Whamit!

Speaker: Eric Bakovic (UCSD)
Title: Ensuring the proper determination of identity: a model of possible constraints
Date: Friday, September 18th
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

Some phonological patterns can be described as sufficient identity avoidance, where ‘sufficiently identical’ means ‘necessarily identical with respect to all but some specific feature(s)’. The first part of the talk addresses this question: why are specific features ignored for the purposes of determining sufficient identity? In previous work (Bakovic 2005, Bakovic & Kilpatrick 2006, Pajak & Bakovic 2010), we have found that patterns of sufficient identity avoidance where a specific feature F is ignored also involve F-assimilation in the same contexts. Direct reference to sufficient identity is thus unnecessary: sufficient identity is indirectly avoided because F-assimilation would otherwise be expected, resulting in total identity. Avoiding sufficient identity without assimilation is the better option, as predicted by the minimal violation property of Optimality Theory. This analysis predicts rather than stipulates the features that will be ignored for the purposes of determining sufficient identity. (Corollary consequences of the analysis will also be discussed in the talk.)

The explanatory value of the analysis, however, is predicated on the absolute non-existence of constraints directly penalizing all-but-F identity, which could be active independently of F-assimilation. The second part of the talk addresses this question: how can such constraints be ruled out formally? I propose a model of constraints and of how they evaluate candidate sets that results in just the types of constraints necessary for the analysis above. More broadly, the proposed model is intended as a contribution to our formal understanding of what a ‘possible constraint’ is.

Today, Tuesday September 8, is Registration Day. Whamit!, the MIT Linguistics Department Newsletter, appears every Monday during the semester (Tuesdays if Monday is a public holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Sophie Moracchini, Lilla Magyar, and Benjamin Storme.

To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6 pm. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what members of the department did during the summer break.

Hope to see you all at the departmental lunch, 12pm at the 8th floor lounge!

24.956: Topics in Syntax: Agreement and Movement

Instructors: Shigeru Miyagawa (miyagawa@mit.edu) and Norvin Richards (norvin@mit.edu)
Time: Mondays 10-1
Room: 32-D461

In this seminar we will tackle some of the big syntactic questions: what Agree relations should we posit, and what effects do they have on structure and interpretation?

The seminar will begin with discussion of various ways in which C, and particularly root C, has a special status as a starting point for the features that participate in Agree relations in the rest of the clause; topics here will include allocutive agreement, pro-drop, the syntax of ‘why’, and ga-no conversion. The discussion will take as a starting point Shigeru’s Strong Uniformity thesis.

In the second half of the seminar we will turn to Norvin’s Contiguity Theory, which amounts to a family of proposals about how Agree and selection relations are mapped onto prosodic structure, and indirectly onto syntactic structure, driving movement operations and (we will see) determining the size of structures that can or must be moved. Topics for this half of the semester include pied-piping, the derivational history of A-bar operators, the effects of A-bar movement on nuclear stress, and the structure of DPs.

24.915/24.963 Linguistic Phonetics

Instructor: Edward Flemming
Lecture: TR11-12.30
Room: 56-169
Stellar site: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa15/24.915/

We will be considering three fundamental questions:

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

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

24.964 Topics in phonology: Harmonic Serialism

Instructor: Edward Flemming (flemming@mit.edu)
Time and place: Currently schedule for W 10-1 in 32D-461 but may be rescheduled

A generative grammar is a mapping between two levels of representation. Is this mapping direct or indirect? A common answer in both phonology and syntax is that the mapping is indirect: there are intermediate steps in a derivation. In Optimality Theory (OT), however, the standard answer to date has been that the mapping is direct…The central insight of OT — candidate comparison by a hierarchy of ranked, violable constraints — is not necessarily tied to the direct-mapping architecture, however. A version of OT with indirect mapping is known as Harmonic Serialism (HS). It is in most respects similar to parallel OT, except that it posits serial derivations with intermediate steps. This single change has important empirical consequences…’ (McCarthy 2010).

We will investigate the properties of Harmonic Serialist phonological grammars, and examine the evidence for serial vs. parallel evaluation in OT. Case studies will include opaque interactions between processes (e.g. stress assignment and syncope/epenthesis), ‘myopia’ in harmony, and positional and P-map faithfulness constraints. These are all interesting problem areas in phonological theory, and we will compare analyses of them based on serial and parallel versions of OT.

24.979 Topics in Semantics

Instructors: Danny Fox, Martin Hackl
Time: Thursdays, 2-5
Room: 24-461
Stellar site: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa15/24.979/index.html

This class will be centered on topics in the syntax and semantics of DPs. Traditional approaches to this area of research begin with the postulation of lexical items. determiners, with simple morpho-phonological properties – they are spelled out as the, some, every, etc — and familiar meanings [[the]], [[some]], [[every]]). We will discuss various phenomena that are puzzling from this perspective and might suggest a more indirect relationship between sound and meaning.

Our first topic will be Hydras (e.g . every man and every woman who were introduced to each other…) where we will consider the possibility that words such as every do not directly carry the content of quantification but are rather indicative of its presence elsewhere in the structure (perhaps similar to inflection on verbs being indicative of the presence of distinct temporal operators). Another topic will concern various puzzles in the semantics of the which, likewise, might suggest a more indirect relationship between overt form and content. Among the puzzles we will look at is the semantics of superlatives, where DPs with the have been argued to be underlyingly indefinite: the semantics of the same, the only, and a well-known problem about the semantics of stacked definite descriptions (Haddock’s puzzle).

Reading for first class are on Stellar (Champollion 2015, Fox and Johnson 2015)

24.S95. Computation and Linguistic Theory

Instructor: Professor Robert C. Berwick
Time: Monday and Wednesday 1-2:30pm
Room: 2-105

Linguistics is sometimes construed as an important part of the “computational theory of mind.” But what about its computational aspect? How can we bring linguistics and computation together? Modern students of linguists often confront a dizzying array of questions that intersect with computational analysis. Does sideways Merge or multidominance structure impact computational complexity? Should syntactic features be encoded via arbitrary hierarchal structure, using ‘unification’ like “Simpler Syntax”? Is Simpler Syntax then really “simpler”? Are there any real computational differences between different theories like HPSG, TAGs, CCGs, and Minimalism or are they all just “notational variants”? Is there some way to formally characterize what makes a natural language natural? Is phonology really “different” from syntax? What about OT accounts and constraint-based systems vs. ordered/unordered rules? Do we need to pay attention to the classic learnability results from Gold? Does Bayesian analysis solve the poverty of the stimulus? This course will teach you the computational tools needed to answer these and many other questions from a computational point of view. It will guide you through both the classical and the more modern methods that examine linguistic theories from a computational perspective. No prior knowledge of computational theory will be assumed, but some familiarity with formalisms for syntax, phonology, or semantics, including some exposure to logic, would be very useful. If you don’t have this background, permission of the instructor is OK - please just ask!

The MIT Linguistics Colloquium schedule for the Fall and early Spring. All talks are on Fridays, 3:30-5:00 p.m. For further information, please contact the organizers for this year, Athulya Aravind and Michelle Yuan.

Fall 2015:

• Sep.18 — Eric Bakovic
• Oct.23 — Philippe Schlenker
• Nov. 4-6 — Paul Portner
• Nov. 20 — Susi Wurmbrand
• Dec. 9-11 — Claire Halpert

Spring 2016 (partial):

• Feb. 5 — Junko Ito
• Feb. 19 — Seth Cable

We have a few items of summer news from faculty and students:

• Faculty Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou and alumni Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002) and Jonathan Bobaljik (PhD 1995) were elected 2016 Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America. This is our field’s highest honor, awarded each year to a small number of linguists for “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. This is truly fantastic news. Kai and Sabine join their faculty colleagues Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, Irene Heim, David Pesetsky, and Donca Steriade, who have been honored as Fellows in previous years, as well as more than twenty alumni of the department. About a third of all LSA Fellows are MIT alumni or faculty. A full list of Fellows from MIT can be found here, and the full list of LSA Fellows can be found here.
• Shigeru Miyagawa, Chris O’Brien, David Pesetsky, Juliet Stanton, and Donca Steriade taught three-day courses at the University of Brasilia in August that were attended by students and faculty from Brazil and Argentina. Donca, David, and Shigeru also gave presentations at the Congresso Internacional de Estudos Linguísticos III held at the U of Brasilia. One of the main organizers of the Brasilia events, Professor Eloisa Pilati, will be a visitor at MIT during this fall semester. Shortly after leaving Brasília, Shigeru gave a course at the University of São Paulo, and Juliet and Chris gave presentations at the University of Buenos Aires.
• David Pesetsky and Michel DeGraff taught at the 2016 Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, hosted by the University of Chicago. David taught two classes: a two-week seminar on Slavic Syntax and Semantics, co-taught with Sergei Tatevosov (a visiting faculty member in 2011-2012), and the introductory syntax class. Michel taught “Topics in Creole Studies: from Historical Linguistics to Computational Phylogenetics”. One of the two organizers of the LSA Institute this year was our own alum Karlos Arregi.
• Juliet Stanton taught a short class on phonetics and phonology for high school students though HSSP, a program that allows students in grades 7-12 from all over New England to take classes at MIT. 24 students were registered for the class, including several who had taken the Introduction to Linguistics course taught in previous HSSP sessions.
• Samuel Jay Keyser reports something that did not happen this summer, but is related to the question “What did you do this summer?”:

  Alistair Campbell was the author of Old English Grammar, one of the best philological (phonological) grammars of old English ever written. He was one of my tutors at Oxford when I was there in 1956-58. When he was a student, he was asked precisely the same question that you ask in your email, only the interrogator was the warden of his college. (I think it was Pembroke but I’m not sure.) It was an annual ritual called “the shaking of hands.”

  The conversation as reported on the Oxfordian grapevine, my vintage, went like this:

  Warden: Now tell me, Mr. Campbell. How did you spend your summer?

  Campbell: Sir, I spent the summer on the beach at Brighton pondering the Anglo-Saxon corpus.

Congratulations to this summer’s doctoral dissertators!

• Isaac Gould: Syntactic Learning from Ambiguous Evidence: Errors and End-States
• Gretchen Kern: Rhyming Grammars and Celtic Phonology
• Ted Levin: Licensing without Case
• Wataru Uegaki: Interpreting questions under attitudes
• Coppe van Urk: A uniform syntax for phrasal movement: a Dinka Bor case study

In the coming year, Isaac will be a visiting assistant professor at Kansas University, Gretchen will work as a linguist for a tech company in NYC, Ted will be a post-doc at Maryland, Wataru is a post-doc at the ENS in Paris, and Coppe will be a Lecturer (= an Assistant Professor) at Queen Mary University of London.

The members of ling-15, the incoming graduate class, have provided brief biographical notes for us. Welcome to them!

Rafael Abramovitz: “I’m from Minneapolis, MN, and in June I finished my B.A. in Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in phonology, syntax, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. More specifically, I’m interested in dominant-recessive harmony systems, accidental (or “accidental”) homophony, case and agreement phenomena (particularly in ergative languages), and syntactic ergativity. In addition, I’m excited to learn more about computational phonology and formal semantics, two areas of linguistics which I have not yet had much exposure to.”

Itai Bassi writes: “I was born and raised in a small Kibbutz in Israel. I got my B.A. in linguistics and philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I also worked on my M.A. in linguistics. My main areas of interest are semantics, pragmatics and the syntax-semantics interface. I especially find NPIs, negative concord, modality and conditionals very intriguing. I feel honored to have the opportunity to develop my thinking on these issues at MIT. In my free time I enjoy watching sports and playing chess.”

Justin Colley

Colin Davis writes: “I was born in Colorado, but ended up getting a linguistics BA at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where I did a year of fieldwork research on the Turkic language North Azeri. From this I wrote a thesis attempting to account for several morphosyntactic puzzles in this language, which for brevity’s sake I won’t describe. I have a background in Japanese and am fond of the Altaic typology generally, but I’m interested in any language with fun morphosyntax. I occasionally like a little morphophonology as well, in moderation. At MIT I hope to do more fieldwork, get a grasp of semantics, and generally just make the most of everything. I’m hoping the Massachusetts winter is at least a bit more bearable than winter where I came from.”

Suzana Fong: “I’m from Brazil. I did my undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo, where I received a B.A. in linguistics. I also received an M.A. there. I worked on gerund clauses in Brazilian Portuguese both as an undergrad and as an M.A. student. Right now, my major research interest is syntax, but, at MIT, I’m mostly looking forward to broadening my horizons and to working on areas I have had little or no contact with.”

Verena Hehl: “As a Ravensburger (Ra-vens-bur-ger /ʁaːvənsbʊʁgɐ/ n 1 a native of the medieval town Ravensburg, Germany; 2 a German company that produces board games) I enjoy challenging puzzles of all sorts.
Before discovering semantics I was mainly puzzling over structural approaches to theory formation in history, English literature and mathematics. Besides a teaching degree in these subjects, I hold an M.A. in English linguistics from the University of Tübingen. In Tübingen I was working as a lecturer and as a research assistant in a crosslinguistic research group that is studying the semantics of comparison constructions, focus and questions. While at MIT I hope to be puzzled by and puzzle out some of the many issues in formal semantics and at the syntax-semantics interface. When I am not doing semantics, I enjoy playing the viola, I love reading and I am interested in traveling, attending theater productions, and visiting history museums.”

Maša Močnik: “I come from a small village in Slovenia. I did my undergrad in Ljubljana, studying English and French, and spent a year in Paris (Erasmus exchange). The last three years I was in Amsterdam — I did a master’s in logic and then taught a bit at the university. My primary interest is formal semantics, especially questions related to tense, aspect, and modality. When I have time, I like to read a good novel or poem, watch an older film (Wittertainment fan!), have a healthy meal, and run/cycle in nature.”

Mitya Privoznov writes: “I’m from Russia. I was born and grew up in Moscow. I received my specialist degree in linguistics (it was a Russian equivalent to BA and sometimes to MA) at Moscow State University. I’ve done some field work on Turkish (Tatar, Balkar), Mongolic (Buryat) and Uralic (Khanty and Moksha) languages, though my specialist thesis was about Russian and German passive. Mostly I’m interested in argument structure, syntax-morphology interface and semantics, especially intensional semantics. In my free time I read, play the piano, cook and watch films and a bunch of series.”

Visiting students

• Keny Chatain (École Normale Supérieure (ENS)) works in Syntax and Semantics. He says: “I’m interested in formal descriptions of tense, mood and aspect of verbal systems across languages.”
• Chingting Chuang (National Tsing Hua University)’s research interests include Phonetically-based phonology, language variation, language change, prosody. She says: “My research has primarily focused on prosodic manifestations of phonetic variation and language change. I have chosen Penang Hokkien, an understudied dialect of Southern Min Chinese spoken in Northwestern Peninsular Malaysia, as the language under investigation.”
• Maria-Margarita Makri (University of York) says: “My research mainly focuses on the syntax and semantics of comparative constructions.” Interests and Research Description: Semantics, Syntax, Language Acquisition.
• Tiaoyuan Mao (Beijing Foreign Studies University) says: “The object of my research is to propose a unified explanation for Chinese English learners’ morpho-syntactic development of C on the basis of the feature assembly theory (Chomsky 2001, 2008) and Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2008, 2009). If possible, a minor revision of the feature assembly theory would be carried out in terms of improvement of the acquisition theory for the second language acquisition.”

Visiting scholars

• James Gair(Cornell University)
• Mingqiong (Joan) Luo (Shanghai International Studies University)
• Barbara Lust (Cornell University)
• Pritty Patel-Grosz (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
• Bruna Pereira (Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri)
• Eloisa Pilati (University of Brasilia)
• Katsuo Tamaoka (Nagoya University)
• Nicholas Baier (UC Berkeley)

This semester, Phonology Circle will be meeting on Mondays, from 5-6:30pm in 32-D831 (the 8th floor conference room). Presentations about work in progress, papers from the literature, and old squibs are every bit as welcome as practice talks. Please contact Juliet Stanton (juliets@mit.edu) and/or Sam Zukoff (szukoff@mit.edu) if you would like to reserve a slot.

Warmest congratulations to our graduating Linguistics majors Demetri Hayes, Lina Kyungeun Kim, Olivia Murton and Irina Onoprienko! We’ll miss you!!

Olivia, Lina and Demetri

Congratulations to Isaac Gould on his unambiguously successful defense of his dissertation entitled Syntactic Learning from Ambiguous Evidence: Errors and End-States — well done!!

photo credits: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

More exciting news! Bronwyn Bjorkman has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in morphosyntax at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Bronwyn completed her PhD in 2011, and has been a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow and a Banting Fellow (Canada’s “Nobel Prize of post-docs”) at the University of Toronto. Congratulations, Bronwyn!!

Congratulations to Jessica Coon (PhD 2010) on her promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure at McGill University. Super-great wonderful news!!

We are absolutely delighted to announce that Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in Linguistics at the National University of Singapore. Mitcho completed his PhD here in 2014 and has spent the past year as a post-doc at McGill. Congratulations mitcho!!!

Three 2014 PhDs Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, Yusuke Imanishi and Hadas Kotek joined newly minted 2015 PhD Wataru Uegaki for the traditional conferring of graduate hoods as part of MIT’s Commencement cermonies.

Speaker:  Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota)
Title:        Raising Hell
Date:       Wednesday, June 17
Time:      3:30pm
Place:      32-D461

In this talk, I investigate cross-linguistic variation in raising constructions, proposing a unified account for the derivation of hyper-raising and standard raising. I argue that the presence or absence of these constructions in a given language can be determined by independent properties of CP and TP in the language, including: 1) whether CPs or infinitival phrases are phi-goals in the language and 2) the presence of an EPP effect on T and (and how it can be satisfied). I show that variation in these factors can capture the different raising profiles found in Zulu, Makhuwa, and English, and Uyghur.

Note: a previous version of this announcement mistakenly gave the month of this talk as July. It is happening in June!

Speaker: Joan Mascaró (UAB)
Title: Phase impenetrability in phonology
Date: Monday, May 11th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

There are several proposal that entertain the idea that the phase impenetrability condition, PIC (Chomsky, 2000, 2001) also applies to the phonological computation (Phase Impenetrability in Phonology, PIP). I will give an overview of these poposals and discuss some of them (e.g. D’Alessandro and Scheer to appear, Samuels 2009, 2011). I will also present a set of data from phonologically conditioned allomorph selection that show that a meaningful version of the PIP is difficult to maintain.

Speaker: Alexandre Cremers (ENS, LSCP)
Time: Wednesday 5/13, 12-1:30
Place: ***TBA***
Title: Plurality effects with embedded questions and exhaustive readings.

Questions are known to behave like plural nouns. Most famously, Berman (1991) showed that embedded questions can be modified by adverbs of quantity such as ‘mostly’ or ‘in part’ (quantificational variability effect). They also give rise to cumulative readings (Lahiri, 2002), and homogeneity effects (observed but never implemented). Recently, it has also been shown that questions embedded under verbs like ‘know’ are ambiguous between weak, strong and intermediate readings. This ambiguity is usually seen as an orthogonal issue, and most recent literature on the various levels of exhaustivity completely ignores plurality effects. Here I show how an updated version of Lahiri’s (2002) proposal can be combined with ideas from Klinedinst & Rothschild (2011) to yield a theory of strong and intermediate readings compatible with recent theories of plurality effects of definite plurals (e.g., homogeneity, cumulative readings). Along the way, we may discuss a few puzzles such as mention-some questions, emotive-factive verbs (‘surprise’) and the reason why ‘believe’ does not (usually) embed questions.

Fourth-year students Snejana Iovtcheva and Despina Oikonomou presented this weekend a paper entitled Island Obviation in Fragment Answers: Evidence from Bulgarian li-questions at FASL (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics) 24 at NYU. Congratulations!

Speaker: Juliet Stanton (MIT)
Title: Constraints on contrast motivate nasal cluster effects
Time: Thurs 5/14, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Many languages disallow sequences of nasal clusters (*[NC1 V NC2]). In languages where these sequences are banned, there are a number of attested repairs. For example, in some systems, the first NC is realized as a plain nasal, N (1).

(1) NC1 nasalization in Ngaju Dayak (Blust 2012)

a. /maN-bando/ > [ma-mando] ‘turn against’ (cf. [mam-bagi] ‘divide’)

b. /maN-gundu/ > [ma-ŋundul] ‘wrap up’ (cf. [maŋ-gila] ‘drive crazy’)

Previous analyses of nasal cluster effects generally fall into one of two camps. Many authors (e.g. Meinhof 1932, Blust 2012) claim that effects like (1) are dissimilation, driven by an OCP constraint (*NC…NC). Others (Herbert 1977, 1986; Jones 2000) claim that effects like (1) are neutralization, driven by a constraint on contrast: in the sequence [NC1 V NC2], anticipatory nasalization from NC2 renders NC1 insufficiently distinct from N.

In this talk I argue from the larger typology of nasal cluster effects that the contrast-based analysis is the right one. I show that the contrast-based account (i) accurately predicts the conditions under which languages exhibit certain types of repairs, (ii) accurately predicts implicational generalizations regarding which kinds of [NC1 V NC2] sequences are repaired, and (iii) accurately predicts generalizations regarding the locality of repairs. I show that an analysis in which effects like (1) are treated as dissimilation is not capable of accounting for any of these generalizations, let alone all of them together.

Dear WHAMIT,

The MIT-Haiti Initiative has produced a 3-minute video on our efforts to promote active learning of STEM in Haiti. This video is part of an online showcase organized by the National Science Foundation. WHAMIT readers can help MIT and Haiti win a “Public Choice” award by voting for this video—-i.e., by sharing or tweeting the video that will be available on Monday, May 11, at 8AM, at this link:

http://resourcecenters2015.videohall.com/posters/519

By voting (between Monday, May 11 and May 15—early and often!), the WHAMIT community can help MIT and Haiti move ahead together, so teachers and students in all social classes in Haiti can do science and math better, in their native Kreyòl with state-of-the-art technology for active learning. That way, Haiti will, indeed, get on the much awaited path of development, with the participation and for the benefit of *ALL* her children. And this breakthrough will also serve as an example for the rest of the world to see that local languages, coupled with technology, can have global impact in improving access and quality in education.

Thank you,

Michel DeGraff

Congratulations to 2nd-year student Ezer Rasin, whose paper “On evaluation metrics in Optimality Theory” (co-authored by Roni Katzir) has been accepted for publication by Linguistic Inquiry! You can read a draft of the paper by clicking here.

Speaker: Sophie Moracchini (MIT)
Time: Monday May 4, 12-1:30
Place: 32-D831
Title: Construal of pronouns in French and Vietnamese
Abstract: Abstract LFRG

Speaker: Suyeon Yun (MIT)
Title: Non-native Cluster Perception by Phonetic Confusion, Not by Universal Grammar
Date: Monday, May 4th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

Experimental results of non-native cluster perception have been used as evidence that the Sonority Sequencing Principle is synchronically active. Notably, Berent et al. (2007 et seq.) argue that the knowledge of onset cluster phonotactics is projected from UG on the basis of evidence that speakers whose native languages do not have the relevant clusters perceive universally preferred clusters with rising sonority more accurately than universally dispreferred clusters with level or falling sonority. In this talk, I will report results of my perception experiments with English and Korean listeners in which phonetically diverse stimuli were used. I will argue that the results of Berent et al.’s experiments are just one possible result we may get from some combinations of initial consonant clusters, and thus cannot be evidence for the Sonority Sequencing Principle in synchronic grammar. More importantly, I argue that it is the auditory properties of the consonant cluster that play a more important role in non-native cluster perception than the cluster’s sonority profile.

Speaker: Despina Oikonomou (MIT) & Snejana Iovtcheva (MIT)
Title: Island insensitive fragment answers to Bulgarian li-questions
Time: Tuesday 5/5, 1pm-2pm
Place: 32-D461

We discuss fragment answers to Bulgarian yes/no question that are formed with the particle Li. Different than English, Bulgarian yes/no questions have an overt focus particle that can attach to a wide variety of constituents and allows the speakers to form a grammatical fragment answer even out of a syntactic island. This is significant because island insensitiveness has long been observed in sluicing (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001, Merchant 2004, Griffiths & Liptak 2014 (G&L)) but not in fragment answers. In this sense, the Bulgarian data shed new light on the question of ‘island insensitivity under ellipsis’ as they suggest that islands can be ameliorated under any type of TP-ellipsis, thus allowing for a uniform treatment of sluicing and answer fragments.

Speaker: Aron Hirsch (MIT) (MIT)
Title: A case for conjunction reduction
Time: Thurs 5/7, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Disjunction can take wider scope than appears to be the case in the surface string, as in (1a), which can be interpreted similarly to (1b). This has been linked to the availability of ellipsis processes, in particular VP-ellipsis familiar from Johnson’s (e.g. 2014) work on gapping (Schwarz 1999); (1a) can be derived from an LF similar to that for (1b) via ellipsis.

(1) a. John wants to see Mary or Sue.
b. John (either) wants to see Mary or < he wants to see > Sue (but I’m not sure which).

In this talk, I evaluate the strength of evidence that and, as well as or, can take scope via a mechanism other than QR. Is there, for instance, a “conjunction reduction” (Schein 2015 and references therein) mechanism whereby e.g. (2a) can be derived from (2b) via ellipsis?

(2) a. John wants to see every student and every professor.
b. John wants to see every student and < he wants to see > every professor.

This talk (i) develops new arguments which support the view that reduction is at least an available option, and (ii) shows that a commitment to the copy theory of movement and ex situ interpretation of object quantifiers entails a commitment to reduction as the only option for certain cases of conjoined quantifiers. I will provide some support for this prediction by considering the scope behavior of conjoined quantifiers in embedded environments.

The most comprehensive survey of rhyme ever made reveals a new possibility for one of the essential units of language.

“The syllable has long been considered to be the basic building block of language in the area of rhythm. MIT’s Donca Steriade now believes that a different element — known as the ‘interval’ — may be the basic unit of rhythm in human language.”

Read more on the webiste of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences (SHASS).

Speaker: Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst)
Title: Constructing attitude and speech reports
Time: 2:00-4:00pm, Friday May 8th
Place: 32-155

Abstract TBD

We are proud to announce that Ted Levin has accepted a postdoctoral position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where he will be working with Maria Polinsky and Omer Preminger (PhD 2011) (and the rest of the great Maryland linguistics department as well). Fantastic news, great opportunity — congratulations Ted!!

Speaker: Jessica Coon (McGill)
Title: Two types of ergative agreement: Implications for Dependent Case Theory
Date: Friday, May 8th
Time: 4:30-6:00p Note special time!
Place: 32-141

A range of literature has shown that agreement is sensitive to morphological case (e.g. Bobaljik 2008, et seq). While the dependence of agreement on case has been robustly demonstrated, the source of morphological case remains controversial. This talk focuses on the assignment of ergative case. Under one line of approach, ergative is an inherent case, assigned by a functional head to external arguments in their thematic position (Woolford 1997; Legate 2008). On another approach, ergative is the mirror image of accusative, assigned configurationally to the higher of two arguments in some local domain (Marantz 1991; Baker & Bobaljik to appear). Through an investigation of ergative agreement systems, I argue that a Dependent Case approach is not only unmotivated for a less-studied type of ergative agreement, but also runs the risk of over-generating.

I argue that ergative-absolutive agreement patterns have two different sources. Type 1: In languages like Hindi-Urdu, agreement comes from T; morphologically case-marked ergative subjects are inaccessible for agreement, resulting in an “ergative” agreement pattern (i.e. absolutive arguments agree; see Bobaljik 2008). Type 2: In languages like Chol and Halkomelem, transitive subjects (i.e. ergative arguments) agree, and the source of this agreement is low: v (Coon to appear; Wiltschko 2006).

This talk has two main goals. First, I provide morphophonological and syntactic evidence for the existence of the less-discussed Type 2 system; specifically, I argue that ergative agreement in Chol has a low source and is the result of a direct relationship between v and the ergative subject. Second, I argue that a Dependent Case analysis––while easily able to handle the Hindi-Urdu-type agreement system––faces problems with the Chol-type agreement system. Not only must the language keep track of two different types of null case, but we are left without a way to rule out languages with nominative-accusative case and ergative-absolutive agreement, a well-known typological gap.

While Dependent Case has achieved a range of empirical coverage (e.g. Baker & Vinokurova 2010; Levin & Preminger 2015; Baker & Bobaljik to appear), the end result is one in which the mechanism of ergative case assignment––inherent or dependent––must minimally be parameterized. Given that Type 2 ergative languages lack morphological case altogether, I suggest that this may not be a bad result.

Undergraduate linguistics & physics major Elise Newman (‘16) has been linguistically busy these last two weekends. She presented her paper “Extended EPP: A New Approach to English Auxiliaries and Sentential Negation” as a poster at the 9th Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium on the weekend on April 18, and as a talk last weekend at the 2015 Annual Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium

Speaker: Ted Levin (MIT)
Title: The Case Filter is Real
Date: Tuesday, April 28/br> Time: 1:00-2:00pm
Place: 32D-461

Case Theory holds that there is a syntactic property of nominals, Case, that captures aspects of their distribution and form that do not otherwise follow from their PF or LF content (Chomsky 1981, 1986; Chomsky & Lasnik 1995; Lasnik 2008). Nominals that do not receive Case in the course of the derivation violate the Case Filter, yielding ungrammaticality. In the Agree framework, Case is (commonly) held to be feature-valuation and deletion via Agree to satisfy Full Interpretation of the nominal at LF and to give the nominal case morphology at PF (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2008). However, current thinking has shifted much of the work earlier done by Case to the needs of functional heads, such as [uPhi], reducing the role of Case in DP-licensing. Various accounts have suggested that Case serves solely as a condition on Agree or Move (e.g. Chomsky 2000, 2001), arises ”for free” in the syntax by virtue of [uCase] being able to survive the derivation (e.g.Preminger 2011, 2014), or might be eliminated entirely from syntax (e.g. Marantz 2000, McFadden 2004, Bobaljik 2008, Sigurdsson 2009).

In this talk, I argue that consideration of the needs of nominals cannot be completed eliminated from the calculation of well-formed derivations. I show that in the absence of [uCase], nominals must satisfy alternative distributional requirements, indicative of an alternative licensing strategy that satisfies the Case Filter and cross-cuts any of the implementations of Case above. Specifically, in two disparate environments . pseudo noun incorporated objects and some Austronesian in-situ subjects . the nominal head must display strict linear-adjacency with the verbal head. This need of nominals distinguishes well- and ill-formed derivations. Furthermore, I argue that, because the head-head adjacency requirement is sensitive to linear, not hierarchical, adjacency, the Case Filter must be operative at PF (e.g. Chomsky 1980, Lasnik 2008).

The 51th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society was held this week end at the University of Chicago this weekend (April 23-25). The program included talks by:

• Third year students Juliet Stanton and Sam Zukoff: Prosodic effects of segmental correspondence
• Second year student Michelle Yuan: Case competition and case domains: Evidence from Yimas

• Hadas Kotek (PhD 2014) and Mitcho Erlewine (PhD 2014), currently postdocs at McGill, gave a joint talk: Relative pronoun pied-piping, the structure of which informs the analysis of relative clauses

A picture of Juliet Stanton and Sam Zukoff’s presentation:

A picture of Michelle Yuan’s presentation:

credit: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (mitcho)

Speaker: Leon Bergen (MIT)
Time: Monday 4/27, 12-1:30
Place: 32-D808
Title: The strategic use of noise in pragmatic reasoning

We combine two recent probabilistic approaches to natural language understanding, exploring the formal pragmatics of communication on a noisy channel. We first extend a model of rational communication between a speaker and listener, to allow for the possibility that messages are corrupted by noise. A further extension of the model, which allows the speaker to intentionally reduce the noise rate on a word, is used to model prosodic emphasis. We show that the model derives several well-known interpretive effects associated with prosodic emphasis, including exhaustification, question-and-answer pairing, and the interaction between stress and focus-sensitive adverbs. We also use this model to provide a simplified semantics for even. Our results show that nominal amounts of actual noise can be leveraged for communicative purposes.

Speaker: Lena Karvovskaya (MIT/Universiteit Leiden)
Title: Complex relatives in Russian
Time: Thurs 4/30, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

I will discuss the intensifier “sam” in Russian (which is similar to English “himself” in its “emphatic reflexive” function). The intensifier “sam” can combine with a reflexive pronoun. Two agreement patterns are possible in this case, “sam” can either agree in case with the internal argument (the reflexive) or it can agree in case with the external argument (the subject). The second agreement pattern is puzzling, because the intensifier is not a part of the subject constituent.

I will present the properties that correspond to each of the agreement patterns and argue that we are dealing with two different constructions: in one case the intensifier is a modifier of the reflexive, in the other case it adjoins to the vP and receive its case marking as the result of agreement with the subject.

Speaker: Nina Topintzi (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Title: Edge Geminates: typology and asymmetries*
Date: Friday, May 1st
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

Edge geminates (EG) are a different species from intervocalic geminates. They are rarer and structurally different; they emerge – at least superficially – as tautosyllabic within an onset (word-initial geminate) or coda (word-final geminate), as opposed to the typically heterosyllabic intervocalic geminates. In this paper, I present a typology of the weight properties of EGs and make observations that may predict whether an EG patterns as heavy or light. For the latter part, I consider the relationship between EGs and edge consonant clusters in the language under consideration and investigate the existence of correlations. For example, an initial finding suggests that if EGs are unique in a language, i.e. the language possesses no edge clusters, then the EG is more likely to pattern as moraic (cf. Trukese and Pattani Malay in initial position and Hadhrami Arabic finally). Additionally, when edge clusters do arise, then the EG will tend to pattern the same way as the cluster with respect to weight. Finally, I discuss exceptions to this and speculate on the reasons the typology is shaped the way it is.

*Based on joint work with Stuart Davis (Indiana University)

Nature interviews Chomsky and Miyagawa for a program on primate communication and human language. The interview is available on Nature Podcast.

Laurent Lamothe (Former Prime Minister of Haiti, 2012-2014) at MIT Sloan School of Management on April 13, 2015, discussing how the MIT-Haiti Initiative is opening up access to quality education in Haiti—-thus, dismantling Haiti’s linguistic apartheid and its barriers against development. The video can be watched here.

MIT Linguistics is delighted to welcome the new students who will join our PhD program in the Fall, from A to П:

• Rafael Abramovitz (University of Chicago)
• Itai Bassi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
• Justin Colley (University of New South Wales)
• Colin Davis (University of Minnesota)
• Suzana Fong (University of São Paulo)
• Verena Hehl (University of Tübingen)
• Maša Močnik (University of Ljubljana; University of Amsterdam)
• Dmitry Privoznov (Moscow State University)

We are proud as can be to report that Coppe van Urk has accepted a position as Lecturer (= Assistant Professor) in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London.  Congratulations, Coppe!!

Speaker: Seid Tvica (MIT/ University of Amsterdam)
Title: Rich Agreement Hypothesis beyond Indo-European
Time: Thurs 4/23, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

It is well-established in the literature that many Germanic and Romance languages differ in the placement of adverbs, appearing either before or after the finite verb. This typological distinction is standardly accounted for via v-to-I0 movement, arguably triggered by the subject agreement features that are assumed to be located at I0 (cf. Roberts 1985; Kosmeijer 1986; Rohrbacher 1994; Vikner 1995; Bobaljik and Thráinsson 1998; Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014, among many others). The observed correlation between the properties of agreement morphology and verb movement gave rise to the so-called “rich agreement hypothesis” (RAH) which, in its strong version, states that in controlled environments the finite verb moves to a vP-external position if and only if the agreement morphology is rich (cf. Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014). Building on the work done so far in this talk I present the results of a typological investigation of RAH, showing that RAH holds across many languages, well beyond the Indo-European family. In particular, I will discuss verb movement in three unrelated non-Indo-European languages.

Speaker: Cassandra Chapman (McMaster/MIT)
Time: Thursday 4/23, 5:30-7
Location: 32-D831
Title: On the encoding of evidentiality in English: an experimental approach
Abstract: ChapmanDoranSchmidtke_LFRG_abstract_final

GLOW 38 was held last week in Paris. Several third year students from MIT had poster presentations or talks:

• Lilla Magyar: The role of universal markedness in Hungarian gemination processes
• Chris O’Brien: How to get off an island
• Juliet Stanton: The learnability filter and its role in the comparison of metrical theories
• Benjamin Storme: Aspectual distinctions in the present tense in Romance and cross-linguistically

Sabine Iatridou was also there and talked about Conditionals in Turkish and their absence.

Three recent alumni gave talks:

• Claire Halpert (PhD 2012; University of Minnesota): Raising Parameters
• Hadas Kotek (PhD 2014; McGill University): Intervention everywhere!
• Guillaume Thomas (PhD 2012; Pontifical Universidade Católica): Rising scale segments: additivity, comparison and continuation

20th century MIT Linguistics was represented by two alumni, co-authors of the following papers:

• Sarah Ouwayda and Ur Shlonsky (PhD 1987; Université de Genève): Order in the DP
• Dorothy Ahn and Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998; ZAS Berlin): Relative Measures: Implications for the Semantics and Syntax of Pseudo-Partitives

Speaker: Ming Xiang (University of Chicago)
Title: Parsing covert dependencies—the case of Mandarin wh-in-situ constructions
Date: Friday, April 24th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

While modeling cross-linguistic structural variations, linguistic analyses sometimes postulate abstract “covert” representations that do not have any morpho-phonological reflexes in the surface word string. Little is known as to whether and how such representations are constructed in language comprehension and production. In this talk, I will examine the processing of Mandarin wh-in-situ questions. Drawing on data from production, eyetracking-reading, and the speed-accuracy tradeoff paradigm, I will address two questions: (i) Does the parser construct a covert non-local syntactic dependency in processing? (ii) What is the parsing mechanism that supports such non-local dependencies? In particular, how is a “silent” scope position retrieved from memory? The current data suggests that the parser indeed constructs a covert dependency in real time processing, but the retrieval of the scope position is supported by two distinct (maybe simultaneous) mechanisms: one that relies on associative cue-based memory retrieval, and the other (cyclically) searches through intermediate clause edge positions.

Speaker: Zuzanna Fuchs (Harvard)
Title: pro-drop in Coordinated-WH Questions: Further Challenges for Multidominance and Ellipsis
Time: Monday 4/13, 12-1:30
Place: 32-D831

Languages vary as to the freedom with which they coordinate WH-expressions in coordinated-WH questions (CWHs) like When and where is the party?, which differ from familiar multiple-WH questions in the that they contain the conjunction and between two WH-expressions and require a multiclausal analysis (although monoclausal analyses have been suggested (Kazenin 2000, Liptak 2011)). On one end of the spectrum, English-like languages are very limited in their CWHs, while on the other end, Polish and its relatives allow free WH-coordination in CWHs. There seems to be little consensus in the literature as to what the underlying structure of these constructions is, with the two most prominent analyses being ellipsis (Giannakidou & Merchant 1998, Tomaszewicz 2010) and multidominance (Gracanin-Yuksek 2007, 2009).

In this talk, I present ongoing work on what licenses CWHs and whether multidominance and ellipsis can account for these properties. In particular, I focus on the observation — based on comparing Polish, English, and Italian CWHs — that the availability of pro-drop and/or optional transitivity seems to correlate with the degree of freedom to which languages allow CWHs with argument WH-expressions: If an argument can be somehow null in the main clause (as pro or as the missing argument of an optionally transitive verb), it can appear as a WH-phrase in a CWH. Independent analyses of seeming pro-drop in Italian (Cardinaletti 1994, Brandi & Cordin 1989) and Slavic (Gribanova 2013) allow us to more precisely compare the two main approaches to CWH. I demonstrate that the English, Italian, and Polish facts introduce further challenges to multidominance (ex. violations of the Constraint on Sharing (Gracanin-Yuksek 2013) by pro and problems with WH extraction) and ellipsis (issues of parallelism and coindexation).

Speaker: Patrick Jones (Harvard)
Title: Underlying falling tones in Interlacustrine Bantu, and their implications for Meeussen’s rule
Date: Monday, April 13th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

In this talk, I argue that in a number of Bantu languages spoken near Lake Victoria – namely Luganda, Shi, Kinande, Haya, and Runyankore – the basic underlying tone contrast is between a falling tone and no tone (i.e. H͡L vs. Ø), rather than the H vs. Ø contrast normally posited for other Bantu languages. Evidence for this comes from a range of different phenomena which require the presence of a L tone following a H tone. These include surface falling tones (Luganda, Shi, Kinande, Haya, Runyankore), downstep (Luganda, Shi), leftward H tone shift (Kinande), and the blocking of intonational H tones (Luganda, Kinande). All of these phenomena, I argue, may be viewed as consequences of different repairs of underlying H͡L.

Positing underlying H͡L requires that certain well known tonal processes be re-examined. In particular, Meeussen’s Rule – normally described as a process by which H lowers to L (or deletes entirely) after another H tone (H-H → H-L) – must be recast as a rule in which a falling tone simplifies to L either following another falling tone (H͡L-H͡L → H͡L-L) or simply following a L tone (L-H͡L → L-L) (Hyman and Katamba, 1993). I argue that this latter reformulation, rather than being an unwarranted complication of Meeussne’s Rule, actually produces a number of positive results, allowing us to explain cases of tonal lowering which are otherwise entirely mysterious. These results, which are entirely independent of the original motivations for underlying HL, provide strong additional support for it.

Speaker: Athulya Aravind (MIT)
Title: Minimality and wh-licensing in Malayalam
Time: Tuesday 4/14, 1pm-2pm
Place: 32-D461

This talk discusses long-distance wh-licensing asymmetries in Malayalam, a wh-in-situ language. The licensing of a matrix scope taking, embedded wh-phrase depends on whether or not the clause containing it undergoes movement. I will argue that despite not involving two instances of movement, the configuration of interest is parallel to remnant movement. Since Müller (1996), it has been known that remnant movement is disallowed if the two movement steps are of the same type, an effect that has been argued to fall out from the Minimal Link Condition (e.g. Kitahara 1997). I show that a generalized minimality constraint on Agree can derive both the Malayalam wh-licensing patterns and the restriction on remnant movement. If the proposal is on the right track, the Malayalam data provide crucial evidence for the simple and intuitive generalization that all probe-goal relations, of which movement happens to be a special case, are subject to minimality conditions.

Speaker: Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell (MIT/ UT Austin)
Title: One or two UNTILs? The case of single-UNTIL languages
Time: Thurs 4/16, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Abstract: One or two UNTILs? The case of single-UNTIL languages

Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully, now with an English accent) explains Noam Chomsky in an excellent short animated video from BBC Radio 4.

Michel DeGraff recently participated to two events related to his role as a socially and politically committed linguist:

• On April 10th, he gave a talk at UMass Amherst on “Efforts to Develop Active-Learning Resources in Kreyòl to Improve STEM Education in Haiti.”
• On March 22nd, he co-hosted the LSA webinar on Linguistics and Human Rights. You can listen to the webinar here.

ECO-5 was held at Harvard on Saturday. Two graduate students from MIT gave talks:

• Fourth year student Snejana Iovtcheva: The External Possessors of Bulgarian: Raising, Control, and Focus
• Second year student Michelle Yuan: Case assignment as feature dissimulation

Speaker: Aditi Lahiri (University of Oxford)
Title: In support of asymmetric phonological representations
Date: Friday, April 17th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

Word recognition has less impediments than one might expect although no word can ever be pronounced in an identical fashion even by the same speaker. I would like to defend our model, the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL), which claims that variation in speech can be resolved by assuming that the representation of words is phonologically sparse. The assumption is that privative underspecified feature representations, which can account for a number of asymmetries typical and pertinacious in synchronic and diachronic phonological systems, are also responsible for asymmetries at the onset of word recognition. The acoustic signal is converted into phonological features by roughly defined acoustic parameters which are then mapped on to the lexical representation using a three-way matching logic ranging from a perfect match, no-mismatch to mismatch along with a coherence metric which is used to evaluate the ‘strength’ of the matching features. The talk will present a phonological sketch of the model along with evidence from a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments from German, English and Bengali. .

Speaker: Mia Nussbaum (MIT)
Title: On the difference between only and just
Time: Monday, April 6, 2015
Place: 32-D808

In some cases, the exclusive particles only and just appear to be interchangeable:

(1) Mary (only/just) read War and Peace.
(2) (Only/just) three professors came to the party.

In this talk, I’ll be taking a look at some contexts where they diverge, foremost among them the phenomenon of “minimal sufficiency readings” in conditionals.

(3) If just three people get on the boat, it will sink.
(4) #If only three people get on the boat, it will sink.

In addition to the somewhat implausible reading where three people will sink the boat but four people might not, the sentence with just in (3) has an interpretation that’s unavailable with only. This is the minimal sufficiency reading, which can be paraphrased as “If at least three people (which is not a lot) get on the boat, it will sink.”

I will look at some arguments for and against two competing analyses of minimal sufficiency readings: Grosz (2011)’s lexical-ambiguity hypothesis, and Coppock and Beaver (2014)’s scope hypothesis.

Speaker: Chingting Chuang (National Tsinghua University)
Title: How does circular chain shift tone sandhi evolve?
Date: Monday, April 6th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

Penang Hokkien (PH) is a representative variety of Southern Min Chinese spoken by the descendants of emigrants from the Chinese province of Fuijian in Northern Malaysia. In previous studies (Chang & Chuang, 2012) and (Chuang, Chang, & Hsieh, 2013), it has been observed that the original tonal system remains intact among older speakers, especially the famous chainshift tone sandhi rules (see Chen 2000), while language change occurs among younger speakers. The goals of this talk are twofold: first, we examined an interesting phenomenon of synchronic reorganization of tonal inventories by obtaining data from more speakers and more age groups. Our results conform to previous results that tonal reorganization can be shown in three stages and the pace of sound change differs by syntactic position. Second, we are going to show that tonal variation in stage 2 (intermediate stage) is context-sensitive. Speakers are sensitive to the neighboring tones when they choose a variant such that the pattern of consecutive F tones is dispreferred by stage 2 learners.

Speaker: Kenyon Branan (MIT)
Title:Attraction at a distance: A’-movement and Case
Time: Tuesday 4/7, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D461

This talk is about how A’-movement of a subject is licensed (or not) by the structural position of the CP from which subject extraction takes place. I adopt a dependent approach to Case and Agreement, following Marantz (1991); Preminger (2011;2014). In this approach to modeling Case, Case is a reflection of structural relations between objects which participate in the Case system; in contrast to an Agree-based approach to Case modeling, in which Case reflects Agreement relations between objects which participate in the Case system. I assume that CPs participate in the Case system. I argue that a CP in a dependent Case configuration licenses subject extraction, but a CP in a non-depedent Case configuration does not. This provides a unified account for several otherwise mysterious—and understudied—subject/object extraction asymmetries in English.

Speaker: Juliet Stanton and Sam Zukoff (MIT)
Title: Prosodic effects of segmental correspondence
Time: Thurs 4/9, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

In this talk, we examine how extensions of Correspondence Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995) can be used to explain a class of misapplication effects arising in reduplication and copy epenthesis. In these domains, we frequently see exceptional patterning in the assignment of phonological properties relating to prominence (i.e. stress, pitch, length). We will argue that, in order to explain these effects, the phonological grammar must have the following two properties:

(i) The existence of a Correspondence relation among surface segments, arising under particular structural configurations, and

(ii) Output-Output faithfulness constraints that require identity among surface correspondents for prosodic properties.

We show that a grammar with these properties is sufficient and necessary to generate a range of effects, many of which have heretofore failed to receive satisfactory explanations in the literature:

(i) Stress-matching in Ngan’gityemerri reduplication (Reid 2011)

(ii) Sub-categorical durational matching between copy vowels and their hosts in Scots Gaelic (Bosch & de Jong 1997) and Hocank (e.g. Miner 1989)

(iii) Opaque interactions between copy epenthesis and stress placement in Selayarese (e.g. Broselow 2001), Tahitian (Bickmore 1995), and Hocank (e.g. Miner 1989)

Shigeru Miyagawa discusses his recent work on the rise of human language, which we mentioned in last week’s Whamit! issue, in MIT News.

Speaker: Yimei Xiang (Harvard)
Title: Number-marking in wh-questions: Uniqueness and mention-some
Time: Monday, 3/30, 12-1:30
Place: 32-D831
Abstract: plq_lfrg_abstract

Speaker: Juliet Stanton (MIT)
Title: Environmental shielding is contrast preservation
Date: Monday, March 30th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

The term “environmental shielding” refers to a class of processes where the phonetic realization of a nasal stop depends on its vocalic context. In Kaiwá (Tupí; Bridgeman 1961), for example, plain nasal stops are realized as prenasalized stops before oral vowels (i.e. /ma/ > [mba]) but as nasal stops before nasal vowels (i.e. /mã/ > [mã]). Herbert (1986:199) claims that the purpose of shielding is to protect a contrast between oral and nasal vowels. If Kaiwá /ma/ were realized as [ma], without the intervening [b], [a] would likely carry some degree of perseveratory nasal coarticulation and be less distinct from its nasal counterpart /ã/ as a result.

This paper provides several arguments that Herbert’s position is correct – that environmental shielding is contrast preservation, and that any successful analysis of shielding must make explicit reference to contrast. Results from a survey of over 150 languages reveal a stark asymmetry in the typology of shielding: all languages that exhibit shielding also license a contrast in vocalic nasality (see also Herbert 1986:219). In addition, further asymmetries within the typology mirror known cross-linguistic asymmetries in the direction and extent of nasal coarticulation. I propose an analysis referencing auditory factors that predicts these asymmetries, and show that its broader predictions, though not yet fully investigated, appear to be on the right track.

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: Extended EPP: A New Approach to English Auxiliaries and Sentential Negation
Time: Tuesday, March 31, 1-2pm
Place: 32-D461

Abstract: Extended EPP: A New Approach to English Auxiliaries and Sentential Negation

Speaker: Cassandra Chapman (McMaster University/ MIT)
Title: Restricting the antecedent domain using focus: New evidence from English DPs
Time: Thurs 4/2, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

In this talk, I investigate a previously overlooked use of the English morphological form one, which occurs with the definite determiner and an overt noun, i.e. “the one dress”. I show that these constructions have a distinct interpretation from numeral “one” constructions and definite descriptions. Similarly to a subset of definite descriptions, the referent in “the one” N constructions must have an antecedent in the context. However, they differ from definite descriptions because the context cannot restrict the domain to a set that contains only one individual. I also show that in “the one” N constructions, either “one” or a modifier, e.g. “blue”, must be Focus-marked.

I argue that the English data provide empirical support for a covert restrictor variable, R (Bartošová, accepted; von Fintel and Heim, 2011), in the DP structure. I propose that R ensures that there is a salient antecedent in the common ground, in a similar way to Rooth’s ~ operator. Unlike Rooth’s ~ operator, which requires a propositional antecedent, I argue that R is of a flexible semantic type (cf. Schwarzschild 1999’s compositional notion of givenness). Specifically, I propose that R adjoins to Focus-marked maximal projections, and that its type depends on the semantic type of its sister. I argue that the introduction of a covert restrictor variable into the structure of English DPs not only allows us to provide a unified analysis of the different anaphoric readings of one but that it may also shed light on how we might understand Rooth’s ~ operator, and how we might relate Rooth’s theory of focus to Schwarzschild’s theory of givenness.

A new article co-authored by Shigeru Miyagawa was published last week in Frontiers in Psychology, “The precedence of syntax in the rapid emergence of human language in evolution as defined by the integration hypothesis” (Vitor Nóbrega and Shigeru Miyagawa).

Four of our students traveled to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to present talks at the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (a.k.a. WCCFL 33):

Isaac Gould: Learning from ambiguous input via parameter interaction (or lack thereof)

Nicholas Longenbaugh, with Bradley Larson (Harvard) and Maria Polinsky (Harvard): Subject/Object Parity in Niuean and the Labeling Algorithm

Lilla Magyar: Are universal markedness hierarchies learnable from the lexicon? The case of gemination in Hungarian

Coppe van Urk: Multiple spell-out and the realization of pronouns

— where they were joined by two of our very recent PhDs, also presenting papers:

Claire Halpert (PhD 2012) (Minnesota): Raising Parameters

Bronwyn Bjorkman (PhD 2011) (U of Toronto) and Hedde Zeijlstra (Göttingen). Upward Agree is Superior

Not to mention keynote speaker and distinguished alum Kyle Johnson (PhD 1985) from UMass Amherst, and former visitor Hedde Zeijlstra (Göttingen) (who presented a poster arguing, against all odds, that some of Jonah Katz (Phd 2010) and David Pesetsky’s ideas about language and music are wrong). Plus current visitor Lena Karvovskaya (Leiden) and fondly remembered former postdoc Eric Schoorlemer (Leiden), who presented a poster about ““The possessor that should have stayed close to home, but ran away”.

Speaker: Jan-Wouter Zwart (Groningen)
Title: Revisiting complementizer agreement
Date: Tuesday, March 31
Time: 5:30-7:00
Place: 32D-461

In this talk I intend to return to the phenomenon of complementizer agreement as found in (dialects of) Dutch, Frisian and German, one of the research topics during my stay at MIT in 1991. This phenomenon played an important role in early minimalist analyses of verb movement and subject-verb agreement and has since gained added significance as providing evidence for the presence of (uninterpretable, unvalued) phi-features in C, consistent with the idea that even these inflectional features, typically associated with T (or with Agr in earlier minimalism), really derive from the phase head C. I argue, however, that complementizer agreement has many peculiar properties that suggest that its origin lies elsewhere, namely in the analogical generalization of an auxiliary-cum-weak subject pronoun pattern (as argued earlier by Goeman 1980). If we look at the phenomena in detail, it appears that the morphological and distributional properties of complementizer agreement need to refer to interface processes outside of narrow syntax, suggesting that the phenomenon cannot serve as a model for core cases of syntactic agreement, currently described in terms of Agree. If so, not all agreement phenomena can be reduced to the agency of unvalued features probing for a goal with valued counterparts to those features. I will also reflect on the consequences of this for the idea that the features relevant to subject-verb agreement derive from the phase head C, suggesting instead that these core cases of agreement be described in terms of the minimally needed structure building mechanism of narrow syntax, and the asymmetric relations of dependency that it yields.

The 39th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference took place March 20-22, 2015 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Speaker: Benjamin Storme (MIT)
Title: Aspectual asymmetries across tenses
Time: Monday, 3/16, 12-1:30
Place: 32-D831

It has been observed that languages typically have a richer aspectual morphology (in particular, to express the perfective/progressive distinction shown in (1) in English) in the past than in the present (for instance, Comrie 1976).

(1) a. At 8 pm, I was jumping. (progressive)
b. At 8 pm, I jumped. (perfective)

In this talk, I discuss two approaches to this asymmetry, (i) a semantic approach, where the absence of a perfective/progressive distinction in the present tense corresponds to a semantic incompatibility between present tense and perfective aspect, and (ii) a syncretism approach, where the perfective/progressive distinction exists in the present tense, but only covertly. I argue in favor of the second option based on French data. I then propose an explanation of (i) why syncretism happens preferentially in the present tense and (ii) why the progressive is used as the underspecified form in case of syncretism.

Speaker: Lilla Magyar (MIT)
Title: The role of universal markedness in Hungarian gemination processes
Date: Monday, March 16th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

Gemination in loanwords is a cross-linguistically widespread phenomenon attested in such languages as Japanese (Kubozono et al. 2008), Finnish (Karvonen 2009), Italian (Passino 2004), Telugu (Krishnamurti & Gwynn 1985) and Hungarian (Nádasdy 1989; Törkenczy 1989 and Kertész 2006), amongst many others. The process involves lengthening of a singleton consonant which is preceded by a short (stressed) vowel in the source word, even when gemination does not have an orthographic reflex in the source word. None of the source languages allow phonetic geminates and all of the borrowing languages do. Furthermore, none of the borrowing languages require geminates phonotactically in the positions where lengthening happens in loanwords.

In Hungarian, borrowings from English and German (and occasionally, from French) participate in this process. The propensity of loanwords to undergo gemination depends on the position of the consonant. Gemination is most predictable in monosyllables (e.g. fitt (Eng. fit)). In other contexts, it primarily applies when the consonant in question is spelt with a double consonant letter in the source word (e.g. koffer (G. Koffer ‘suitcase’)) or when the word ends with -er (e.g. szvetter (Eng. sweater)).

Apart from position, consonant class also determines whether a consonant is likely to be geminated or not. Even though practically all consonants can be geminated in the native Hungarian phonology, not all consonants can undergo gemination in loanwords, and even those which can, do so to different degrees. The ranking of consonants undergoing gemination in loanwords lines up with hierarchies of universal geminate markedness, which potentially supports the hypothesis that Hungarian speakers are drawing on their knowledge of this universal hierarchy. However, before we can conclude this, we must ask whether a less direct mechanism could be at play: phonetic pressures shape the native lexicon, and learners learn the preference from that.

The goal of the present study is to test the following hypotheses: (1) Even native speakers of Hungarian (a language which allows all kinds of geminates) have some awareness of universal geminate markedness. (2) This knowledge comes from the native lexicon: the frequency distribution of geminates in the native phonology reflects patterns of universal markedness. (3) These patterns can be learned from the native Hungarian lexicon based on phonotactic generalisations.

Speaker: Coppe van Urk (MIT)
Title:Pronoun copying in Dinka and the realization of copies
Time: Tuesday 3/17, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

In a number of cases, pronouns seem to be able to spell out more articulated copies of lexical DPs. This has been argued for resumptive pronouns in many languages (e.g. Aoun et al. 2001; Boeckx 2003; Sichel 2014) and also for clitic doubling, subject doubling, and wh-copying (e.g. Felser 2004; Bruening 2006; Holmberg and Nikanne 2008; Harizanov, to appear). In this talk, I present further evidence for this claim from a pattern of pronoun copying in the Nilotic language Dinka (South Sudan). In Dinka, long-distance extraction of any plural noun phrase, regardless of person or complexity, is accompanied by the appearance of a 3rd person plural pronoun at the edge of each verb phrase on the path of movement. I show that similar number asymmetries are attested in resumption and subject doubling. On the basis of this, I propose that copies may undergo partial spell-out, targeting just the phi-layer, resulting in a pronoun. This allows us to connect the asymmetry in Dinka pronoun copying to a general asymmetry in how number is spelled out in the language.

Speaker: Bradley Larson (Harvard) & Nicholas Longenbaugh (MIT)
Title: Subject/Object Parity in Niuean and the Labeling Algorithm
Time: Thurs 3/19, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

We present novel data from the Polynesian language Niuean, based on recent fieldwork, that shows a lack of many expected structural asymmetries between subjects and objects. This structural parity runs counter to traditional theoretical and empirical differences between subjects and objects. For example, languages like English show ECP effects such that operations over objects are generally freer than those over subjects, and languages like Chol specifically privilege operations over subjects (Coon 2010). In order to account for the Niuean in a way that does not make incorrect or ad hoc predictions for other types of languages, we develop notions from Chomsky’s (2013) labeling algorithm and argue for a lack of relevant labeling in the domain where subjects and objects are potential operands.

This weekend, several of our graduate students taught linguistics classes to middle school students at Spark, a weekend-long program run by the MIT Educational Studies Program. Snejana Iovtcheva taught a class on Saturday about the writing systems of the world, and Chris O’Brien and Juliet Stanton taught two sections of introductory linguistics (focusing on syntax) on Sunday. They had a lot of fun, and the students did too!

Speaker: Aron Hirsch (MIT)
Title: Conjoining quantifiers
Time: Monday 3/9, 12-1:30
Place: 32-D831

The examples in (1) are straightforward to interpret if movement leaves in situ a variable (e.g. Heim & Kratzer 1998). I will show, however, that they pose a challenge under the well-motivated view that movement leaves in situ copies that are converted into definite descriptions by Fox’s (1999, 2002) trace conversion.

(1) a. I talked to John and every student.
b. I talked to every student but no professor. (due to Kai von Fintel)

I will explore possible analyses for (1a) and (1b) compatible with trace conversion, and suggest that the most promising solution involves conjunction reduction. In the final part of the presentation, I will discuss evidence which contradicts a classic variable-based approach, and supports the trace conversion-based approach suggested.

Speaker: Hemanga Dutta (EFLU / MIT) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: Laryngeal Contrasts in Assamese
Date: Monday, March 9th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D461

The Indic languages are well known for the four-way /p,b,ph,bh/ contrast in their stop systems that freely combines [±voice] and [±spread gl] at three points of articulation. In this presentation we examine how these contrasts are expressed in Assamese in four contexts: prevocalic, presonorant, word-final, and preobstruent. Our principal finding is that aspirated stops modify their minor point of articulation in word-final position to replicate aspiration as noise either in the release of the stop or during the constriction while in the preobstruent context aspiration is largely lost leading to neutralization with the plain stops. In addition, the voicing contrast is also largely neutralized in preobstruent position. These modifications are analyzed in the licensing by cue framework of Steriade (1997, 2009).

Speaker: Coppe van Urk (MIT)
Title: Movement in Dinka
Time: Thurs 3/12, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

In this talk, I examine the syntax of phrasal movement in Dinka (Nilotic; South Sudan). Most theoretical approaches to syntactic structure in some way distinguish at least three types of displacement: A-movement, A’-movement, and intermediate movement steps of a successive-cyclic dependency. I show that, in Dinka, these three movement types make use of the same two positions in the clause, one at the edge of the clause and one at the edge of the verb phrase, and have the same morphosyntactic repercussions for verb-second, voice, case, agreement, and binding. On the basis of these facts, I argue that all types of phrasal movement are established in the same way, as the reflex of a featural relation between a probe and a goal (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001), with the differences between them deriving only from independent properties of the features involved. In this framework, we can view Dinka as a language in which different movement-driving features act in unison, by virtue of being merged on the same head. After developing this argument, I discuss some of the ways in which we might derive the differences between A- and A’-movement, drawing on proposals by Takahashi and Hulsey (2009), Sauerland (1998, 2004), and Ruys (2000), among others.

Congratulations to Ayaka Sugawara, our finishing PhD student, specializing in semantics and language acquisition, who has accepted a position as Lecturer in Japanese Linguistics at Mie University!!

Ayaka will be missed not only in the department and its Language Acquisition Lab but also in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts, where she has participated as a violinist for the last three years. Congratulations, yes, but we’ll miss you!

Speaker: Despina Oikonomou (MIT)
Title: The interpretation of alos ‘other’ in Modern Greek
Time: Monday, March 2, 12-1:30pm
Place: 32-D831
Abstract: see Despina_abstract

Speaker: Naomi Francis (MIT)
Title: A foot-free approach to Nanti stress
Date: Monday, February 2nd
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D461

Nanti (Kampa, Peru) has an intricate stress system that is sensitive to syllable weight, syllable shape, and vowel quality. Crowhurst and Michael (2005) capture this complex system in a foot-based framework. In light of recent work (e.g. Gordon 2002) that has demonstrated that it is possible to derive a wide range of quantity-insensitive stress patterns without making use of feet, I will attempt to extend this foot-free approach to account for Nanti’s stress system.

Speaker: Martin Walkow (MIT)
Title: Locating variation in person restrictions: When they arise and how to get out of them
Date/Time:Tuesday, March 3, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Two analyses have emerged from work on variation in person based restrictions on agreement and cliticization. Cyclic Agree analyses (Bejar 2003,Bejar & Rezac 2009) locate the variation in (i) the feature specification of probes, (ii) the syntactic position of probes, and as a function thereof, (ii) the locality pattern of Agree. On the other hand, Multiple Agree analyses (Anagnostopoulou 2005, Nevins 2007, 2011) assume that both the specification of the probes and the locality pattern are constant, but that variation arises from the availability of different syntactic operations in different languages. Nevins (2007, 2011) in particular argues that the operation MultipleAgree is parameterized differently in different languages.

The two approaches have not been applied to the same data though. While Cyclic Agree has been applied to variation in person-restrictions between subjects and objects, Multiple Agree has been applied to restrictions on combinations of internal arguments known as the Person Case Constraint (PCC, Bonet 1994).

This talk shows that Cyclic Agree can also account for the variation between two kinds of PCC, the Strong PCC (Bonet 1994) and the Ultrastrong PCC (Nevins 2007) via different specifications of the probe. Key to the analysis is the observation that the PCC can be understood as the lower direct object (DO) bleeding person Agree with the higher recipient, the reverse of what is typically assumed.

Cyclic Agree’s flexibility of deriving person restrictions in different syntactic structures also offers a better understanding of a second type of variation. Languages that show the same types of PCC can differ in the alternative strategies they use to realize person combinations banned by the PCC. This is demonstrated for Catalan (Bonet 1991) and Classical Arabic, which both show have strong and ultrastrong PCC speakers but differ in the which argument is targeted for alternative realization in PCC-violating person combinations. This difference will be derived from the different underlying structures in which the PCC arrises in the two languages.

Speaker: Richard Larson (Stony Brook)
Title: Quantificational States/br> Date: Friday, March 6th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

The abstract of this talk is available here.

Third year student Sam Zukoff will give a talk about Repetition Avoidance and the Exceptional Reduplication Patterns of Indo-European in the GSAS Workshop on Indo-European and Historical Linguistics at Harvard on Wednesday, March 4 at 5:00 pm, in Boylston Hall 303. Congratulations, Sam!

The University of Connecticut celebrates Irene Heim!

The UConn Logic group is proud to announce its annual logic workshop. The workshop is organized around a researcher whose work has had a significant and lasting influence on the field. The remaining talks, invited and selected, will be given by critics or contributors to the field who were influenced by the keynote speakers’s work.

2015: Going Heim. Linguistic Meaning Between Structure and Use.

Irene Heim is among the most influential scholars in the study of natural-language semantics and pragmatics. Several of her lasting contributions to the field were contained or foreshadowed in her dissertation “The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases” (UMass Amherst, 1982). There, Heim demonstrated that Montagovian semantics and Chomskyan syntax, two schools of thought which had developed independently and were deemed at cross-purposes by many, could in fact be unified to mutual benefit. Heim’s dissertation is also one of the first fully developed accounts in what would come to be known as dynamic semantics. With this workshop, we will celebrate Heim’s recent 60th birthday and use the occasion to reflect on the transformative nature of her early work, its continued influence over the years since, and the present state and trajectory of the field of formal semantics and pragmatics.

Location: TBA
Date: May 2-3, 2015
Keynote: Irene Heim (MIT)
Confirmed Speakers:
David Beaver (Texas)
Simon Charlow (Rutgers)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart/Texas)
Barbara Partee (UMass)
Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt)

Exciting news from our alumnus Ezra Keshet (PhD 2008) who has been recommended for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. Congratulations Ezra!!!

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/ci.keshetezra_ci.detail

Speaker: Byron Ahn (Boston University)
Title: Giving Reflexivity a Voice
Time: Thurs 2/26, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Reflexive anaphora is not a homogeneous category whose members are licensed in a single uniform way. This talk highlights the formal properties of Local Subject-Oriented Reflexivity (LSOR), in which a reflexive anaphor’s antecedent must be the local subject. In languages across the world, LSOR is subject to a number of syntactic constraints, and is expressed differently from other types of reflexivity.

I show that the attested range of morphosyntactic configurations for LSOR arise from the same basic structural source. In particular, LSOR derivations involve two atoms of reflexivity:

(i) a semantic reflexivizer (associated with a unique grammatical Voice head, REFL), and
(ii) a reflexive anaphor which syntactic movement (triggered by that same REFL Voice)

Moreover, the same two atoms are reflexivity are active in English. For this reason, English also exhibits the same LSOR/non-LSOR split, though the difference manifests in the prosodic component: LSOR anaphors in English do not bear phrasal stress (while non-LSOR anaphors do). This is derived with a Nuclear Stress Rule based upon syntactic hierarchy (and not linearization) that is couched in a multiple spell-out architecture of grammar (e.g., Cinque 1993 and Zubizarreta 1998).

Local Subject-Oriented Reflexivity is implicated as a central aspect of reflexivity, across languages, and when such a distinction is not entirely (morphologically) apparent, closer investigation can elucidate it. Finally, LSOR, its grammatical properties, as well as its possible morphosyntactic instantiations, simply fall out from the general architecture of Language.

Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Time: Monday 2/23, 12-1:30pm
Place: 32-D831
Title: Acquisition of quantifier scope: Evidence from English Rise-Fall-Rise

Since Musolino (1998), many studies have reported that children trend to interpret sentences such as in (1a) to mean the LF illustrated in (1b), not the LF in (1c), which adults do not have trouble accessing (Musolino et al. 2000, Musolino & Lidz 2006, Viau et al. 2010, a.o.).

(1) a. Every house didn’t jump over the fence.
b. For every horse x, x did not jump over the fence.
c. It is not the case that for every house x, x jumped over the fence.

Meanwhile, at least since Jespersen (1933) it has been pointed out that different prosodic contours will/can differentiate readings in such sentences (Jackendoff 1972, Büring 1997, 2003, Constant 2012, 2014 a.o.; Cf. Ward and Hirschberg 1985). Specifically, sentences with L+H* on the Contrastive Topic (ALL in (2b)) and L-H% on the IntP (sentence-final in (2b)) will only have the reading where negation takes scope over the universal quantifier. (I will refer to the contour for (2b) as Rise-Fall-Rise, following Constant 2012.)

(2) a. All my friends didn’t come.
b. ALL my friends didn’t come…

In this experiment with children (Picture-selection Task), I investigate whether children are sensitive to the difference in prosody that conveys different readings. The results show that children are indeed sensitive - with “Falling” contour where the sentence-final L-H% is not observed, children picked pictures with “not>all (and some)” over “all>not” pictures 30% of the time, on the other hand with “Rise-Fall-Rise” contour, children picked “not>all (and some)” pictures over “all>not” pictures 70% of the time.

Date: Monday, February 23th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D461

In preparation for Gunnar Hansson’s colloquium talk, third-year student Juliet Stanton will lead a discussion of the basics of the Agreement by Correspondence model, and how it can be extended to account for dissimilation.

Speaker: Lotte Hendricks (Meertens Instituut)
Title: Knowledge of verb clusters
Date/Time:Tuesday, Febrary 24, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Speakers are able to judge syntactic constructions that are not part of their own language variety. When they are asked to rank a number of variants of such a construction on a scale, this ranking turns out to be parallel to the geographic frequency distribution of these variants. We consider three possible explanations for this striking fact, based on (i) processing, (ii) familiarity and (iii) the syntactic system. We argue that only the third option can explain the behavior of the speakers.

We discuss two aspects of verb clusters that exhibit variation in the Dutch dialects: the order of the verbs in the cluster and interruption of the verb cluster by non-verbal material.

There is much variation in the order of the verbs in the cluster in (1); (cf. Barbiers 2005; SAND Volume II, Barbiers et al. 2008). While all varieties of Dutch have verb cluster constructions, we find a clear geographic distribution of different orderings across the language area, with differences in frequency of occurrence.

Verb cluster interruption shows a lot of geographical variation too, here with respect to the type of constituent that can interrupt the cluster, varying from particles (moet op-bellen ‘must up-call’) to various types of arguments (moet een schuur bouwen ‘must a barn built’) and adverbs (moet vroeg opstaan ‘must early rise’) (cf. SAND Volume II). Two factors turn out to be relevant, the complexity of the interrupting constituent and the position in the syntactic hierarchy (in the sense of Cinque 1999) where this element is base-generated (Hendriks 2014).

The clear geographic distribution of the various variants of these two constructions makes it possible to investigate if speakers have intuitions on variants that occur in language varieties different from their own.

We find a high degree of correspondence between the speakers’ rankings and the number of locations in the Dutch language area that have a particular construction. (i) verb cluster orders that are more frequent amongst the varieties of Dutch are ranked higher and (ii) speakers in areas where verb cluster interruptions are only used sporadically and with many restrictions, nevertheless have intuitions that correspond to the observed syntactic patterns in the Flemish varieties of Dutch.

We demonstrate that processing preferences and familiarity with the phenomenon cannot account for the observed correspondence between speakers’ intuitions of a construction and that constructions’ geographic distribution. Potentially, the intuitions follow from properties of the grammatical system.

Speaker: Gunnar Hansson (UBC)
Title: Learning Long-Distance Phonotactics: Dissimilation, Assimilation and Correspondence
Date: Friday, February 27th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

In current phonological theory, the leading constraint-based approach to modelling long-distance consonant assimilation is Agreement by Correspondence (ABC; Walker 2000, Hansson 2001/2010, Rose & Walker 2004). In the ABC model, long-distance agreement is dependent on an abstract, and in principle covert, correspondence relation that carves up the surface string into sets of corresponding segments (equivalence classes) in ways negotiated by ranked and violable constraints. Some of these (CORR constraints) demand that similar segments stand in correspondence, while others (CC-Limiter constraints) can curtail correspondence by demanding that pairs of correspondents obey certain criteria. However, there is reason for skepticism as to whether the formal machinery of the ABC model has adequate empirical support, in particular its fundamental notion that similarity-based agreement is a mediated effect (similarity-based correspondence; correspondence-based agreement). The factorial typology of ABC generates many unattested patterns that are highly suspect, while other attested and formally simple patterns become hard to capture; various proposed amendments merely highlight underlying flaws in the overall architecture. Recently the implications of the ABC model for consonant dissimilation have been explored in detail by Bennett (2013, 2014), who identifies a number of “mismatch predictions” whereby the typologies of dissimilation and harmony should be opposites of one another. I will report on a series of artificial grammar learning experiments (in collaboration with Kevin McMullin) which investigate how inductive biases and heuristics affect the learning of nonadjacent phonotactic dependencies between consonants. The central question is what implicational relationships, if any, learners assume to hold between “transvocalic” consonant pairs (…CVC…) and pairs separated by greater distance. Some of these experiments follow a poverty-of-stimulus paradigm, testing how learners generalize in the absence of overt evidence (cf. Wilson 2006, Finley & Badecker 2009, Finley 2011, 2012), whereas others are designed to provide explicit evidence for patterns of questionable status (cf. Lai 2012, White 2014). The findings suggest that, with respect to the hypothesis space, learners treat dissimilatory dependencies and assimilatory dependencies (harmony) equivalently, in ways that run counter to predictions of the ABC model. I will outline future studies that aim to clarify the formal nature of “transvocalic” locality: whether the relevant criterion is syllable-adjacency (Odden 1994, Rose & Walker 2004, Bennett 2013) or adjacency on a consonantal tier (Hansson 2010, McMullin & Hansson 2014).

Congratulations to the students who have been accepted to give talks or present posters at GLOW 38 and CLS 51 in April!

GLOW:

• Third year student Lilla Magyar: The role of universal markedness in Hungarian gemination processes
• Third year student Chris O’Brien: How to get off an island
• Third year student Juliet Stanton: The learnability filter and its role in the comparison of metrical theories (accepted for the phonology workshop, titled ”The implications of Computation and Learnability for Phonological Theory”)
• Third year student Benjamin Storme: Aspectual distinctions in the present tense in Romance and cross-linguistically

CLS:

• Third year students Juliet Stanton and Sam Zukoff: Prosodic effects of segmental correspondence
• Second year student Michelle Yuan: Case competition and case domains: Evidence from Yimas

Two recent alumni, now at McGill, will also give talks at these conferences:

• Hadas Kotek (PhD 2014) will give a talk at GLOW: Intervention everywhere!
• Hadas Kotek (PhD 2014) and Mitcho Erlewine (PhD 2014) will give a joint talk at CLS: Relative pronoun pied-piping, the structure of which informs the analysis of relative clauses

Speaker: Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Two tiers of case assignment in Yimas
Date/Time:Tuesday, November 17, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831 (note exceptional location!)

Under the Marantzian (1991) model of case assignment, dependent case is assigned configurationally and on the basis of competition. In this talk, I examine the case and agreement system of Yimas (Lower Sepik; Papua New Guinea; data from Foley 1991) and argue that, while Yimas supports the fundamentals of this system, it also necessitates an extension of it. In Yimas, ERG and DAT behave like dependent cases, realized only in the presence of a case competitor. However, dependent case is determined over a series of optionally-present verbal agreement clitics, not over the arguments they cross-reference (i.e. clitics are case competitors for other clitics). The realization of dependent case thus hinges on the number of clitics hosted by the verb, not the number of arguments present in the syntax. The puzzle that this talk addresses is how dependent case comes to be realized over the clitics.

I argue that this can be resolved under a two-tiered system of case assignment. First, I show that there is reason to posit that the overt nominals are being assigned abstract case (NOM for subjects and ACC for objects) in the syntax, though this is obfuscated by the zero spell-out of both NOM and ACC (see Legate 2008 on ABS=DEF languages). The doubled clitics encode both the phi-features and abstract case features of their associated arguments. In the morphological component, dependent case realization is calculated over the series of verbal clitics; subject clitics are ERG in the presence of a case competitor and NOM (=ABS) otherwise, while object clitics are DAT in the presence of a case competitor and ACC (=ABS) otherwise.

Speaker: Donca Steriade (MIT)
Title: The Tribrach Law
Date: Tuesday, February 17th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D461

In a 1884 paper, Saussure sketched the evidence for a rhythmic constraint operating in prehistoric Greek, whose effect was to eliminate non-final sequences of three light syllables. Saussure called it la loi du tribraque, the tribrach law (abbbrev. TL; tribrach = three lights). The TL is interesting in several ways. It’s typologically unusual. It employs, in Greek, a wide range of solutions, from vowel lengthening to syncope, to ineffability and violation of morphological exponence constraints. It is a rhythmic phenomenon that’s easier to interpret in a foot–free theory of metrical prominence, than in a foot-based one. Finally, a closer look at the evidence shows that the TL was still alive in 5th cent. Attic, but morphologically limited: Saussure was thinking as a neogrammarian when he denied TL’s survival in historical Greek. Once we realize that TL continues to operate in historical times, it turns into the most reliable evidence available to determine the weight of different consonant clusters in Greek. This has consequences for the analysis of reduplication and for our understanding of the ways in which weight is computed.

Speaker: Marie-Christine Meyer (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Redundancy and Embedded Exhaustification
Time: Thurs 2/19, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

In this talk we are going to look at some of the most recent developments in the area of embedded exhaustification, by which I mean the insertion of a grammatical operator exh as one possible mechanism to derive embedded implicatures (see e.g. Sauerland 2010, 2012 for others). As recently as 2009 (Geurts&Pouscoulos), the mere existence of embedded implicatures has been disputed. On the other hand, the last decade has seen various successful applications of (embedded) exhaustification, ranging from polarity sensitivity (Chierchia 2004 et seq.) and Free Choice (Fox 2007, Meyer 2014b) to surface redundant disjunctions (Chierchia,Fox&Spector 2012, Gajewski&Sharvit 2012,Meyer 2014a, Mayr&Romoli 2014). However, these contributions concentrate on what embedded exhaustification can do, and background the old question of what it can not do, and why not (e.g. Horn 1989). I propose that, for starters, embedded exhaustification cannot violate the Gricean maxim of Brevity. Departing from a formalization of this idea, we will see how it addresses Horn’s old question and related challenges currently discussed (Fox&Spector 2014, Spector 2014): What happens in downward-entailing environments? — e.g., Mary didn’t talk to Bill or Sue (*or both) Why are some, but not all logically redundant disjuncts acceptable? — e.g., Mary either studied physics, or (she didn’t and) she studied math. Why do certain embedded implicatures have to be marked phonologically? — e.g., Mary didn’t study math OR physics.

We are celebrating the great news that our distinguished alum Joey Sabbagh (PhD 2005) has been officially recommended for promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure at the University of Texas Arlington. Joey wrote his dissertation on Non-verbal argument structure: evidence from Tagalog and is the author of numerous papers about Tagalog syntax. But he is also well-known for his ground-breaking work on the construction known as Right Node Raising, which was, as it happens, instantiated quite beautifully in the letter that he received yesterday with the great news:

“I am happy to inform you that [the University Tenure and Promotion Committee voted to approve __], and [President Karbhari will recommend to UT System __] [that you be granted tenure and promoted to associate professor].”

Congratulations!!

Hot off the press, the latest issue of Linguistic Inquiry includes a syntax paper jointly authored by fifth-year student Coppe van Urk and by Norvin Richards: “Two Components of Long-distance Extraction: Successive Cyclicity in Dinka”. Congratulations, Coppe and Norvin!

Here’s the abstract: “This article presents novel data from the Nilotic language Dinka, in which the syntax of successive-cyclic movement is remarkably transparent. We show that Dinka provides strong support for the view that long-distance extraction proceeds through the edge of every verb phrase and every clause on the path of movement (Chomsky 1986, 2000, 2001, 2008). In addition, long-distance dependencies in Dinka offer evidence that extraction from a CP requires agreement between v and the CP that is extracted from (Rackowski and Richards 2005, Den Dikken 2009b, 2012a,b). The claim that both of these components constrain long-distance movement is important, as much contemporary work on extraction incorporates only one of them. To accommodate this conclusion, we propose a modification of Rackowski and Richards 2005, in which both intermediate movement and Agree relations between phase heads are necessary steps in establishing a long-distance dependency.”

Speaker: Sigrid Beck (Tübingen)
Title: Readings of ‘noch’ (still)
Date: Friday, February 20th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

The talk develops an analysis of the particle ‘noch’, the German counterpart of ‘still’. These particles can give rise to a lot of different readings, making it hard to figure out their semantic contribution (e.g. ‘Washington still wore a wig’). The literature has analysed ‘noch/still’ as focus sensitive and ambiguous. I suggest that it is not focus sensitive, and I try to propose just one lexical entry to account for the different readings that sentences with ‘noch/still’ can have.

Speaker: Martin Walkow (MIT)
Title: Locating variation in person restrictions: When they arise and how to get out of them
Date/Time:Tuesday, November 10, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Two analyses have emerged from work on variation in person based restrictions on agreement and cliticization. Cyclic Agree analyses (Bejar 2003,Bejar & Rezac 2009) locate the variation in (i) the feature specification of probes, (ii) the syntactic position of probes, and as a function thereof, (ii) the locality pattern of Agree. On the other hand, Multiple Agree analyses (Anagnostopoulou 2005, Nevins 2007, 2011) assume that both the specification of the probes and the locality pattern are constant, but that variation arises from the availability of different syntactic operations in different languages. Nevins (2007, 2011) in particular argues that the operation MultipleAgree is parameterized differently in different languages.

The two approaches have not been applied to the same data though. While Cyclic Agree has been applied to variation in person-restrictions between subjects and objects, Multiple Agree has been applied to restrictions on combinations of internal arguments known as the Person Case Constraint (PCC, Bonet 1994). This talk shows that Cyclic Agree can also account for the variation between two kinds of PCC, the Strong PCC (Bonet 1994) and the Ultrastrong PCC (Nevins 2007) via different specifications of the probe. Key to the analysis is the observation that the PCC can be understood as the lower direct object (DO) bleeding person Agree with the higher recipient, the reverse of what is typically assumed.

Cyclic Agree’s flexibility of deriving person restrictions in different syntactic structures also offers a better understanding of a second type of variation. Languages that show the same types of PCC can differ in the alternative strategies they use to realize person combinations banned by the PCC. This is demonstrated for Catalan (Bonet 1991) and Classical Arabic, which both show have strong and ultrastrong PCC speakers but differ in the which argument is targeted for alternative realization in PCC-violating person combinations. This difference will be derived from the different underlying structures in which the PCC arrises in the two languages.

Congratulations to our faculty colleague Michel DeGraff and to linguistics major Alyssa Napier ‘16, 2015 faculty and undergraduate honorees of MIT’s Martin Luther King Leadership Award!!

Michel, as readers of Whamit know well, is a founder and leader of the MIT Haiti Initiative, which has been working to actively promote the use of Kreyòl in STEM education in Haiti.  Alyssa is a double major in Linguistics and Chemistry, a 2014 Burchard Scholar, and co-chair of the Black Women’s Alliance. Last November, Alyssa wrote an eloquent article in the Tech about Ferguson, the Newbury Street march, “Black Lives Matter”, MIT and much more. We encourage you to read it!

Congratulations to both!

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki (MIT)
Title: Interpreting questions under attitudes
Date: Tuesday, February 10th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

Since Karttunen (1977), interpretations of embedded questions have played a central role in the development of the semantics of questions. One of the important observations in this domain is that interpretations of embedded questions vary depending on the type of embedding attitude predicates. More specifically, cognitive attitude predicates like “know” prefer strongly-exhaustive interpretations of their interrogative complements (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984) while emotive factives like “surprise” and “be happy” only allow weakly-exhaustive interpretations (Heim 1994, a.o). Also, Égré & Spector (2007, to appear) argue that the class of predicates that are veridical with respect to interrogative-embedding are precisely the class of predicate that are factive with respect to declarative-embedding. Despite the rich literature on embedded questions, however, there has been no account that succeeds in predicting both their exhaustivity and veridicality given the lexical semantics of embedding predicates. In this talk, I propose a theory of question-embedding that is properly constrained to achieve this prediction.

My analysis of exhaustivity is based on a reformulation of Klinedinst and Rothschild’s (2011) analysis of the so-called intermediate exhaustivity. Under this analysis, matrix exhaustification derives intermediate exhaustivity, but the exhaustification is vacuous when the embedding predicate is non-monotonic. Strong exhaustivity is argued to be pragmatically derived from intermediate exhaustivity. Thus, exhaustivity of embedded questions depends on the monotonicity property of embedding predicates, which I argue to be the relevant property distinguishing between cognitive attitude predicates and emotive factives.

Building on Uegaki (to appear), I further analyze declarative-embedding as a special, trivial, case of question-embedding. Under this analysis, factivity is derived as a limiting case of veridicality, providing a natural explanation for Égré & Spector’s generalization (cf. Theiler 2014). The analysis will then be extended to mention-some readings, including George’s (2011) “non-reducibility” puzzle. I will conclude by discussing several open questions concerning the syntax and semantics of attitude predicates and interrogatives in general.

In January, the 5th MIT-Haiti Workshop on Active Learning in STEM was held in Haiti. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Vijay Kumar (Senior Strategic Advisor, MIT Office of Digital Learning) and Professor Michel Degraff have been leading a team of MIT faculty and staff engaged in helping improve STEM education in Haiti through the use of open education resources and digital technology for active learning all in Haitian Creole. This is the first time ever that such resources and pedagogies are being produced and tested in Haitian Creole—Haiti’s national language—with the help of a valiant team of MIT educators and staff, alongside educators and administrators in Haiti. This 5th workshop was the most successful to date with some 80 participants, and it was co-hosted by Haiti’s Ministry of National Education.

You can see more photos of the workshop here.

There’s also a moving video of a group of Haitian artists donating to the MIT-Haiti Initiative a fresco that they painted during the workshop.

The slides that Michel used to introduce the workshop are available on his Facebook page. There’s an English version of these slides for a keynote speech Michel gave on January 4, 2015, for a Haitian Independence Day gala in Randolph, Massachusetts.

And here’s an article, in French, about the workshop.

Vast numbers of current MIT linguists and alumni prowled the corridors of the Portland Hilton presenting papers and posters at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America on January 8-11, 2015. The following talks and posters featured MIT presenters:

• Athulya Aravind: The structure and interpretation of Malayalam clefts
• Ruth Brillman and Aron Hirsch : An anti-locality approach to English subject/non-subject asymmetries
• Kai von Fintel presented on Open Access at the Special Session on the Publishing Process
• Martin Hackl, Erin Olson and Ayaka Sugawara: Processing only: Scalar presupposition and the structure of ALT(S)
• Martin Hackl, Ayaka Sugawara and Ken Wexler: Question-answer (in)congruence in the acquisition of ‘only’
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (‘14; McGill University), Theodore Levin, and Coppe van Urk:Voice morphology as extraction marking
• Aron Hirsch: Exhaustive answers and polarity-mismatch
• Theodore Levin : Toward a unified analysis of antipassive and pseudo noun incorporation constructions
• Ryo Masuda : Pitch as a stop voicing cue is affected by minimal pairs and prosody: Hypo- and hyperarticulation in Japanese
• Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and Elizabeth Choi :Distribution of glottalized onsets in task-directed American English speech
• Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and Jennifer Cole (University of Illinois) : Imitation as a tool for investigating cues to prosodic structure
• Donca Steriade : Reduplication and reconstructed syllable structure in Indo-European
• Ayaka Sugawara and Ken Wexler : Acquisition of inverse-scope readings: Evidence from Japanese scrambling and contrastive topic prosody
• Wataru Uegaki : Predicting the variation in the exhaustivity of embedded interrogatives
• Coppe van Urk : The A/A’-distinction in Dinka
• Suyeon Yun : Auditory properties explain cluster-dependent epenthesis asymmetries
• Sam Zukoff : Syllable-level OCP effects in Indo-European reduplication

Several recent alumni were also present:

• Jessica Coon (‘10; McGill) organized and presented at a Tutorial on “LingSync and ProsodyLab-Aligner: Tools for Linguistic Fieldwork and OS2 Experimentation”; her copresenters were recent visiting faculty member Alan Bale (Concordia) and Michal Wagner (‘05; Mcgill)
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (‘14 McGill University): On the position of focus adverbs
• Jonah Katz (‘10; West Virginia University): Continuity lenition
• Jonah Katz (‘10; West Virginia University) and Melinda Fricke (Pennsylvania State University): Lenition/fortition patterns aid prosodic segmentation
• Hadas Kotek (‘14; McGill University) : A new compositional semantics for wh-questions

A picture of Aron Hirsch poster presentation:

A picture of Theodore Levin poster presentation:

The 12nd meeting of the Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP) was held last week in Barcelona, Spain. The following MIT faculty and students gave talks there:

• Adam Albright: Faithfulness to non-contrastive phonetic properties in Lakhota
• Fifth-year student Gretchen Kern: Syntactically unjustified morphs and other strategies for hiatus resolution in Irish prepositions
• Third-year student Benjamin Storme: Closed Syllable Vowel Laxing: A strategy to enhance coda consonant place contrasts

Two MIT alumni were present as well:

• Andrew Nevins (PhD 2004; University College of London): Undergoers are harmony sources: Maintaining iterative harmony in Oroqen dialects (co-authored with Elan Dresher (University of Toronto))
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009; CNRS, UniversitéŽ Paris 8): Idempotency and the early acquisition of phonotactics