members of our community and alums included:

Current MIT-ers:

• Itai Bassi (3rd year) and Ezer Rasin (5th year): Intensional-functional relative clauses with syntactic reconstruction (talk)
• Vincent Rouillard (first year) with Bernhard Schwarz (McGill): Presuppositional implicatures: Quantity or Maximize Presupposition? (poster)
• Sarah Zobel (postdoctoral associate, PhD ‘12 University of Tübingen): Capturing the interpretational possibilities of weak free adjuncts (talk)

Alumni:

• Pranav Anand (UCSC, PhD ‘06) with Natasha Korotkova (University of Tübingen): Acquaintance content and obviation (talk)
• Pranav Anand (UCSC, PhD ‘06) and Maziar Toosarvandani (UCSC, former visiting faculty): No explanation for the historical present: Temporal sequencing and discourse (talk)
• Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland, PhD ‘06) with Saskia Brockmann (University of Tübingen), Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland) and Sara McConnell (University of Maryland): Children’s comprehension of pronouns and definites (talk)
• Despina Oikonomou (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, PhD ‘16): Imperatives: How minimal are they? (poster)
• Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo, PhD ‘12) and Patrick G. Grosz (University of Oslo, PhD ‘11) with Tejaswinee Kelkar and Alexander Refsum Jensenius (University of Oslo): Coreference and disjoint reference in the semantics of narrative dance (talk)
• Yasutada Sudo (UCL, PhD ‘12) and Alexandre Cremers (former visiting student) with Frances Kane (Ulster University), Lyn Tieu (Macquarie University), Lynda Kennedy (Ulster University), Raffaella Folli (Ulster University) and Jacopo Romoli (Ulster University): Testing theories of temporal inferences: Evidence from child language (poster)

Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Fall 2017! After our summer hiatus, Whamit! is back to regular weekly editions during the semester.

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

We’d like to extend a warm welcome to the students who are joining our graduate program this year!

Daniel Asherov

Tanya Bondarenko

Cater Chen

Sherry Chen

Boer Fu

Filipe Kobayashi

Vincent Rouillard

Dóra Takács

Christopher Yang

Stanislao Zompì

Visiting Faculty

•  Naomi Feldman (University of Maryland): “I’m visiting this year from the University of Maryland.  My research is in computational psycholinguistics.  This means I use computational models to try and understand how people learn and process language, drawing on methods and insights from a number of fields: linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, engineering.  Most of my research looks at how people’s processing of speech becomes specialized for their native language, but in recent collaborations with students, I’ve also looked at questions in morphology and syntax acquisition.”

• Michiko Bando (Shiga University): “My research interests are morphology and syntax of Japanese complex predicates, and recently I am also interested in syntax of Japanese and English relative clauses.”
• Yunjing Li (Tianjin Foreign Studies University): “I’m an associate professor from Tianjin Foreign Studies University, China. I got my Ph.D degree in linguistics from Nankai University.  My research interests lie primarily in doing phonological and/or phonetic studies on Chinese dialects. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss with me linguistic things or anything else.”
• Senem Şahin  (Universität Augsburg)
• Ryosuke Shibagaki (Nanzan University). His research interests include Lexical Semantics and Syntax
• Jaehyun Son (Duksung Women’s University): “I am interested in the accent types and their correspondences in Korean and Japanese. For now, I am focusing on Korean accentual dialects through field work. 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.”
• Sze Wing Tang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong). His research interests lie primarily in Chinese syntax, theoretical approaches to the study of Chinese dialects, and comparative grammar. Topics he is currently working on include the syntax of the sentence-final expressions and the micro-parametric variation of functional categories under a cartographic approach.
• Koichi Tateishi (Kobe College): “I am a phonologist with a strong interest in syntax. Currently, I am doing a joint work on how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language perceive prosody, how it is different from native speakers of English, and whether the learners’ levels of English matter. Also, I have been working on the relation between lexical classes and phonological phenomena related to syllables and other prosodic structures. My past work includes those on the syntax of multiple nominative constructions in Japanese and on pitch contours of Japanese speakers in relation to syntactic constructions.”

Our warmest congratulations to this summer’s shower of doctoral dissertators. From Aron Hirsch and Paul Marty’s semantics to Chris O’Brien, Isa Kerem Bayırlı and Ruth Brillman’s syntax and to Sam Zukoff and Ben Storme’s phonology. Between all the fields, a wide variety of topics and excellent defenses, it was truly a fruitful dissertation season. The department was celebrating with an as wide a variety of food and beverages: champagne, a cookie cake, sublime French wine and rakı.

• Aron Hirsch: An inflexible semantics for cross-categorial operators
• Benjamin Storme: Perceptual sources for closed-syllable vowel laxing and nonderived environment effects
• Chris O’Brien: Multiple dominance and interface operations
• Isa Kerem Bayırlı: The universality of concord
• Paul Marty: Implicatures and the DP domain
• Ruth, Brillman: Subject/non-subject extraction asymmetries: the view from tough-constructions
• Sam Zukoff: Indo-European Reduplication: Synchrony, Diachrony, and Theory

We have following summer news from students and faculty:

• The biennial Summer Institute of the Lingusitic Society of America took place at the University of Kentucky from July 5 - August 1. Several faculty members and alumni taught classes:
  • Adam Albright (faculty): Phonology
  • Michel DeGraff (faculty): Creole Studies at the Intersection of Theory, History, Computation and Education
  • Claire Halpert (PhD ‘12, now at Minnesota): Clausal Arguments in Bantu and Beyond
  • Giorgio Magri (Phd ‘09, now at CNRS): Computational Phonology
  • David Pesetsky (faculty): Introduction to Syntax
  • Norvin Richards (faculty): Prosody and Syntax: Introduction to Contiguity Theory
  • Coppe van Urk (PhD ‘15, now at QMUL): Movement in Minimalism
  • Igor Yanovich (PhD ‘13, now at Tübingen): Statistical Inference for the Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Past
  Elise Newman (2nd-year) and Danfeng Wu (2nd-year) were attendees, and Danfeng also TAed David’s syntax class. Elise shares this group picture of some of the attendees, including MIT-ers Danfeng, Coppe, Norvin, Elise, Claire and David, and David shares this picture of a bourbon distillery.
• The CreteLing Summer School took place at the University of Crete in Rethymnon from July 10 to July 21, and many MIT faculty and alumni taught courses. Shigeru shares the picture below showing the view of Rethymnon from the accomodations at CreteLing.
  • Eulàlia Bonet (PhD ‘91, now at UAB): Introduction to Morphology
  • Kai von Fintel (faculty): Modals and Conditionals
  • Gillian Gallagher (PhD ‘10, now at NYU): Inductive learning of phonology
  • Sabine Iatridou (faculty): Introduction to Syntax
  • Meltem Kelepir (PhD ‘01, now at Boğaziçi): Syntactic Approaches to Interrogatives in Sign Language
  • Joan Mascaró (PhD ‘76, now at UAB): Phonology and its interface with Syntax, Morphology, and Phonetics
  • Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty): Agreement Beyond Phi (week 1) and Language and animal communication in evolution (week 2)
  • Douglas Pulleyblank (PhD ‘83, now at UBC): Introduction to Phonology
  • Rajesh Bhatt (Umass Amherst), Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Roumi Pancheva (USC), and Tim Stowell (PhD ‘81, now at UCLA): Aspect
  Marie-Christine Meyer (PhD ‘13, now at ZAS Berlin), Despina Oikonomou (PhD ‘16, now at Humboldt), and Uli Sauerland (PhD ‘98, now at ZAS Berlin) gave talks at the associated workshop. Rafael Abramovitz (3rd-year), Ömer Demirok (4th-year), and Maša Močnik (3rd-year) were TAs at CreteLing, while Snejana Iovtcheva (6th-year), and Tatiana Bondareko (1st-year) and attended. In addition, former visiting faculty Elena Anagnostopoulou (Crete) and Hedde Zeijlstra (Göttingen) also taught courses.
• The European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLII 2017) took place at the University of Toulouse from July 17-28. Among the course instructors were:
  • Roger Schwarzschild (faculty) and Daniel Altshuler (Hampshire College): Underlying States
  • Sam Alxatib (PhD ‘13 now at CUNY) and Yael Sharvit (UCLA): Introduction to the semantics of tense and aspect
  • Philippe Schlenker (PhD ‘99, now at Institut Jean Nicod/CNRS and NYU): Super Semantics
  Philippe also gave an evening lecture on the scope of the field of semantics. Keny Chatain (2nd-year), Yadav Gowda (2nd-year), and Maša Močnik (3rd-year) attended, and Maša also presented a poster at the student session. Roger, who shared the picture of the ferris wheel to the right, reports “The school was well organized. The location, Toulouse, France, did not disappoint nor did the students and fellow lecturers. If the 2017 instantiation of ESSLLI was representative and you have an opportunity in the future to participate, grab it!”.
• Some MIT linguists who happened to be in Toronto in August presented at the Dog Days VI Syntax Workshop at the University of Toronto. Bridget Copley (PhD ‘02, now at CNRS/Paris 8), Neil Banerjee (2nd-year), and Tova Rapoport (PhD ‘87, now at Ben Gurion) gave talks, while Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD ‘11, now at Queen’s University) was a co-author on a talk and gave a keynote as well.
• For the third year in a row, MIT has participated in the Congresso Internacional de Estudos Linguísticos (VI CIEL) at the University of Brasília. From August 23-25, Shigeru Miyagawa, Kai von Fintel, and Maria Luisa Zubizaretta (PhD ‘82, now at USC) taught mini-courses.
• Maya Honda (Wheelock College) and Wayne O’Neil (faculty) have published an article in Revista LinguíStica. The article summarizes the past thirty years of their teaching linguistics, generally in non-traditional settings. The journal is open-access, and the article is available online here.
• In June, David travelled to Utrecht University to participate in a dissertation defense by Heidi Klockmann, who was a visitor to the department in Fall 2014. Heidi’s dissertation is available here.
• In August, the Workshop on Quirks of Subject Extraction was held at the National University of Singapore. The workshop was organized by Mitcho Erlewine (PhD ‘14, now at NUS). David was an invited speaker, and former visitors Nico Baier (UC Berkeley) and Amy-Rose Deal (UC Berkeley) also presented at the workshop.
• Congratulations to Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD ‘12) who has been promoted to the rank of full professor at the University of Oslo!
• Colin Phillips (PhD ‘96, now at Maryland) was elected a 2018 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Colin joins 37 other MIT linguistics alumni and faculty members who have been similarly honored. Congratulations to Colin and the other 2018 Fellows!

LPRG is the Linguistics and Philosophy Reading Group, held Mondays from 1:00 to 2:00pm in 32-D769. Linguists and philosophers join forces to understand language and linguistics. We read and discuss old and new papers in the field (especially in formal semantics and philosophy of language). For more information visit the website or contact the organisers Christopher Baron or Maša Močnik.

Phonology Circle will be meeting on Mondays, from 5:00–6:30pm, in 32-D831 (the 8th floor conference room). For those of you who are new to the department, Phonology Circle is the weekly phonology meeting group. It is an informal group, so we welcome presentations on all kinds of topics: work in progress, papers from the literature, recently defended generals papers or theses, practice talks, etc. Presenters need not be affiliated with MIT, though we give priority to current students, faculty, and visitors. Light refreshments will be provided. At this point, every Monday of the semester is open other than September 18 and November 13th. Please contact Erin Olson and/or Rafael Ambramovitz if you would like to reserve one. We will ask you for a title and an abstract closer to the date of presentation.

Syntax Square exists to facilitate the presentation or discussion of anything relating to syntax. Formal presentations are welcome, but not necessary. If there’s a bit of syntax you want to have a discussion about, sign up.

Syntax square will be meeting this semester on Tuesdays from 1-2pm in room 32-D461. If you would like to lead a discussion or give an informal presentation of your work, please contact Danfeng or Suzana.

LFRG is an informal, weekly semantics and semantics/syntax interface group. Rough ideas, work in progress, practice talks and presentation of papers from the literature are most welcome.

We will be meeting on Wednesdays 1-2pm, room 32-D461.

Please let Naomi or Mitya know if you would like to present.

Ling-Lunch is a series of weekly talks, held on Thursdays from 12:30 to 1:50pm. It is open to all linguistics topics and everybody is welcome to present their work, though preference is given to members of the MIT Linguistics Department. Contact this semester’s organizers, Keny Chatain or Ömer Demirok to reserve a slot.

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

24.946. Topics in Syntax

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

Course Description:

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

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

Reading for the first class can be found on stellar.

24.979. Topics in Semantics: The Linguistics of Desire

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

Course Description:

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

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

An initial list of readings can be found here.

Course requirements for registered students:

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

24.964. Topics in Phonology: Reduplication

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

Course Description:

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

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

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

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

24.946. Linguistic Theory and Japanese Language

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

Course Description:

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

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

24.965. Morphology

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

Course Description:

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

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

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

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

Course requirements:

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

(Please, check back for updates!)

Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: Intermediate Stranding, Constraints on Movement, and Cyclic Linearization
Date and time: Thursday, September 7, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

I argue that certain rarely considered facts about stranding point us towards a particular understanding of some general issues in syntactic theory, namely: The theory of phasal domains/spellout, and the nature of movement operations. In particular, using data from English, West Ulster English, Afrikaans, Polish, and Russian, I examine scenarios where material is pied-piped with one step of movement and stranded with a subsequent step, stranding that material at an intermediate position in the clause. I show that this phenomenon of intermediate stranding is subject to the following descriptive generalization:

(1). Intermediate stranding is only possible when the stranded material is, or can be, linearly to the right of the material that continues to move leftward.

I argue that the Cyclic Linearization theory of phase spellout (Fox & Pesetsky 2005, Ko 2014) and a theory of movement as driven by Probe-Goal Agree (Chomsky 1995, Ko 2014, van Urk 2015), and thus constrained by c-command, precisely predicts exactly this generalization, while the commonly held theory of phases, and a view of movement as free and untriggered, cannot. These results also point us to a new perspective on what constrains movement out of moved elements.

Speaker: Alan Yu (UChicago)
Title: Are individual differences in cue weight strategies contrast-specific?
Time: Friday, September 8th, 3:30-5:00 pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

Phonological categories are generally defined by multiple acoustic dimensions. Recent studies have found that listeners of the same gender and dialect group give differential weighting to dimensions in phonetic categorization. What factors govern the differences between individuals remain a largely unanswered question. Variability may stem from differences in individual perceptual experience or the influence of some contrast-independent cognitive mechanism that modulates speech processing strategies. This study examines the relationship between perceptual behaviors across three categorization tasks concerning three sets of phonological contrasts in English (i.e. the effects of VOT and f0 on voicing identification, the effects of spectral and duration information on i/ɪ identification, and the effects of vowel on sibilant identification) and show that, while individuals vary in their cue weightings for each contrast, the weight settings across contrasts are not random. Implications of these findings for models of speech perception and language variation and change will be discussed.

Speaker: Marie-Christine Meyer (ZAS Berlin)
Title: Sound Patterns of Exhaustification
Date and time: Wedensday August 30, 1:00-2:00pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk I will suggest a compositional semantics for certain intonational contours, arguing that the falling (LL%) and rising (LH%) boundary tones are what I call weak and strong exhaustification morphemes. These morphemes occur together with a L+H* pitch accent in constructions that have been studied under the names of Meta-linguistic Negation (e.g. Horn 1989), Contrastive Negation (e.g. McCawley 1991), and Contrastive Focus (e.g. Bolinger 1965, Rooth 1985), whereas intonational tunes like L+H*LH% have been studied in relation to their use as indicating speaker uncertainty and/or contrastive topics (e.g. Büring 1997, 2003). I will show how the semantic/pragmatic contribution of these intonational tunes across constructions is mediated by (i) the semantics of L+H* and LL% or LH% (ii) economy principles like Efficiency (Meyer 2013, 2015), (iii) quantifier domain restriction of LL% and LH%, which allows for the possibility of anaphora between the levels of presupposed and exhaustified (i.e. asserted) content (e.g. Karttunen & Peters 1979, von Fintel 1994) as well as contextual symmetry breaking of ALT (cf. Fox & Katzir 2011), and (iv) independent constraints on structural alternatives (Katzir 2007).

Speaker: Marie-Christine Meyer (ZAS Berlin)
Title: Priming Three Categories of Implicature (joint work with Roman Feiman, UCSD)
Date and time: Thursday August 31, 11:00 - 12:00
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Priming is a powerful and widely used method; its applications range from establishing the existence of implicit stereotyping (e.g., Banaji & Hardin 1996) to arguing for the reality of syntactic representations (e.g., Raffray & Pickering 2010). To the young field of experimental pragmatics, however, the priming paradigm has only been introduced very recently (Bott & Chemla 2016). In this talk, we report on a series of experiments in which we try to prime the computation of three categories of inferences: scalar implicature, exactly-readings of numerals, and (disjunctive) Free Choice inferences. As we will see, it is theoretically attractive to derive these inferences through the same mechanism. The existence of a priming effect between these three categories of inferences would provide strong evidence in favor of the cognitive reality of this theoretical assumption. Before we can produce and believe in such evidence, however, a few more questions need to be answered. Can the results of Chemla & Bott be replicated? What are the kinds of stimuli that work best for the paradigm and the linguistic material? Are we really priming the mechanism in question, or a confound? And finally: What are the mechanisms involved in these inferences for which we find evidence in the form of cross- and within-category priming effects? We will present our results and discuss their relevance to these questions, as well as to the theory of (recursive) scalar implicature.

Please join us on September 23, 2017 for the MIT Workshop on Simplicity in Grammar Learning.

The workshop will bring together members of MIT’s Linguistics and Brain & Cognitive Sciences departments to share current work that revisits the relevance of simplicity criteria in the study of language. Our goal is to build a dialogue between the two departments around questions of common interest about simplicity.

The workshop will take place in room 32-155. Please visit simplicity2017.mit.edu for more details and be sure to register if you plan to join as space will be limited.

Best, Ezer Rasin, on behalf of the organizers

Sam Zukoff has just had a paper titled The Reduplicative System of Ancient Greek and a New Analysis of Attic Reduplication published in Linguistic Inquiry!

The published version can be accessed through LI here. A pre-publication version is available on Sam’s site here.

Athulya Aravind’s paper Licensing Long-Distance wh-in-situ in Malayalam has just been officially published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

The published version is available here. A pre-publication version can be found on linbgbuzz here.

Newly minted PhD Juliet Stanton and very-soon-to-be-minted Sam Zukoff just received news that their joint paper has just been accepted for publication in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, entitled “Prosodic identity in copy epenthesis: evidence for a correspondence-based approach”. Congratulations to both!! You can read a pre-publication version here: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003522

Michel DeGraff (faculty) gave a plenary talk at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL) annual conference in Tampere, Finland, this week. His talk was titled “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers”: in search of post-colonial foundations for Creole studies. The abstract is available here.

Photo credit: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (mitcho)

We are very excited for Michelle Yuan, a graduate student in her fourth year, who has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research grant by the National Science Foundation!! — for a project entitled “Pronominals and Verb Agreement in Inuktitut”

Here’s the official abstract:

“A central question in theoretical linguistics concerns the range of linguistic variation (to what extent languages differ) and language universals (to what extent languages are fundamentally the same at an abstract level, despite surface variation). Answering this question requires both detailed investigation of particular languages and broader cross-linguistic comparison. This project will investigate sentence structure and word structure in an indigenous language of North America. Many of the indigenous languages of the Americas are under-documented; detailed research into the linguistic properties of individual dialect groups is even more lacking for the dialects of the language targeted in this study. Specifically, the project will provide a comprehensive description and analysis of the structural properties of pronouns and pronoun-like verbal agreement forms and will compare the findings with what is already known about related and genetically unrelated languages. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions at the Alaska Native Language Archive at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, as well as the linguistic training of indigenous community members working on translation and language pedagogy. This, in turn, will aid the facilitation of dialect-specific language learning materials and thus contribute towards work in language sustainability.

“The CoPI, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, will document and analyze Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, one of a group of Inuit languages spoken in the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, and which are related to Eskimo-Aleut languages spoken in Alaska. The work produced in this project will therefore build a solid empirical foundation for future linguistic research on Inuktitut and Inuit, as well as for the field of theoretical linguistics more broadly. The main hypothesis of this project is that the verbal agreement markers that encode transitive objects in Inuktitut are not canonical agreement markers, but rather ‘doubled clitics,’ pronoun-like elements that co-occur with objects. Historically, linguistic research on these elements has focused on European languages; however, evidence for such an approach for Inuktitut comes from striking distributional and structural parallels with these better-studied languages. This project will investigate how these clitics interact with the case system of Inuktitut as a whole, and show how their absence in other Inuit languages yields a slightly different case system, despite surface appearances. Variation in the distribution of case morphology across the Inuit languages is therefore tightly linked to the underlying structure of the verbal agreement forms. This project will also explore how this novel approach may be extended to account for other pronoun-related phenomena in Inuktitut, as well as case systems cross-linguistically.”

We are very pleased to announce that Loes Koring (postdoctoral associate) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Utrecht University! Congratulations Loes!

Congratulations are in order for Kenyon Branan (fourth-year grad student), whose paper “Attraction at a distance: Ā-movement and Case” has been accepted for publication by Linguistic Inquiry!

You can find a pre-publication draft of the paper (and others too) here: http://kbranan.scripts.mit.edu/papers-and-presentations. Here’s the abstract:

“Some languages allow extraction of possessors from only a subset of nominals. I show that a juxtaposition of two proposals about Case and Agree [Rackowski & Richards (2005), Bobaljik (2008)] correctly predicts these cross-linguistic restrictions on possessor extraction.”

Heidi Harley (PhD ‘95) and Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty) have just had an article on the Syntax of Ditransitives published by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. The article is available online at the link. Congratulations Heidi and Shigeru!

Whamit! will be on hiatus during the summer. The editors would like to thank all of you for reading, and all our contributors for sharing their news with us!

Weekly posts will resume September 5th, 2017, but we will certainly update you on an as-it-happens basis with any interesting news that comes our way before then. We hope everyone has an enjoyable summer. See you again in the fall!

The day has come and Prof. Jay Keyser will give a special Ling-Lunch talk today!

Speaker: Jay Keyser
Title: Music, Poetry, Painting and Easter Eggs
Date/Time: Monday, May 22/12:30-1:50pm [notice the exceptional time!]
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk takes the view that modernism in the so-called sister arts of music, poetry and painting resulted from the abandonment of sets of rules that characterized each genre and that were shared by the artist and his/her audience. Rules governing meter and tonal music are reasonably well understood. I propose a way to think about “rules” for the third genre, painting. These rules define a natural aesthetic, ’natural’ in that the rules are shared by the artist and his or her audience in the way that the rules of one’s natural language are shared by speaker and listener.

I suggest that the esoteric direction that the sister arts took in the period cultural historians call “Modernism” is a direct result of abandoning the natural, i.e. shared aesthetic for private formats whose origins can be found in the 14th century.

Finally, I will speculate on the similarity between what happened to the arts at the turn of the 20th century and what happened in science after the publication of Principia Mathematica two centuries earlier.

Speaker: Naomi Francis (MIT)
Title: Turkish ki: A presupposition-challenging particle
Date and time: Wednesday May 24, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk explores the behaviour of the Turkish discourse particle ki. I argue that it serves to challenge presuppositions, just as Iatridou & Tatevosov (2016) propose for a use of even in questions. Pursuing a unified analysis of even and ki motivates modifications of Iatridou & Tatevosov’s (2016) original account, and raises a new puzzle about possible links between even, polarity sensitivity, and presupposition-challenging discourse moves.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign organized the 26th annual meeting of FASL (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics), which took place this past weekend. MIT was represented by the following talks and posters:

Mitya Privoznov (2nd year grad student): Russian stress in inflectional paradigms[poster]

Masha Esipova (current visitor/NYU): Two types of verb fronting in Russian [poster]

Natalia Ivlieva (PhD ‘13) and Alexander Podobryaev (PhD ‘14): How to negate a disjunction in Russian

Ora Matushansky (PhD ‘02) (UiL OTS/Utrecht University/CNRS/Université Paris-8), Nora Boneh (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Lea Nash (University Paris 8) & Natalia Slioussar (School of Linguistics, Higher School of Economics, Moscow): To PPs in their proper place.

A glimpse of Masha’s poster and of Mitya. Thanks Masha for the picture!

2nd-year grad student Rafael Abramovitz is headed to Manchester for the 25th Manchester Phonology Meeting (25mfm). He will give the talk An Argument against the Richness of the Base from Koryak Labials. Alum Giorgio Magri (PhD ‘09) will present the poster MaxEnt does not help with phonotactic restrictiveness. Adam Albright (faculty) will be one of the discussants

Kenyon Branan (4th-year grad student) is off to the International Christian University in Tokyo (Japan) to present The i-boundedness of A-scrambling at WAFL 13. The 13th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics will take place later this week, on May 25—28. Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty) is among the organizers.