Whamit!

Speaker: Chris O’Brien (MIT)
Title: How to get off an island
Date/Time: Monday December 15, 12:30-1:45
Location: 32-D461

Note the special date.

The grammar, it has been argued, possesses strategies for bypassing syntactic islands. Based on the selective island (SI) phenomenon, Cinque (1990) and Postal (1998) argue for a resumptive pronoun strategy for extraction from islands. Bachrach & Katzir (2009) argue that multiple dominance obviates islandhood, via a delayed Spellout (DS) mechanism. We argue that both SIs and DS islands arise from the same source, and that DS is the sole mechanism for escaping islands in wh-movement. Fox & Pesetsky’s (2009) implementation of DS and Johnson’s (2010) theory of movement conspire to predict the effects of the resumptive pronoun strategy in both sharing, and non-sharing, contexts; as well as why SI effects emerge in leftward, but not rightward, movement (Postal 1998).

Speaker: Adam Albright (MIT)
Title: Faithfulness to non-contrastive phonetic properties in Lakhota
Date: Monday, December 8
Time: 5 - 6:30
Location: 32D-461
Abstract: OCP12-Albright-NonAnonymous

Speaker: Ito Masuyo (Fukuoka University/MIT)
Title: Japanese-speaking children’s interpretation of sentences containing the focus particle datte ‘even’: QUD or processing limitations
Date: Wednesday, December 10th
Time: 3:00p
Place: 32-D831

In this talk, I will talk about the acquisition of ‘even’ in Japanese. I will focus on the following: 1) the properties of the focus particle datte ‘even’ in Japanese; 2) whether Japanese-speaking children are able to interpret sentences containing ‘even’ as adults do; and if not, QUD or processing considerations can facilitate children’s performance.

The results show that children can calculate information strength associated with datte sentences when the task does not require them to construct and maintain alternative representations. Examining whether or not QUD relevance and processing considerations apply to datte sentence implicatures as they do to SIs allows re-examination of the nature of implicatures datte generates. I aim to contribute to experimental studies on pragmatics, especially those on EVEN, conventional implicature and SI.

Speaker: Tim Stowell (UCLA)
Title: Adverbial Complexes
Date: Friday, December 12th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

I will discuss the syntactic derivation of parenthetical qualified adjunct phrases like the underscored example in (i):

(i) Mitt drank two bottles of gin last night, unfortunately rather quickly.

The adverbial complex consists of two adverbial phrases (AdvPs), one of which evaluates, or qualifies, the other. The adverbial complex forms a distinct intonational phrase, as is typical of parenthetical constituents. Within the complex, nuclear (or focal) stress falls on the head of the qualified AdvP (rather quíckly). The entire complex has the force of an independent secondary assertion, similar to that of the underscored paratactic clauses in (ii):

(ii) Mitt drank two bottles of gin last night;
unfortunately he drank them rather quickly.
unfortunately he did it/this/so rather quickly.

I will defend an ellipsis analysis of the adverbial complexes in (i), modeled on Jason Merchant’s account of sluicing and sentence fragment constructions. This involves a combination of extraction and TP ellipsis. Assuming a source structure resembling one of the paratactic clauses in (ii), the qualified AdvP (rather quickly) is extracted from the TP and moved to a position below the qualifying AdvP (unfortunately). The remnant TP is then elided, with the host clause providing the antecedent TP. Although I refer to this as TP ellipsis, the precise hierarchical level of the elided material is tricky to pin down, mainly because of more complex examples.

In (i) both AdvPs are ‘integrated’ within the complex adjunct, and occur in the same linear and hierarchical order that they would occur in as integrated AdvPs in main clauses. In (iii), the order of the two AdvPs within the complex is inverted:

(iii) The rebels have been defeated—decisively, perhaps.

In (iii), nuclear stress still falls on the qualified AdvP (decisively). I will discuss the derivation of the inverted order, which also occurs in main clauses. The chief candidates are (i) right-adjunction of the qualifying AdvP via initial merge; (ii) movement (of one or the other AdvPs within the adverbial complex) or (iii) an additional instance of TP ellipsis within the elided TP.

Like simple adverbs (both integrated and parenthetical) and Slifting remnants, adverbial complexes (with or without internal inversion) can be ‘niched’ within the host clause.

(iv) Napoleon, probably deliberately, insulted his host.

The analysis of niching is also problematic. While not resolving this decisively, I will point out that niching turns out to depend on the placement of nuclear (or focal) stress on the preceding constituent in the host clause.

Adverbial complexes also provide evidence bearing on the familiar problem of identity in ellipsis structures. In (v) the ‘qualifying’ frequency adverb often gives rise to a quantificational variability effect; I argue that this implicates a definite source for the elided counterpart of the indefinite object DP in the host clause:

(v) Janet has performed over a hundred autopsies, often incompetently.

More complex adverbial complexes are also possible, with both inverted and un-inverted orders:

(vi) Mitt drank the whole bottle, I think probably again unintentionally.
(vii) Mitt drank the whole bottle, unintentionally, again, probably, I think.

The existence of complex adverbial complexes like (vi) provides further evidence supporting the ellipsis approach, but also complicates the problem of determining the identity of the elided constituent. The inverse ordering effect visible in (vi) vs. (vii) takes us back to the question of how the inverted order is derived. To derive the inverse order via leftward movement of the qualified AdvP, one would need a roll-up derivation of the sort advocated by Cinque in his account of integrated adverb order, and by Koopman and Szabolcsi in their account of Hungarian and Germanic verbal complexes. Our parenthetical adverbial complexes, however, seem to allow for far more ordering options than would be expected under such an approach, suggesting that these adverbial complexes may involve multiple applications of ellipsis.

On December 7th, Noam Chomsky turned 86. Happy birthday, Noam!

MITWPL is pleased to announce the publication of the Proceedings of FAJL 7: Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics (MWPL#73). (Editors: Shigeto Kawahara and Mika Igarashi, 2014).

https://mitwpl.mit.edu:444/catalog/mwpl73/

+++ get it together with FAJL3 or FAJL6 and save over 30% +++

Speaker: Gretchen Kern
Title: Syllables or Intervals? Welsh cynghanedd lusg rhymes
Date/Time: 1 Dec. (M), 5:00 - 6:30
Location: 32D-461

This talk will present my data and some preliminary analysis on my ongoing work on cynghanedd lusg, a type of line-internal, word-internal rhyme in Welsh poetry, based on a corpus of the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym. In these rhymes, the stressed penultimate vowel of a polysyllabic line-final word (and some number of following consonants) will correspond to the final vowel and any following consonants of a word earlier in the line.

(1) Ganed o’i fodd er goddef (Credo, line 25)

In many examples, the rhyme domain consists of the entire interval (even in consonant clusters) but some will have unanswered consonants in the line-final word:

2) a. Mi a wn blas o lasgoed (Merch Gyndyn, line 31)
b. I waered yn grwm gwmpas, (Gwahodd Dyddgu, line25)
c. ‘Nychlyd fardd, ni’th gâr harddfun, (Cyngor y Bioden, line65)

This is similar, but not exactly like skaldic rhyme, where the unanswered consonants appear in the word on the left (3c):

(3) a. hann rekkir lið bannat (from Háttatal, by Sturluson)
b. ungr stillir sá, milli (via Ryan 2010:5)
c. Gandvíkr, jǫfurr, landi

Speaker: Heidi Klockmann (MIT/Utrecht)
Title:Case, Agreement, and Hierarchies: Fitting in Inherent Case
Date/Time: Thursday, December 4, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I consider the variation found in systems of case and agreement cross-linguistically, focusing specifically on languages which show accusativity or ergativity in their case or agreement. There are in principle four language types, for which it has been claimed that only three exist (cf. Bobaljik 2008): ergative case with ergative agreement (e.g. Hindi, Gojri), ergative case with accusative agreement (e.g. Nepali, Bantawa), accusative case with accusative agreement (e.g. Polish), and accusative case with ergative agreement (the gap). I present data from the case-agreement systems of these languages, as well as a discussion of the nature of structural and inherent case assignment. I propose that inherent case is actually the realization of some form of a P-head and that languages can differ in their inventory of P-headed cases. I treat these PP-cases as being generally opaque to external processes, such as agreement (see Rezac 2008), and show how this assumption can be used to model the case-agreement systems discussed here.

“Wh-Fronting in a two-probe system”, a paper by newly minted PhD Hadas Kotek, has just appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Hadas is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill. Great paper — congratulations!

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-014-9238-8

Speaker: Angela Carpenter, Wellesley College
Title: Learning of a Natural and Unnatural Stress Pattern by Older Children
Date: Nov. 24 (M)
Time: 5-6:30
Location: 32D-461

Recent research into adult learning of natural and unnatural pairs of artificial languages has demonstrated that it is easier to learn a phonological rule that is based on naturalness in language than a similar, but unnatural, version of the same rule. This effect has been seen in a variety of phonological research (e.g. (Moreton 2008; Pater & Tessier 2005; Zhang & Lai 2010). Research in the area of infants’ learning of natural and unnatural phonology (Gerken & Bollt 2008; Seidl & Buckley 2005), has provided mixed results regarding the infants’ ability to learn natural and unnatural patterns of phonology. There has been little work done with older children to investigate whether they exhibit a learning bias that favors natural phonological patterns over unnatural ones.

The present study focuses on English-speaking older children’s learning of a natural and unnatural version of a stress rule based on vowel height. Previous research has shown that both English-speaking and French-speaking adults are able to more accurately learn a natural phonological rule where stress occurs on a low vowel than when stress occurs on a high vowel (Carpenter 2010). A study of how older children learn natural and unnatural stress patterns is important as it bridges the gap between infants and adults, allows comparison with both groups, and perhaps may shed some insight on the interaction between a general cognition, which allows learning of patterns in many areas, and a language-specific one, which perhaps bias learning of a natural pattern over an unnatural one.

References
Carpenter, Angela. 2010. A naturalness bias in learning stress. Phonology 27. 345-92.
Gerken, LouAnn & Alex Bollt. 2008. Three exemplars allow at least some linguistic generalizations: Implication for generalization mechanism and constraints. Language Learning and Development 4. 228-48.
Moreton, Elliott. 2008. Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology 25. 83-127.
Pater, Joe & Anne-Michelle Tessier. 2005. Phonotactics and alternations: Testing the connection with artificial language learning. UMOP 31: Papers in Experimental Phonetics and Phonology, ed. by S. Kawahara. Amherst, MA: GLSA.
Seidl, Amanda & Eugene Buckley. 2005. On the learning of arbitrary phonological rules. Language Learning and Development 1. 289-316.
Zhang, Jie & Yuwen Lai. 2010. Testing the role of phonetic knowledge in Mandarin tone sandhi. Phonology 27. 153-201.

Con-grat-ul(?)-at-ion-s to our alum Rochelle Lieber (PhD 1980), and to her co-authors Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag, whose book The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology has just been honored with the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by the Linguistic Society of America! Shelly Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire.

Speakers: Ted Levin and Coppe van Urk
Title: Austronesian voice as extraction marking
Date/Time:Tuesday, Nov. 25, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

One major question within Austronesian syntax concerns the relationship between Voice marking, case, and extraction, which (commonly) display a one-to-one correspondence. Broadly, two approaches are employed to capture these correlations: (i) Voice morphology marks case and extraction via (wh-)agreement (e.g. Chung 1994; Richards 2000; Pearson 2001), (ii) Voice morphology determines case and extraction via changes in argument structure (e.g. Guilfoyle et al. 1992; Aldridge 2004; Legate 2012). Under a deterministic view of Voice morphology, dissociations of voice and case/extraction are unexpected. In this talk, we present two systems that display such dissociations, supporting the case/extraction-marking analysis of Voice (i). We present a concrete proposal for Voice as extraction marking that explains its effects on case.

Emmanuel Chemla (CNRS) will be giving two lectures this week:

• Tuesday 11/18 5:15-8PM; 32D-831
• Wednesday 11/19; 3-6PM; 32D-461

Below is the abstract and information for the lectures:

We will ask how simple psycholinguistic methods can be relevant for the study of various questions in linguistic theory. We will start by discussing the case of scalar implicatures, where many illustrations can be found, both in terms of questions and methods, without a perfect alignement between the two, however. We will quickly move to other topics including questions, scopal relations, cumulative/distributive readings of plurals. The methods we will discuss include truth value and acceptability judgments, basic “priming” studies and response time studies. The hope is to demonstrate that these methods are useful and simple to deploy.

Speaker: Loes Koring (MIT/Utrecht)
Title: A visual signature of computation
Date/Time: Thursday, November 20, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I will present a new method to track argument reactivation during processing of intransitive verbs. In particular, I will show how the Visual World Paradigm can be used to obtain a precise record of (re)activation of the verb’s argument throughout the entire sentence. Using this method, we will see that the argument of unaccusative vs. unergative verbs is reactivated at a different point in time depending on their syntactic position. The timing difference is independent of the thematic role of the argument, as we will conclude from the behavior of theme unergative verbs.

Speaker: Karlos Arregi
Title: How to sell a melon: Mesoclisis in Spanish plural imperatives
Date/Time:Friday, November 21, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Harris and Halle (2005) present a framework (hereafter, Generalized Reduplication) that unites the treatment of phonological reduplication and metathesis with similar phenomena in morphology, thereby accounting for the apparently spurious placement of imperative plural inflection -n in non-standard Spanish. For instance, alongside standard “vénda-n-me-lo” (“Sell it to me!”), where -n precedes enclitics, one also finds forms such as “vénda-me-lo-n” and “vénda-n-me-lo-n”, in which the plural suffix follows enclitics, with an optional copy of the suffix before them. More recently, Kayne (2009) has challenged their analysis, arguing that such cases should be uniformly treated in the syntax. In this talk, I reassess some of Kayne’s arguments, agreeing with his conclusion that the most important desiderata of any general analysis of these sorts of phenomena is restrictiveness, but contending that greater restrictiveness can be achieved through metaconstraints on the Generalized Reduplication formalism rather than through byzantine syntactic derivations. I present supporting data from morphological reduplication and metathesis phenomena in the Basque auxiliary system, demonstrating that they are better accounted for postsyntactically, and conclude with general remarks about the division of labor in word-formation.

The eighth meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology Circle (NECPhon 2014) was held at NYU over the week end. Third year student Juliet Stanton gave a talk entitled “Rare forms and rare errors: deriving a learning bias in error-driven learning”.

The 2014 edition of the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS 2014) was held at UMass Amherst on Saturday. Three MIT students gave talks:

• Fifth year student Wataru Uegaki: “Predicting the Variation in Exhaustivity of Embedded Questions”
• Third year student Aron Hirsch: “An Unexceptional Semantics for Expressions of Exception”
• Third year student Benjamin Storme: “Present perfectives in English and Romance”

Three 2014 PhD theses are now available on the MITWPL webstore!

• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, 2014: Movement Out of Focus
• Yusuke Imanishi, 2014: Default Ergative
• Hadas Kotek, 2014: Composing Questions

Also, both volumes of Irene Heim’s Festshrift are now out of print and available from the MITWPL webstore:

• First volume
• Second volume

A public service announcement from Kai von Fintel - not just relevant for semanticists!

On October 30, Irene Heim’s colleagues and students past and present gathered to celebrate her 60th birthday with the presentation of a Festschrift (that we already linked to in an earlier post) and a great party with food, drink, speeches and reminiscences. Master of ceremonies was Uli Sauerland. Irene also was presented with framed versions of the artwork for the Festschrift by Sarah Hulsey (PhD 2008).

(photo credit: mitcho Erlewine — thank you!)

From left to right: Sarah Hulsey, Irene Heim & Uli Sauerland; Irene Heim; Angelika Kratzer; Danny Fox; Kai von Fintel; Gennaro Chierchia; Barbara H. Partee; Mats Rooth & Uli Sauerland

Speaker: Isabelle Charnavel (Havard)
Title: Perspectives on Binding and Exemption
Date/Time:Thursday, Nov. 13, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Some anaphors are exempt from Condition A regardless of how it is formulated. Drawing on French and English data, I will propose a way to draw the line between exempt and non-exempt anaphors and I will argue that exempt anaphors are in fact bound by covert logophoric operators. These operators code three kinds of perspective centers: attitude holders, empathy loci and deictic reference points.

Emmanuel Chemla (CNRS) will be giving a series of four lectures starting this Friday:

• Friday 11/14; 3-6PM; 32D-461
• Tuesday 11/18 5-8PM; room to be announced (check this page)
• Wednesday 11/19; 3-6PM; 32D-461
• Tuesday 11/25; 5-8PM; room to be announced (check this page)

Below is the abstract and information for the lectures:

We will ask how simple psycholinguistic methods can be relevant for the study of various questions in linguistic theory. We will start by discussing the case of scalar implicatures, where many illustrations can be found, both in terms of questions and methods, without a perfect alignement between the two, however. We will quickly move to other topics including questions, scopal relations, cumulative/distributive readings of plurals. The methods we will discuss include truth value and acceptability judgments, basic “priming” studies and response time studies. The hope is to demonstrate that these methods are useful and simple to deploy.

The 39th BU Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 39) took place this past weekend at Boston University. The following MIT students and faculty gave talks or presented posters:

• Second year student Athulia Aravind, and Jill de Villiers (Smith College): Implicit alternatives insufficient for children’s SIs with some.
• Fifth year student Ayaka Sugawara, and Martin Hackl: Question-Answer (In)Congruence in the Acquisition of Only
• Ayaka Sugawara and K. Wexler: Japanese children accept inverse-scope readings induced by scrambling, but they do not accept unambiguous inverse-scope readings induced by prosody

Michel DeGraff has received the “Award for Excellence” from the Haitian Studies Association at their 26th annual conference at Notre Dame University this weekend. (Read the citation in the photos below.) Great news, Michel!

http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/degraff/

Congratulations to five of our 21st-century alumni on the recent publication of their books!!

• Heejeong Ko’s (PhD 2005) Edges in Syntax was published by Oxford University Press. Heejeong is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Seoul National University.
• Márta Abrusán’s (PhD 2007) book Weak Island Semantics has been published by Oxford University Press.  Márta is a CNRS Research Scientist at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse.
• Omer Preminger’s (PhD 2011) Agreement and its Failures was published by MIT Press. Omer was an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University during the writing of this book, and is now Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.
• On the Grammar of Optative constructions by Patrick Grosz (PhD 2011) has been published by Benjamins in their series  Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today.  Patrick is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen.
• Young Ah Do’s (PhD 2013) dissertation on Biased learning of phonological alternations was published by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics (MITWPL).  Youngah is Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgetown University.

Speaker: Loes Koring (Utrecht)
Title: The semantics and acquisition of non-embedding reportatives
Time: Thursday, November 6, 5:30-7
Place: 32-D461

Two seemingly similar Dutch evidential raising verbs, schijnen and lijken, have been shown to differ in their distribution (Haegeman 2006). Although they can both be translated to ‘seem’ in English, they do differ in meaning (van Bruggen 1980, Vliegen 2011). Schijnen means that the speaker has indirect reported evidence for the proposition (Vliegen 2011, cf. De Haan 1999); whereas lijken means that the speaker has some type of direct evidence for the proposition, but the evidence is unclear (van Bruggen 1980). Interestingly, whereas lijken can be embedded under modals, negation, and questions for instance, schijnen cannot. One goal of this talk is to identify a semantic property that is responsible for the restrictions in distribution reportative schijnen shows. The claim is that schijnen is restricted in evaluation to the here and now of the speaker (i.e. it is subjective) and as such it cannot occur in nonveridical contexts (cf. Giannakidou 2011). Crucially, the difference in semantics between schijnen and lijken does not only affect their distribution, but also their acquisition and processing. As a secondary goal of this talk, we will look at the effect of the extra semantic computation in acquisition and processing.

Nor snow nor rain nor heat nor NELS can stay these pumpkins from the swift completion of their appointed carvings [e].

Some of the results:

Last week, we celebrated Irene Heim’s 60th birthday. On this occasion, a Festschrift was offered to Irene by some MIT students, faculty and alumni to honor her great contribution to the field of formal semantics. Happy birthday, Irene!

Speaker: Klaus Abels (UCL)
Title: Guess what else!
Date: Friday, November 7th
Time: 3:30-5:00p
Place: 32-141

Ross’s seminal paper on sluicing, that is, elliptical wh-questions of the type in (1), contains two generalizations that have driven analyses of sluicing in radically different directions.

(1) Somebody just left. - Guess who!

On the one hand, Ross observes that, at least in languages where this is directly observable, the wh-phrase in the elliptical question must bear the same case as its perceived correlate in the antecedent sentence, as in the German example in (2).

(2) Er hat jemandem geholfen, aber er verrät nicht {wem | *wen | *wer}.
he has someone.dat helped but he divulges not who.dat | who.acc | who.nom}
‘He helped someone but he won’t divulge who.’

On the other hand, sluicing ameliorates island constraints, as seen in the contrast between the acceptable (3) and the ungrammatical full version (4).

(3) They want to hire someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don’t know which.
(4) *They want to hire someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don’t know which Balkan language they want to hire someone who speaks.

The case matching effect in (2) is often taken as a straightforward argument for the presence of syntactic structure at the ellipsis site which is (nearly) identical to the syntactic structure of the antecedent. The island amelioration effect seen in (3) suggests the exact opposite.

In the first part of this talk, I will report on joint work with Gary Thoms. In this work, we use contrast sluices in languages with resumptive pronouns as a diagnostic tool. Contrast sluices are examples like (5), where the correlate in the antecedent clause is definite and the sluice asks about the identity of a different relevant entity.

(5) He gave the car to his son and guess what else!

The cross-linguistic distribution of island repair in contrast sluices strongly suggests that sluicing does not literally repair island effects. It also strongly suggests that ellipsis identity for sluicing in general cannot be understood as strict syntactic identity.

This conclusion calls for a careful evaluation of the case-matching effect, a task that will be taken up in the second part of the talk. Finally, a possible way forward will be suggested based on Fox and Katzir’s structural theory of focus alternatives.

NELS 45 was held at MIT over the week end and it was a success! The following MIT students and faculty gave talks or presented posters:

• Roger Schwarzschild, one of the three invited speakers: Markers of mass and count
• Third year student Aron Hirsch and Michael Wagner (McGill): Prosodic evidence that parentheticals are placed by rightward movement
• First year student Erin Olson, fifth year student Ayaka Sugawara, and Martin Hackl: Processing only: Scalar presupposition and the structure of ALT(S)
• Second year student Ezer Rasin and Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv): A learnability argument for constraints on underlying representations
• Third year student Juliet Stanton: Wholesale Late Merger in A’-movement: Evidence from preposition stranding
• Ryan Sandell (UCLA) and third year student Sam Zukoff: A new approach to the origin of Germanic strong preterites
• Visiting student Brian Buccola (McGill): Global semantic constraints: The case of Van Benthem’s Problem

A lot of MIT alumni were present:

• Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), one of the three invited speakers, now Professor at the University of Arizona: Aggressive Passives in Haiki
• Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD 2012), now at the University of Tübingen: Different again
• Dorothy Ahn (Harvard) and Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998), now at ZAS: Reverse quantification with proportional quantifiers
• Michael Y. Erlewine (PhD 2014), now at McGill: On the position of focus adverbs
• Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2013), now at HSE Moscow: Syntax and semantics of person in coordinations
• Ora Matushansky (PhD 2002), now at the CNRS and Utrecht: On being [feminine] and [proper]
• Mark Baker (PhD 1984), now at Rutgers: Applicative markers as agreement with PP in Amharic (co-authored with Ruth Kramer (Georgetown))
• Seth Cable (PhD 2007), now at UMass: Graded Tenses in Complement Clauses: Evidence that Future is not a Tense
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009), now at the CNRS and Utrecht: The error-driven ranking algorithm learns inventories of obstruents (co-authored with Rene Kager (Utrecht))
• Tara McAllister Byun (PhD 2009), now at NYU: Parallels in speech acquisition and loss as evidence for a grammar of articulatory reliability (co-authored with Sharon Inkelas (Berkeley) and Yvan Rose (MUN))
• Lisa Bylinina (Meertens), Natalia Ivlieva (PhD 2013), now at the CNRS, Alexander Podobryaev (PhD 2013), now at the HSE Moscow, Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012), now at UCL: A non-superlative semantics for ordinals and the syntax of comparison classes
• Joanna Zaleska (Leipzig) and Andrew Nevins (PhD 2004), now at UCL: Transformational language games and the representation of Polish nasal vowels
• Natalia Ivlieva (PhD 2013), now at the Institut Jean-Nicod/CNRS: Deriving multiplicity
• Patrick Grosz (PhD 2011) and Pritty Patel-Grosz (PhD 2012), now at Tuebingen: Re-evaluating the distinction between personal and demonstrative pronouns
• Susi Wurmbrand, now at UConn: Restructuring cross-linguistically
• Dennis Ott, visiting student at MIT in 2013, now at Humboldt: On the form and meaning of appositives (co-authored with Edgar Onea (Goettingen))
• MIT alumni Roni Katzir (PhD 2008), now at Tel-Aviv, and Michael Wagner (PhD 2005), now at McGill, co-authored papers with current MIT students (see above)

A picture of Mitcho’s poster presentation:

Speaker: Rebecca Woods (University of York/UMass Amherst)
Title: Embedded Inverted Interrogatives as Embedded Speech Acts
Date/Time:Tuesday, November 4, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: See attachment SyntaxSquare abstract

Speaker: Christiana Christodoulou (MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences/University of Cyprus)
Title: Towards a Unified Analysis of the Linguistic Development of Down Syndrome
Date/Time:Thursday, Nov. 6, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Previous studies on the linguistic development of individuals diagnosed with Down Syndrome (DS) report both phonetic/phonological as well as morphosyntactic impairment. To date, there has not been any research on the effects of phonetic/phonological restrictions on inflectional marking, nor a theoretical analysis of the distinct performance of individuals with DS. Cypriot Greek individuals with DS exhibit distinct articulation and phonological difficulties that affect the production of inflectional marking. Once those are factored out, results reveal high accuracy rates (over 95%) with aspect, tense, person, number and case. In this talk I deal with the small residue of differences, which were morphosyntactically conditioned, and argue that the use of alternative forms exhibit a clear preference for the default value of each inflectional feature. I provide a unified analysis couched within the Distributed Morphology framework, covering both morphosyntactic as well as phonological differences. I suggest that failure to use the targeted form and the consistency in using default values derives from failure of the Subset Principle to fully apply.

There is no Phonology Circle meeting this week. The next meeting will be on November 24.

The 45th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society will be held at the MIT on October 31 - November 2nd, 2014. Invited speakers are:

• Heidi Harley, University of Arizona
• Kie Zuraw, UCLA
• Roger Schwarzschild, MIT

Please visit the conference website for more information.

There will be no Phonology Circle meeting this week.

Speaker and title: to be announced
Time: Wednesday 10/29, 5:00 pm
Room: 32-D831

Speaker: Andreea Nicolae (ZAS Berlin)
Title: Positive polarity and strength of scalar implicatures
Date/Time:Thursday, October 30, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

The goal of this talk is to offer a new analysis of positive polarity elements in light of the differences between weak and strong disjunction (“or” versus “either or”). I will be addressing the following three properties of disjunctive elements in this talk:
◦ the ease of cancelability (strength) of their scalar inference
◦ the PPI status of a disjunctive element
◦ the ignorance inference that accompanies both weak and strong disjunction

I will argue the following:
◦ the strength of the SI relates to the nature of the alternatives activated by the element at play, namely whether or not the scalar alternatives are obligatory (non-prunable).
◦ the PPI status is the result of an element’s appeal to non-vacuous exhaustification, i.e. proper strengthening.
◦ the epistemic ignorance inference is the result of a last resort way of avoiding a contradiction, namely via the insertion of a covert modal.

If time permits, we will also see how this account can be carried over to account for the PPI status of existential quantifiers.

Speaker: Laura McPherson (Dartmouth University)
Title: Problems in Seeku plural formation
Date: Oct. 20 (M)
Time: 5:00 - 6:30
Place: 32D-461

On the surface, the plural in Seeku (Mande, Burkina Faso) is marked by some combination of tone raising, diphthong formation, vowel fronting, or nasalization. For example, bi²¹ ‘goat’ has the plural bi³ ‘goats’ with tone raising, ko²koː²¹ ‘rooster’ has the plural ko³koeː³ ‘roosters’ with diphthong formation and tone raising, dyo¹ŋma³ ‘cat’ has the plural dyo¹ŋmɛ³ ‘cats’ with vowel fronting, and sa²¹ ‘rabbit’ has the plural sɛ̃³ with nasalization, vowel fronting, and tone raising. I argue that the segmental changes are best understood as suffixation of a front vowel /-ɛ/, accompanied by vowel harmony ([ATR] and [high]) and vowel elision as a hiatus repair strategy. Thus, a form like ‘goat’ has the following derivation:

UR                   /bi-ɛ/
Harmony       |bi-i|
Elision             |b-i|
SR                     [bi]

While this analysis works in a derivational framework, it runs into trouble in a parallel model of phonology due to counterbleeding opacity between elision and vowel harmony: due to the largely monosyllabic nature of Seeku, most often the only vowel that remains in the plural (under this analysis) is the vowel of the plural suffix, yet it displays harmony with the elided vowel of the stem. In this talk, I show how the rule-based analysis accounts for the data then briefly discuss the varying levels of success of different constraint-based analyses, including standard I-O OT, output-oriented constraints, Harmonic Serialism, and contrast preservation.

Speaker: Kenyon Branan (MIT)
Title: A long distance subject/object extraction
Date/Time:Thursday, October 21, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

There are a number of ditransitive verbs that are able to take both a DP and a CP complement. A subset of these verbs exhibit an interesting asymmetry: long distance object extraction of a DP is grammatical, whereas long distance subject extraction of a DP is ungrammatical, even when licensing conditions for long distance subject extraction are fulfilled. Examples of ungrammatical subject extraction are given below.

(1) a.* Who did we convince them [ __ sighted Bigfoot]?
b.* Who did they persuade themselves [ __ should move to Canada]?
c.* What did they assure each other [ __ has sunk]?

Previous accounts of this [Stowell (1981), Bošković and Lasnik (2003)] attribute this ungrammaticality to licensing conditions for elements moved out of subject position. We take a different approach. We show that this ungrammaticality obtains only in cases where the extracted subject is a DP. We give evidence from two tests which suggest that the matrix subject of these verbs originates below [spec,vP]. Putting these two together, we argue that the ungrammaticality of sentences like (1) is the result of an intervention effect. The movement of a DP containing a wh-word to [spec,vP] creates a structure where T is unable to Agree with the low subject, the moved DP acting as an intervener.

We propose that there is a structural difference between long distance subject movement and long distance object movement. Long distance subject movement involves movement of a subject from the CP to matrix [spec,vP]. Long distance object movement involves two steps: movement of the CP to [spec,vP], and subextraction of the object DP from the CP. Crucially, long distance object movement does not create the asymmetric c-command relationship between two syntactic objects of the same type which characterizes intervention effects.

Speaker: Aron Hirsch (MIT)
Title: Deconstructing exceptives
Date/Time:Thursday, October 23, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

This talk looks at the semantics of exceptive expressions like but and other than. Building on insights in Gajewski (2008, 2013), I pursue an analysis of exceptives as sharing a common semantic core: a form of subtraction. But in (1) takes John as its argument and returns the set of all entities (atomic or plural) which do not include John. The resultant meaning composes with students by Predicate Modification, yielding the set of students not including John. This set is the restrictor of every.

(1) Every student but John came.

I will argue for an analysis of but as obligatorily strengthened by the Exh operator of Fox (2007). Exh is responsible for deriving the entailment in (1) that John did not come. The literature (in particular, Gajewski 2013) has pursued this approach, but with additional complications, which I will argue are avoidable.

I will show how the analysis extends to account for further empirical puzzles, in particular the incompatibility of exceptives with both, all when there is a numeral present (Moltmann 1993), and singular definites. Each expression in (2) introduces a presupposition about the size of its restrictor: the presupposes uniqueness, both presupposes duality, and all six presupposes a cardinality of six. I will argue that presuppositions project universally out of alternatives over which Exh quantifies, and that the result is presupposition conflict in each of (2a-c).

(2) a. *Both students but John came.
b. *All six students but John came.
c. *The student but John came.

Finally, I will show that the analysis sheds light on the typology of exceptives. But and other than are both a spell-out of the subtraction operator. The dimension on which they differ is that the but allomorph can only occur with Exh, while other than can occur with or without Exh. The availability of a parse without Exh will account for the freer distribution of other than than but and its fewer entailments:

(3) Some student other than/*but John came.
(John could have come also, or not.)
Three students other than/*but John came.
(John could have come also, or not.)

I will motivate the claim that other than is nonetheless optionally strengthened by testing for a parse with Exh using Hurford’s disjunctions.

Speaker: Yimei Xiang (Harvard)
Title: Mention-Some Readings of Indirect Questions: from Experiments to Formalizations
Time: Thursday, October 23, 5:30-7pm
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I look for experimental clues and propose a schematized analysis for the following three problems about mention-some (MS) readings of indirect questions. First, which type(s) of indirect questions admit MS readings? Second, is there any MS reading sensitive to false answers (FAs)? Third, are FAs equally bad? Based on the results of five TVJTs on ATurk and the reanalysis of Klinedinst & Rothschild’s (2011) raw data, I find that (i) MS readings are also supported by indirect MA-questions under predicates like tell; (ii) there is an MS reading sensitive to FAs, in parallel to the intermediately exhaustive reading; and (iii) FAs are not equally bad, in particular, over affirmation is relatively more acceptable than over deny in MA-questions, while over deny is relatively more acceptable than over affirmation in MS-questions.

Speaker: Heidi Klockmann (Utrecht University)
Title: Case alternations and case hierarchies: A view from numerals and negation
Date/Time:Thursday, October 14, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

A number of Slavic and Uralic languages share the property of blocking structural case assignment in the presence of an oblique case assigner. This alternation has attracted the most attention in the context of numerals, whereby the case triggered by the numeral, genitive in Polish (1) and partitive in Finnish (2), fails to appear in oblique contexts.

(1) a. Iwan kupił pięć samochodów
Ivan   bought  five   cars.GEN
Ivan bought five cars
b. z pięcioma samochodami
with five.INST    cars.INST
…with five cars

(2) a. Ivan osti viisi auto-a
Ivan bought five-0 car-PART.SG
Ivan bought five cars (Brattico 2011: 1045)
b. Minä asuin kolmessa talossa
I lived three.INE.SG house.INE.SG
I lived in three houses (Brattico 2011: 1051)

Previous accounts have described the data in terms of case hierarchies, whereby inherent case outranks structural case, leading to the patterns above (cf. Babby 1987). However, such accounts suffer in the face of Finnish, which does not appear to respect the structural-inherent case distinction for case alternations (Brattico 2010, 2011).

In this talk, I discuss various case alternations, focusing specifically on numerals and negation in Polish and to a lesser degree, Finnish. I show that we can model these facts using a case stacking mechanism, which necessitates the use of a case hierarchy in terms of specific cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), rather than case types (inherent, structural). I further show that certain cases appear to have a lexical requirement, leading to case percolation in the context of semi-lexical elements. Finally, I consider the possible underpinnings of the case hierarchy, and suggest that it actually reflects a structural difference between certain cases.

Speaker: Amanda Swenson (MIT)
Time: Wednesday, October 15, 3:00-4:30pm (note exceptional time!)
Location: 32-D831
Title: The Morphosemantics of the Perfect in Malayalam

In this talk, I will examine the the semantics of the two constructions identified by Asher & Kumari (1997) as expressing the perfect in Malayalam. I consider whether or not the Right Boundary of the Perfect Time Span is set by tense, as it is in perfect constructions in Greek, English and Bulgarian (Iatridou et al. 2001). This question is particularly interesting in light of work by Amritavalli & Jayaseelan (2005) and Amritavalli (2014) which has argued that Malayalam does not have a TP and that temporal interpretation is read off of aspect. I will show, based on evidence from the construction that expresses the Existential perfect, that their system makes incorrect predictions for the perfect. I will provide a compositional analysis for the Malayalam Existential perfect. I also consider the other construction used for the Resultative and Universal perfects and show the ways in which it does and does not match the semantics of the parallel constructions in other languages.

Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara (MIT) (joint work with Martin Hackl and Ken Wexler)
Title: On acquisition of “only”: Question-Answer congruence and scalar presuppositions
Date/Time:Thursday, October 16, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

There is a long-standing puzzle in acquisition of only since Crain et al. (1994): children up to age 6 display difficulties understanding sentences with pre-subject only (“subject-only”, e.g. Only the cat is holding a flag.) while having no difficulty understanding sentences with pre-VP only (“VP-only”, e.g. The cat is only holding a flag.). We note that neither “subject-only” nor “VP-only” are congruent with a broad question (e.g. What happened?), which is typically used to prompt puppet’s answers in experiments in the literature. Instead, they are congruent with different sub-questions, which we hypothesize that listeners must accommodate during comprehension. Our experiments compare children’s adult-like responses when we use broad questions and their responses when we use sub-questions. The results show that children are sensitive to Question-Answer Congruence (QAC) and support the idea that accommodation of sub-questions of What happened? plays a role in Crain’s puzzle.

Speaker: David Nicolas (ENS)
Day/time: Friday, 17 October, 3:30pm
Location: 32-D461
Title: Two and a half apples

With some count nouns, we understand expressions of the form “a half N” and “half of an N” and sentences like this one:

(1) Two and a half apples are on the table.

This is true, for instance, if on the table there are two apples and one half apple (half of an apple).

If instead of “two and a half” we use a simple cardinal like “two”, the truth conditions of a similar sentence can be stated like this:

(2) Two apples are on the table
is true iff exists x (apple(x) & card(x) = 2 & on_the_table(x)) {“at least” semantics}

This “at least” semantics of cardinals just asserts the existence of two things. An “exact semantics” would assert the existence of exactly two things and no more.

Whether one adopts an “at least” semantics or an “exact” semantics, these kind of truth conditions are inadequate for (1) for two reasons (Salmon 1997, Liebesman 2014):

• Half an apple is not in the denotation of “apples”, so it cannot be in the denotation of two and a half apples if one just “intersects” the meaning of “apples” with that of “two and a half”.
• The function card() returns the cardinality of a plurality or set, which can never be a fractional number.

So what are the truth conditions of the sentence and how do we get them?

Speaker: Brian Buccola (McGill University)
Time: Wednesday, October 8, 3:30-5pm (note exceptional time!)
Location: 32-D461
Title: Global semantic constraints: the case of van Benthem’s problem

Any adjectival theory of numeral modifiers faces a challenge known as van Benthem’s problem (van Benthem, 1986), whereby non-upward-monotone quantifiers like “fewer than three” give rise to inadequate truth conditions. I propose a novel solution based on general economy principles for LF availability: certain LFs are generated by the grammar but unavailable (blocked) by virtue of (i) their semantic equivalence to LFs of syntactically simpler sentences, and (ii) the simultaneous availability of other, non-trivial LFs. The equivalence check is shown to rely crucially on the distributivity-collectivity properties of the predicates, in particular on whether the predicates distribute to at least some (not necessarily every) subpart (not necessarily atomic). The proposal therefore makes strong predictions regarding the interpretations of sentences with negative (and other) quantifiers and various predicates along the distributive-collective spectrum, which I show are borne out.

We will have no lab meeting this week. Our next lab meeting will be Wednesday, 10/15.

Speaker: Ethan Poole (UMass Amherst)
Title: Deconstructing quirky subjects
Date/Time:Thursday, October 09, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Quirky (nonnominative) subjects differ across languages in whether they display the full range of properties exhibited by canonical nominative subjects. Based on data from Icelandic, German, Hindi-Urdu, Basque, and Laz, I show that the subjecthood properties exhibited by quirky subjects crosslinguistically obey an implicational hierarchy. I argue that this hierarchy is the result of DPs exhibiting a set of subjecthood properties as a function of how high they raise in the functional sequence.

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Toward a unified analysis of antipassive and pseudo noun incorporation constructions
Date/Time: Tuesday, Sept 30, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: See attachment LSA 2015 abstract

The 19th annual meeting of Sinn und Bedeutung was held at the Georg August University at Göttingen from September 15 to 17, 2014. Sabine Iatridou was one of the invited speakers. She gave a talk entitled Our even (joint work with Sergei Tatevosov). The following MIT students and faculty gave talks:

• Martin Hackl, Erin Olson and Ayaka Sugawara: “Processing Only: Scalar Presupposition and the Structure of ALT(S)”
• Miriam Nussbaum: “Subset Comparatives as Comparative Quantifiers”
• Wataru Uegaki: “Predicting the variations in the exhaustivity of embedded interrogatives”

Some MIT alumni were also there:

• Roni Katzir and Raj Singh: “Economy of structure and information”
• Benjamin Spector and Yasutada Sudo: “Presupposed Ignorance and Scalar Strengthening”

Speaker: Paul Egré (Institut Jean-Nicod)
Title: Intensional readings of “many” and moral expectations
Time: Friday, 10/3/14, 3:30-5:00 PM
Venue: 32-141

The determiner “many” is unlike “some” or “all” in that i) it is vague and context-sensitive: how many counts as many depends both on the context and on the speaker (see Partee 1989), and ii) it has intensional readings, in the sense that “many As are Bs” and “many Cs are Ds” can differ in truth value even as the predicates A and C are coextensional, and the predicates C and D are (Keenan and Stavi 1986, Fernando and Kamp 1996, Lappin 2000). Intensional readings of sentences of the form “many As are Cs” can often be given a comparative paraphrase in terms of expectations: “many students left” meaning “(significantly) more students left than expected”. In this paper, I propose to clarify the notion of expectation in question. Two kinds of expectations ought to be distinguished. One concerns statistical expectations in a broad sense, which involve a representation of how likely or typical an event is (see Moxey and Sanford 1993, and Fernando and Kamp 1996 on “many”). Another kind concerns moral expectations in a broad sense, involving a representation of how good or desirable an event is. The latter has received less attention in the literature. I will present the results of a set of experimental studies, run jointly with Florian Cova (University of Geneva), in which we investigated the sensitivity of judgments involving “many” to those two kinds of expectations. The results indicate that judgments involving “many” are sensitive to both kinds of expectations, but they show a considerable influence of moral expectations proper. Our main finding is that the threshold relevant to ascribe “many” is systematically lowered for predicates that have a negative value or that are matched with a more undesirable outcome. This pattern of results bears a substantive connection with the asymmetry originally pointed out by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) concerning the perception of losses vs. gains. I will discuss different ways in which the sensitivity of “many” to moral expectations might be regimented. I will also look at the results from the perspective of extensional accounts of the semantics of “many” (Solt 2012, Greer 2014), in which intensional readings are accounted for in terms of a shift of comparison class.

Our next ESSL/LacqLab meeting will take place on Wednesday, October 1, at 5:00 PM in room 32-D831. NOTE THE TIME CHANGE FROM THE USUAL! Despina Oikonomou will be presenting.

Speaker: Ivy Sichel (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Anatomy of a counterexample: Extraction from relative clauses
Date/Time:Thursday, October 02, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Relative clauses (henceforth RCs) are considered islands for extraction, yet acceptable cases of overt extraction have been attested over the years in a variety of languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Hebrew, English, Italian, Spanish, French, Japanese (Erteschik-Shir 1973, 1982, Kuno 1976, Engdahl 1980, McCawley 1981, Chomsky 1982, Taraldsen 1982, Doron 1982, Chung and McCloskey 1983, Abe et. al. 2010, Cinque 2010), and also in Lebanese Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, where covert extraction from an RC is observed (Aoun & Li 2003, Hulsey & Sauerland 2006). The possibility for extraction has often been presented as evidence against a syntactic theory of locality, and in favor of constraints defined in terms of information structure (Erteschik-Shir 1973, 1982, 1997, Engdahl 1982, 1997, Ambridge & Goldberg 2008), or processing limitations and constraints on working memory (Hofmeister & Sag 2010). Another possibility, still hardly explored (but see Kush et. al. 2013), is that locality is determined syntactically (Chomsky 1973 and subsequent work), combined with a more fine-grained structure for RCs and a theory of how extraction from this structure interacts with the theory of locality. I argue in favor of the latter approach. I assume the structural ambiguity of RCs (Sauerland 1998, Grosu & Landman 1998, Bhatt 2002, among others) and argue that while externally headed RCs do block extraction, extraction is possible, under certain conditions, from a Raising RC, and is formally similar to acceptable extraction from a Wh-island.

The 9th International Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics (TEAL-9) was held last week at the University of Nantes in France. Second year student Sophie Moracchini talked about the syntax and semantics of Vietnamese comparatives. Mitcho Erlewine ‘14 (McGill University) presented his work On the position of focus adverbs. Tue Trinh ‘11 (University of Wisconsin) gave a talk entitled Interpreting expletive negation in Vietnamese. Yasutada Sudo ‘12 (University College of London) talked about An anti-exhaustive, polarity sensitive connective in Japanese & higher-order scalar implicatures.

The full program and abstracts can be found here.

Phonology 2014 was held at MIT over the week end. First-year student Erin Olson gave a tutorial on Automatic Forced Alignment with Prosodylab-Aligner. Third-year student Juliet Stanton gave a talk about Learnability shapes typology: the case of the midpoint pathology. Fifth-year student Suyeon Yun talked about English -uh- insertion and consonant cluster splittability. Third-year students Sam Zukoff and Benjamin Storme presented posters entitled Stress Restricts Reduplication: Stress-Reduplication Interactions in Australian and Austronesian and Closed Syllable Vowel Laxing in Continental French: a Dispersion-Theoretic Account.

Among the presenters were also some MIT alumni. Gillian Gallagher ‘10 (NYU) was one of the three invited speakers. She gave a talk entitled Asymmetries in the representation of categorical phonotactics. Yoonjung Kang ‘00 (University of Toronto Scarborough) talked about French loanwords in Vietnamese: the role of input language phonotactics and contrast in loanword adaptation (paper co-authored by Andrea Hòa Phạm from the University of Florida and Benjamin Storme). Jonah Katz ‘10 (West Virginia University) presented a poster about Continuity lenition.

Speaker: Benjamin Storme (MIT)
Title: Closed syllable vowel laxing and the perceptibility of coda consonant place contrasts
Date/Time: Monday, September 22, 5-6:30 pm
Location: 32-D461

Closed syllable vowel laxing describes a common pattern of allophonic distribution where tense vowels are laxed in closed syllables (e.g., French vous votez /vote/ “you vote” vs il vote /vɔt/ “he votes”). I propose that laxing vowels (e.g., o->ɔ) in closed syllables is a strategy selected by speakers to enhance the perceptibility of coda consonant place contrasts. I present results of a perception experiment that provide preliminary support for this hypothesis.

Our next ESSL/LacqLab meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 24, at 3:00 PM in room 32-D831. It will be partly a brainstorming session on possible activities involving “Linguistics for Kids.”

Speaker: Edwin Howard (MIT)
Title: Superlative Degree Clauses: evidence from NPI licensing
Date/Time:Thursday, September 25, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

This talk concerns the superlative morpheme -est and its ability to license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as any and ever, and addresses the puzzle posed by utterances such as (1):

(1) a. John read the most books that anyone ever read.
b. Mary sang the loudest that anyone ever sang.

While the embedded clause in (1a) appears at first sight to be a relative clause modifier of the NP poems, an analogous role for its counterpart in (1b) would be surprising as RCs do not typically modify adverbs (*Mary sang loudly that I like). Furthermore I demonstrate that the embedded clauses in (1) are not predicted to be able to host NPIs under a RC modifier analysis, given otherwise well-supported proposals that appeal to the entailments that semantic operators such as -est give rise to (Ladusaw 1980; von Fintel 1999, Gajewski 2010).

I present my proposal to analyse these embedded clauses as arguments of -est, akin to than- or as-clauses familiar from other degree constructions. The Superlative Degree Clause analysis makes welcome predictions for the interpretation of such structures, and provides an elegant account of the otherwise puzzling contrasts between (1) and the odd degraded or infelicitous examples in (2):

(2) a. *John read the most books that anyone ever wrote.
b. #Mary sang the loudest that any baritone ever sang

If time permits I will sketch out an implementation of the SDC analysis and consider its consequences for our understanding of the syntax/semantics interface.

Date/Time: Friday, September 26, 5 pm
Location: 8th floor lounge

LingBeer will be starting up again this Friday at 5pm. LingBeer is a reading group, but +beer. This week, we will be reading Michael Barrie and Eric Mathieu’s “Noun Incorporation and Phrasal Movement”.

Phonology 2014 will be held at MIT from September 19-21, 2014. Methods tutorials will be held on Friday Sept 19, and research presentations (talks and posters) will take place on Sat and Sun Sept 20-21. Invited speakers are:

• Naomi Feldman, University of Maryland
• Gillian Gallagher, NYU
• René Kager, Utrecht University

Visit the conference website for more information.

Speaker: Suyeon Yun (MIT)
Title: English -uh-insertion and consonant cluster splittability
Date/Time: Monday, September 15, 5-6:30 pm
Location: 32-D461

This paper investigates the grammar of consonant cluster splittability based on a case study from English -uh-insertion, which, to my knowledge, has not been described or studied thus far. Experimental evidence will show that the acceptability of -uh-insertion is determined by interactions of several factors, so that the resulting -uh-form can be perceptually similar to the original word.

Speaker: Coppe van Urk (MIT)
Title: Why Dutch is like Salish: On the nature of the EPP
Date/Time: Tuesday, Sept 16, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

This talk discusses some syntactic environments in Dutch in which Locative Inversion appears to be obligatory (Hoekstra and Mulder 1990; Zwart 1991). I show that this pattern generalizes and that locative expressions, particularly locative proforms, may be used to satisfy the EPP property of Spec-IP. I relate this to the claim, developed by Ritter and Wiltschko (2009) on the basis of Salishan languages, that Infl may have locative content, and I offer a modification of the Ritter and Wiltschko proposal that accommodates the Dutch facts. If on the right track, this proposal suggests that the EPP is a property of a head (Landau 2006; Richards 2014), rather than a property of a single feature (Chomsky 1995; Pesetsky and Torrego 2001).

Our next ESSL/LacqLab meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 17, at 3:00 PM in room 32-D831 (note room change from last week!). Iain Giblin will be presenting on nominal recursion in child language.

Speaker: Tsuyoshi Sugawara (Ube National College of Technology / MIT)
Title: Between Red Sox and Generative Grammar: The Lexical Semantics and Morphosyntax of the SASPAN Construction
Date/Time:Thursday, September 18, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

The purpose of this talk is to discuss the lexical-semantic and morpho-syntactic properties of Syntactically Attributive but Semantically Predicative Adjective-plus-Noun (SASPAN) construction,exemplified by “an adjectival analysis of cardinal numerals.” I will describe the peculiarity of the SASPAN constructions, in comparison with some other adjective-noun combinations in which the prenominal adjective combines with the head noun in a non-intersective way, and show examples of such a construction in English, Japanese and other languages. Then, by employing the framework of the Generative Lexicon Theory ( e.g., Pustejovsky 1995, Jackendoff 1997, 2002, Pustejovsky et. al. 2013) and building on the earlier findings in Sugawara (2010, 2011, 2013a,b), I will propose (i) a semantic structure for the head noun occurring in the construction, (ii) two semantic constraints on the construction, one applying to the prenominal adjective and the other to the head noun, and (iii) the mechanism by which such a construction is derived.

We forgot to tell you last week, but several of our linguists - faculty and students both - spent the previous week in Oxford giving talks at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of Great Britain (LAGB).

Faculty speakers included invited speaker Adam Albright, who gave both a Masterclass on “Gradient Phonotactics” and the 2014 Association Lecture on “Generalizing phonological patterns with phonetic and featural biases”, and Edward Flemming, who spoke about “Deriving long-distance coarticulation from local constraints”.

In addition, two talks by three students were delivered by two students (for homework, figure out the possible scope relations among these quantifiers, and which reading we intended): 3rd-year student Juliet Stanton spoke on “Varieties of A’ extractions: evidence from preposition stranding”, and Sam Steddy gave a talk presenting joint work with Iain Giblin entitled “Where’s wh-? Prosodic disambiguation of in-situ whphrases” (slides with audio here and handout here. (True tidbit: Juliet was interrogated about her talk by the border control officer at Heathrow airport. After pondering for a moment or two, he expressed agreement with the crucial judgments in her paper, and let her into the UK.)

Alumni of our program presenting at LAGB included Pilar Barbosa (PhD 1995), who gave a joint talk with Cecile Decat on “Subject object asymmetries in Clitic Left Dislocation” and Yasutada Sudo (PhD 2012), whose joint talk with Patrick Elliott discussed “E-type readings of quantifiers under ellipsis” — plus undergrad alum Christina Kim (S.B. 2003), who talked about “Predictability and implicit communicative content”. Recent visitors Caroline Heycock and Gary Thoms also gave a joint talk on “Reconstruction and modification in relative clauses”

Speaker: Jim McCloskey (UCSC)
Title: Phasehood, the Maximal Verbal Projection and Preverbs in Irish
Date/Time: Thursday, September 18th, 5:15-6:45 pm
Location: 34-101

Please note the special time, date and place for this talk.

The direct object relation is a relation of central importance in syntactic theory and so it was an important moment when the nature of that relation was fundamentally re-thought in work of the 1990’s. This paper examines some of the issues raised in that re-thinking, by looking closely at the expression of the direct object relation in Irish (infinitival) clauses. It focuses in particular on what is to be learned from an intricate pattern of dialectal, idiolectal, and generational variation which, it is claimed, sheds light on how we should understand `Burzio’s Generalization’, which is itself a central aspect of theories of objecthood which derive from Government Binding Theory.

The Phonology Circle will return to its traditional meeting time of Monday 5-6:30 but will be held in 32D-461.

Speaker: Martin Hackl, Erin Olson, and Ayaka Sugawara (MIT)
Title: Processing Only: Scalar Presupposition and the Structure of Alternatives
Date/Time: Wednesday, September 10, 3:00-4:30 PM
Location: 32-D461

Martin, Erin, and Ayaka will be practicing for their Sinn Und Bedeutung talk. See abstract attached.

SuB Practice Abstract - WHAMIT

Speaker: Juliet Stanton (MIT)
Title: Learnability shapes typology: the case of the midpoint pathology
Date/Time:Thursday, September 11, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

The aim of this paper is to explore the idea that learnability shapes typology: that the range of linguistic variation we observe is delimited by constraints on the types of grammars that can be acquired accurately and reliably (cf. Boersma 2003, Alderete 2008, Staubs 2014). I focus specifically on the midpoint pathology (Eisner 1997, Hyde 2008, Kager 2012), a term used to characterize a type of unattested stress system in which stress is drawn to the middle of mid-length words, but not others. Kager (2012) argues that eliminating the pathology requires us to eliminate contextual lapse constraints (e.g. *ExtLapseR) from Con and adopt weakly layered feet; I argue instead that systems exhibiting the pathology are unattested because the necessary ranking is difficult to learn. I present modeling results that support the current proposal, and show that the absence of the midpoint pathology can in part be attributed to extra-phonological limitations on the learner’s input. I discuss some immediate challenges for the proposal, and show that its global predictions are borne out. I argue that, if we can explain the absence of all midpoint systems as the result of constraints on learnability, then there is no need to exclude them from the learner’s hypothesis space. In other words: to explain the absence of the midpoint pathology, we do not need to eliminate contextual lapse constraints, nor do we need to adopt weakly layered feet.

Speaker: Mia Nussbaum (MIT)
Title: Subset Comparatives as Comparative Quantifiers
Date/Time: Friday, 12 September, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-D461

Mia will be practicing for her Sinn Und Bedeutung talk. See abstract attached.

nussbaum_sub19_abstract

Speaker: Nicholas Longenbaugh
Title: On the approximate parity of Niuean arguments: a case study in copy-raising
Date/Time: Tuesday, Sept 9, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: here

Today, Tuesday September 2, 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, 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.

At least two conferences will be held at MIT during the fall semester:

Phonology 2014 will be held at MIT from September 19-21, 2014. Invited speakers are:

• Gillian Gallagher (NYU)
• René Kager (Utrecht University)
• Naomi Feldman (UMD)

The 45th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society will be held at MIT on October 31 - November 2nd, 2014. Invited speakers are:

• Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)
• Roger Schwarzschild (MIT)
• Kie Zuraw (UCLA)

24.960 Syntactic Models 

Instructor: David Pesetsky Lecture: T2pm-5pm (32-D461)

The course has twin goals:

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

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

For a demonstration that the issue is live (including the hotly debated question of whether there even is a question), you need look no further than a recent discussion on Norbert Hornstein’s blog, featuring Omer Preminger (who taught this very class in 2011). See http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2014/08/cakes-damn-cakes-and-other-baked-goods.html, which begins with links to earlier discussion on the blog that prompted that posting, and continues with millions of comments. In fact, at the right moment (about half-way through the semester), we will use this blog debate as a springboard for our own discussion.

You can get a good sense of what the class will be like from its old Stellar pages — for example http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp09/24.960 (and http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp11/24.960 for Omer’s version). I plan to follow essentially the same structure (with improvements in the LFG section due to Omer) — but I will work extra hard to reserve time for a topic of your choosing at the very end.

24.964 Topics in Phonology

Instructor: Edward Flemming Lecture: R9.30-12.30 (32-D461)

This course will organized around three main topics:

1. Phonetic grammars It has long been known that the grammars of languages must regulate relatively fine details of phonetic realization, but relatively little is known about the form of the relevant component of grammar. We will study a model based on weighted constraints (Flemming 2001), based on case studies including coarticulation (local and long distance) and the timing and realization of tones. We will also consider the relationship between phonetic and phonological grammars in light of this model.

2. Morphology-phonology interactions: what are the relative roles of morphology and phonology in accounting for allomorphic variation in paradigms? Morphological paradigms sometimes show complex patterns of distribution of stem realizations, in which a given phonological form of a stem appears in a morphosyntactically arbitrary set of contexts (e.g. 1pl and 2pl pres subj, 1pl pres indic, 1pl pres imp). Such cases have been taken as evidence that morphological grammars can specify complex and arbitrary mappings from morphosyntactic specification to phonological form, as proposed by Aronoff (1994). On the other hand, if these morphosyntactically arbitrary distributions of allomorphs are the result of phonological conditioning, then these powerful morphological devices are not required (cf. Steriade in press). Proponents of purely morphological analyses have often dismissed phonological alternatives based on an impoverished conception of the possibilities for phonological conditioning of stem form. We will review cases from Latin and Romance languages in light of mechanisms such as Output-Output Correspondence constraints, phonological conditioning of allomorph selection, similarity-conditioned merger etc.

3. Do speakers’ grammars contain phonetically-based constraints? Phonological typology has been shown to reflect a variety of phonetically-based constraints, but it remains controversial whether these constraints play a role in individual grammars, or whether they are external to grammar, applying only through processes of sound change (e.g. Blevins 2004). We will try to clarify the empirical claims that are at issue here and examine experimental evidence that bears on those claims. (This topic was also covered last year, but we will be looking at new/different sources of evidence this year).

24.979 Topics in Semantics

Instructor: Danny Fox and Roger Schwarzschild Lecture: Mondays 2-5; 32D-461

This seminar will deal with various issues in the semantics of degree expressions (scalar adjectives, comparatives, equatives, degree questions, etc.). We will begin with a well-known puzzle pertaining to the scopal interactions in which such expressions partake. We haven’t yet decided were we will go from there, but the aim is to get to Roger’s recent work reconceptualizing degrees as segments (parts of which were presented here at MIT during IAP and parts of which were presented at SALT) and some work in progress on equatives that Danny’s been doing with Luka Crnic.

21F.514/24.946 Ling Theory & Japanese Lang

Instructor: Shigeru Miyagawa Lecture: M10-1 (32-D461)

We will look at a variety of related topics centering on Japanese but also across a number of other languages. The topics mostly relate to issues of agreement, very broadly conceived:

• agreement systems, including those that don’t appear to have agreement (Japanese, Chinese, Malayalam, Mongolian, with reference to Romance)
• topic systems and root phenomena (Japanese, English, Spanish, etc.)
• binding and agreement (Japanese, Chinese, Malayalam, with reference to Basque, etc.)
• the structure of ‘why’ (Japanese, Chinese, English)
• answer fragments and sluicing (Japanese, English, German)
• position of the subject (standard Japanese, Kumamoto dialect of Japanese)
• marking of the subject as genitive (Japanese, Mongolian, Turkish, etc.)
• passive (Japanese)

24.S95: Seminar on Computation, Biology, and Language

Instructors: Robert C. Berwick & Noam Chomsky Lecture: Fridays, 11-2, 32D-461

This seminar will cover four inter-related topics: (1) recent work in linguistic theory extending ‘Problems of Projection’; (2) evolutionary biology as it relates to the origin of language, including the background results from evolutionary population biology required to understand evolutionary modeling, as well as comparative biology, genomics, and the role of natural selection; (3) computation and generative grammar, including results on the role of strong generative capacity, the computational complexity of natural language, and implemented parsers for modern minimalist generative grammars, including principles and parameters theory, derivation by phrase, and problems of projection; and (4) learnability and the poverty of the stimulus, including the classical Gold results, the role of locality constraints in learnability, and the implications of statistical approaches such as Bayesian modeling and minimum description length. No prior knowledge of computation or evolutionary biology is assumed. Syllabus and readings for the first meeting (9/5) and subsequent meetings are posted on the stellar site.

The MIT Linguistics Colloquium schedule for this academic year is below. All talks are on Fridays. For further information, please contact the organizers for this year, Ruth Brillman and Mia Nussbaum.

Fall 2014:

• Oct. 3 — Paul Egré
• Nov. 7 — Klaus Abels
• Nov. 21 — Karlos Arregi
• Dec. 5 — Nina Topintzi
• Dec. 12 — Tim Stowell

Spring 2015:

• Feb. 6 — Kristine Yu
• Feb. 27 — Gunnar Hansson
• Mar. 6 — Richard Larson
• Apr. 17 — Aditi Lahiri
• Apr. 24 — Ming Xiang
• May 8 — Jessica Coon

The first ESSL/LAQLab (Language Acquisition Lab) of the semester will take place Wednesday 3:00 to 4:30 in the 4th floor seminar room (32-D461). We will review summer activities and try to come up with a schedule for the semester. All are welcome!

Speaker: Dorothy Ahn (Harvard)
Title: Semantics of focus particles too and either
Date/Time: Thursday, September 4, 5:30-7p
Location: 34-D461

Additive either is an NPI that appears clause-finally in sentences like (1).

(1) John didn’t leave. Bill didn’t leave either.
(2) *Bill left either.

An adequate account must explain at least two main properties of additive either: a) its restricted distribution and b) the relation between the host – the clause containing either – and the antecedent – the clause preceding the host. Building on Rullmann’s (2003) intuition that additive either is a negative counterpart of focus particle too, I first propose an analysis for too: it introduces an anaphoric variable q that requires an antecedent, and when applied to a proposition p, it asserts a conjunction of q and p. After discussing how this anaphoricity accounts for the relation between the host and the antecedent, I propose that additive either is a completely parallel disjunctive counterpart of too, with its meaning identical to too except that it asserts a disjunction between q and p. The restricted distribution of additive either is predicted to follow simply from the lexical entry of either once we adopt the exhaustification-based theory of NPIs (Chierchia, 2013) and assume thateither has the same domain and scalar alternatives of a regular disjunction.

Chierchia, G. (2013). Logic in Grammar: Polarity, free choice, and intervention.
Rullmann, H. (2003). Additive particles and polarity. Journal of semantics, 20(4)

Speaker: Roman Feiman (Snedeker & Carey Labs at Harvard Psychology)
Title: The acquisition of verbal negation: a case study in the development of logical operators in thought and language
Date/Time: Thursday, September 4, 12:30-1:45
Location: 34-D461

Logical connectives in natural language, such as “and,” “or,” and “not,” have highly abstract meanings that are typically modeled as higher-order functions of the meanings of the phrases with which they combine. Despite this complexity, children begin to use such words very early. How do they learn the meanings of words with such abstract, non-referential content? Does learning the corresponding words somehow help learn the concept? Or must one know the concept already, so that learning the word is a matter of labeling an existing mental symbol?

I will describe a series of experiments examining children’s comprehension of the words “no” and “not.” Our main finding is that children do not begin to understand the abstract meaning of these words until the age of two. This is surprisingly late, given that “no”, in particular, is frequently produced by younger children. I will discuss some possible interpretations for this disconnect between children’s production of the word and understanding of its logical force, as well as the significance of these findings for the relationship between the development of logic and language.

Over the summer, our new linguistics lab manager, Leo Rosenstein, started work. She will be helping with experimental research throughout the linguistics side of the department, including the Phonetics lab, the Experimental Syntax and Semantics lab, and the Language Acquisition Lab.

Leo is originally from Troy, Michigan. She got her BA in Linguistics from Boston University in January 2013, and is finishing her MA in Linguistics there in September. She is primarily interested in semantics, and is writing her master’s project on adjective denotation and classification, but she likes syntax and has enjoyed doing work on intonation as well. When not thinking about linguistics, she divides her time between writing, reading, ballroom and swing dancing, fire-spinning, stargazing, singing in a symphonic chorus, and playing Dota 2.

Ömer Demirok

I’m from Turkey. I was born and grew up in Tekirdağ, the land of “rakı”. I received my B.A. degree in Foreign Language Education and M.A. degree in Linguistics, both from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Ethnically, I am half Georgian. For this reason, I became interested in Georgian (especially its dialects spoken in Turkey) and shortly after in its endangered sister, Laz. I did fieldwork on Laz in Turkey and wrote my M.A. thesis on the agreement and case systems of Laz. Coming from a country notorious for killing its indigenous languages with great care, I got involved in endangered language preservation efforts. My main interests are syntax and syntax-morphology interface. But I have also done some work in phonology. I certainly look forward to getting my hands dirty (also) with semantics at MIT.

Naomi Francis

I grew up in Tsawwassen, a small town just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. I completed a BA with a double major in linguistics and classics at the University of British Columbia and an MA in linguistics at the University of Toronto. My main interest is in semantics; my recent work has focused on predicates of personal taste, and I hope to continue working on context-dependent expressions at MIT. In the past I’ve also done some fieldwork on modality in Kwak’wala (Wakashan) and Nata (Bantu), and I still have a soft spot for underdocumented and endangered languages. When not doing linguistics, I enjoy knitting, baking, and watching Doctor Who.

Michael Jacques

I’m from Connecticut, I got my B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Connecticut, I am interested in semantics and pragmatics. In my free time, I like to play drums and read.

Nick Longenbaugh

I grew up in the high desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico and completed his BA in Computer Science and Linguistics at Harvard. My linguistic interests comprise complexity in language, particularly the origins and distribution of crossed dependencies; the syntax of verb initial languages; and a less specific fascination with formal semantics. Outside of linguistics, I like riding my bicycles.

Daniel Margulis

I was born in Latvia and grew up in Israel. I received my B.A. in linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I was also working on my M.A. in linguistics. I am interested in semantics, syntax, pragmatics and their interfaces, having special curiosity about negation, polarity sensitivity, tense, modality, aspect, scalar implicatures, focus sensitivity, case and movement. At MIT, I hope to continue dealing with puzzles concerning these topics, along with many new ones.

Erin Olson

I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from McGill University with a BA in Linguistics in 2012. I’m often mistaken for being Canadian (which I don’t mind). In the last two years, I’ve worked as a lab manager at both McGill and MIT doing experimental linguistic work, primarily in syntax and semantics, although my main research interests lie in the field of phonology. I’m especially interested in learning more about the prosody of Algonquian languages, having done some fieldwork on Mi’gmaq (Mi’kmaq, formerly Micmac) while at McGill. When I’m not doing linguistics, I enjoy biking, drawing, computer programming, and reading.

Carolyn Spadine

I’m orignially from New Jersey, but for most of my life I’ve lived in Minneapolis, where I did my BA in Linguistics at the University of Minnesota (with a minor in Cultural Studies). When I’m doing linguistics, I like syntax and semantics, especially in Austronesian languages, and when I’m not, I like rock climbing, cooking, and playing guitar.

Abdul-Razak Sulemana

My name is Abdul-Razak Sulemana, I am from Sandema a small town in the Upper East Region of Ghana. I received my BA in Linguistics and Political Science from the University of Ghana where I also had my MA in Linguistics. I am interested in Syntactic theory, the Syntax of Buli, and the Syntax of Gur languages but I sometimes venture into morphology and phonology. I am open-minded as I embark on the MIT journey. When I am not doing anything related to linguistics, then I am either reading a John Grisham or Sydney Sheldon novel. I go running or play soccer to exercise. I listen a lot but I say little.

Hanzhi Zhu

I was born in Shandong Province on the coast of China, but grew up mostly in Worcester and Shrewsbury, in central Massachusetts. I double majored in Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. At Stanford, I’ve worked on raising constructions in Kazakh, but I’m also interested in a variety of other topics in formal syntax and semantics, and I’m excited to explore other areas as well. For fun, I enjoy a variety of outdoor activities, as well as music, cooking, and calligraphy.

Visiting students

• Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell (University of Texas at Austin) says: “My name is Maria del Mar but everyone just calls me Mar (‘sea’). I’m from an island, Mallorca (Spain), where I lived until I was 20. As an undergraduate I studied English literature and linguistics at the University of the Balearic Islands, The University of Texas at Austin, and Queen Mary University of London. After a year of teaching at The College of the Holy Cross, MA, I decided to move back to UT Austin to pursue graduate studies in linguistics. I’m currently working on the typology of motion constructions. My main interests are semantics, lexical-semantics, pragmatics, and syntax. I look forward to going deeper into any of these fields while at MIT. During my free time, I love traveling, photography, dancing, painting, watching movies, cooking (& eating), and just spending time outdoors while enjoying nature.”
• Brian Buccola (McGill University) says: “My research interests primarily include formal semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and computational linguistics. On the semantics/pragmatics side, I have worked on ignorance inferences associated with superlative numeral/scalar modifiers like “at least” and “at most”. On the phonology side, I have worked on the difference in generative capacity between Optimality Theory and ordered rewrite rules.”
• Heidi Klockmann (PhD student at Utrecht University) works on syntax, especially on case, agreement and numerals.

Visiting scholars

• Tony Borowsky (University of Sydney)’s research interests are all kinds of Theoretical Phonology including issues of lexical phonology in Optimality Theory, the formalization of phonological variation in OT and language acquisition.
• Hemanga Dutta (The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU))’s research explores different phonological theories. He also works on the sociolinguistics and linguistic aspects of Indian languages including language change, language contact, language, power and gender dynamics, language and youth culture, multilingualism, language and education. In addition, he is also interested in applied linguistics, language pedagogy and language disorders.
• Miwako Hisagi (MIT)’s research interests are Speech and Language Processing, Speech Processing, Acoustic Phonetics, Language Acquisition, and Phonetics.
• Masuyo Ito (Fukuoka University) works on first language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and pragmatics.
• Jinglian Li (Beijing Institute of Technology)’s fields are Generative Grammar and Contrastive Linguistics.
• Aijuan Liu (Beijing University of Chinese Medicine) says: “[My] research interests include age effects and maturational constraints in second language acquisition, L2 acquisition of formal aspects of language knowledge (especially morphology and syntax).”
• Chie Nakamura (University of Tokyo)
• Tamina Stephenson (University of Massachusetts Amherst)’s research interests are pragmatics, semantics and philosophy of language.
• Tsuyoshi Sugawara (Ube National College of Technology) writes: “I am a spontaneous and an extrovert person. I love Boston because of its diversity. I am crazy about Boston Red Sox and Boston Celtics. I hold two degrees: Master of Education in Teaching English as a Second Language and Ph.D in Information Science (on Linguistics). As a linguist and a TEFL instructor, I am extremely curious about every language. I have been studying 12 languages (Arabic, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Malay, Chinese, and Korean), communicating every day with my friends from about 50 countries around the world. My research areas are Lexical Semantics (especially on Generative Lexicon Theory), Morphology, Syntax, and Language Acquisition ( Bilingualism, Trilingualism, and Multilingualism).”
• Aline Villavicencio (Institute of Informatics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) reports: “The main goal of this visit is to collaborate with Prof. Berwick on the project Cognitive Computational Models of Natural Languages for Assessing Language Competency (CNPq-MIT) to investigate particular linguistic factors connected to language use in clinical and non-clinical conditions, such as aphasia and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). ”

Congratulations to this summer’s doctoral dissertators!

• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine: Movement out of Focus
• Yusuke Imanishi: Default Ergative
• Patrick Jones:  Tonal Interaction in Kinande: Cyclicity, Opacity, and Morphosyntactic Structure
• Hadas Kotek: Composing Questions

In the coming year, Mitcho will be a post-doc at McGill, Yusuke is an Assistant Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Patrick will be teaching at Harvard, and Hadas will be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill.

And our warmest congratulations to Anthony Brohan on the successful defense of his MA thesis entitled Analytic Bias in Coocurrence Restrictions! Now he’s off to take up a great position at a small firm that a few of us have heard of called “Google”.

(We do think this merits a special late-summer issue of Whamit!)

We are overjoyed to announce that our colleague Donca Steriade has been named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Congratulations, Donca!!!

The just-announced class of 2015 LSA Fellows includes two other MIT PhD alums, in addition to Donca (PhD 1982): C.-T. James Huang of Harvard (MIT PhD 1982) (Donca’s classmate, in fact) and Thomas Wasow of Stanford (MIT PhD 1972). Of the 110 LSA Fellows named since the honor was initiated in 2006, 30 - slightly more than a quarter - are MIT PhDs.  Donca is the fifth member of the MIT faculty to be named an LSA Fellow, joining her colleagues Irene Heim and David Pesetsky and Institute Professors emeritus Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky.

Date/Time: Tuesday, Jun 3, 1:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Patrick Elliott (University College London)
Title: Illusory Repair and the PF-Theory of Islands

In this talk (based on joint work with Matt Barros & Gary Thoms) we argue against the proposal that island violations are repaired by ellipsis. Building on Merchant (2001), we develop an approach to repair-effects based on a number of distinct evasion strategies, which involve a degree of non-isomorphism between the ellipsis site and its antecedent. Island-violations are side-stepped, just so long as a non-island-violating evasion source is available. When non-isomorphism is controlled for, island effects re-emerge. We show this for both sluicing (widely assumed to be island-insensitive) and fragment answers (widely assumed to be island-sensitive). Only the evasion approach can account for the whole set of facts. We conclude: (i) the conjecture that island conditions are fundamentally phonological in nature is incorrect (ii) islands provide a strong argument for silent syntactic structure.

Speaker: Yasutada Sudo (University College London)
Title: How Scalar Implicatures and Presupposition Interact

(Joint work with Benjamin Spector.)

We investigate the interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions in sentences involving both a presupposition trigger and a scalar item, e.g. “John is (un)aware that some of the students smoke”. We first discuss Gajewski & Sharvit’s (2012) account and point out empirical problems for it. Then we present an alternative analysis which is a very natural extension of ‘standard’ treatments of scalar implicatures. We show that it nicely explains the data that is problematic for Gajewski & Sharvit, but claim that it fails to account of the full range of data. This discussion leads us to pursue a view where two distinct strengthening mechanisms are at play. Our key data involves what we call “presupposed ignorance”.

Date/Time: Wednesday, Jun 5, 3pm
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Matthijs Westera (University of Amsterdam)
Title: A pragmatics-driven theory of intonational meaning

I present a compositional semantics for Dutch(/English/German) intonation that crucially treats high phrase accents/boundary tones as signalling conversational maxim violations. Together with Attentive Pragmatics - a set of maxims I proposed earlier for an account of exhaustivity implicatures - this simple assumption is shown to yield very fine-grained and, it seems, accurate semantic/pragmatic predictions for various contours, e.g., that contrastive topic must scope over focus, that fall-rise indicates uncertain relevance or incredulity, and how this all interacts with context. I argue that the assumed intonational meanings are non-arbitrary, suggesting a universal tendency, at least in non-tonal languages, towards an intonational semantics along these lines. Finally, the apparent semanticization of the maxims invites reflection on their status in linguistic theory.

Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Title: Covered Box Task to investigate acquisition of scopally ambiguous sentences: evidence from scrambled sentence in Japanese

(Practice talk for FAJL; joint work with Ken Wexler.)

A major open question in the theory of language acquisition is why children speaking English seem to have difficulty interpreting inverse scope of negation and a universal subject quantifier. Our results contribute both to the solution to this puzzle and provide evidence for particular approaches to the A-movement of Japanese and the theory of contrastive topic. We will argue that children have difficulty with at least some forms of reconstruction and alternative comparison which takes place at LF, but do not have a problem with interpreting a particular logical form generated by syntax.

We conducted two experiments in Japanese with Japanese-speaking children. Our first experiment shows that children accept the not>all reading of scrambled sentences, where the not>all reading is supported by the syntax

Our second experiment shows that children completely fail to get the unambiguous not>all reading of Contrastive Topic sentences, where not>all reading is derived at LF. The difficulty seems to be related to the same type of “alternatives comparison” difficulty that is the major explanation of children’s difficulties with scalar implicatures.

This Spring, Noam Chomsky gave four classes about syntax (and about the language faculty, and the state of the field, and …). Video of these lectures are now available. (Note: during one of them, he lost his microphone for a while — apologies in advance for the loss of sound.)

Lecture 1 (March 3, 2014)
Lecture 2 (April 2, 2014)
Lecture 3 (April 11, 2014)
Lecture 4 (May 19, 2014)

Further, Chomsky visited Sophia University and Keio University in Japan in March. Videos of lectures he gave there are available from their respective webpages.

The 22nd Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm22) was held May 29-31. Among the presentations were:

• Juliet Stanton and Donca Steriade: Stress windows and Base Faithfulness in English suffixal derivatives
• Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000), Tae-Jin Yoon and Sungwoo Han: Lexical diffusion of vowel length merger in Seoul Korean: a corpus-based study
• Adam Albright: Epenthesis in rising sonority clusters in Lakhota
• Suyeon Yun: The role of acoustic disjuncture in loan epenthesis: experimental evidence
• Andrew Nevins (PhD 2005) and Nina Topintzi: Moraic onsets and cross-anchoring in Arrernte
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009): On the Prince-Tesar-Hayes’ approach to OT restrictiveness
• Anthony Brohan: Licensing Catalan laryngeal neutralization by cue (Poster)
• Sam Zukoff: A correlation between stress and reduplication: Diyari and beyond (Poster)
• Lilla Magyar: Gemination in Hungarian loanword adaptation (Poster)
• Benjamin Storme: The Loi de Position and the acoustics of French mid vowels (Poster)
• Katrin Skoruppa, Andrew Nevins and Stuart Rosen: English listeners’ use of vowel phonotactics for speech segmentation (Poster)

The 24th meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 24) was held at NYU on 5/30-6/1.

• Among the invited talks were Valentine Hacquard (PhD 2006), Bootstrapping into attitudes, and Sarah Moss (PhD MIT Philosophy 2009), On the semantics of epistemic vocabulary.
• Wataru Uegaki gave a talk entitled Japanese-type alternative questions in a cross-linguistic perspective.
• Tue Trinh (PhD 2011) presented a poster with Andreas Haida entitled Building alternatives as did Luka Crnič (PhD 2011), on Scope fixing, scope economy, and focus movement.
• Marie-Christine Meyer (PhD 2013), gave a talk entitled Grammatical uncertainty implicatures and Hurford’s constraint

CNRS-IKER in the Basque Country will host the Workshop on Quantifier Scope: Syntactic, Semantic, and Experimental Approaches on June 12-13. Benjamin Bruening (PhD 2001) will present an invited talk entitled Giving and having: quantifier scope and secondary predicates. Susi Wurmbrand (PhD 1998) is also giving an invited talk titled Thoughts on the syntactic domain of QR. Ayaka Sugawara and Ken Wexler will present a talk entitled Covered Box Task to investigate acquisition of scopally ambiguous sentences: evidence from scrambled sentences in Japanese.

NINJAL and ICU are co-hosting the 7th Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics (FAJL7) in Tokyo on June 27-29. The following are among the MIT-affiliated presentations:

• Miwako Hisagi, Valerie Shafer, Shigeru Miyagawa, Hadas Kotek, Ayaka Sugawara and Dimitrios Pantazis: Perception of Japanese vowel duration contrasts by L1 and L2 learners of Japanese: An EEG study
• Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998) and Kazuko Yatsuhiro: Japanese Reported Speech within the Emerging Typology of Speech Reports
• Shinichiro Ishihara (PhD 2003): On Match Constraints (Invited Talk)
• Ayaka Sugawara and Ken Wexler: Children do not accept unambiguous inverse-scope readings: experimental evidence from prosody and scrambling in Japanese
• Ryo Masuda: Phonological and lexical contexts and the phonetic realization of [voice] in Japanese (Poster)
• Takashi Morita: Scalar implicature and restrictive focus particles (Poster)

Finally, NINJAL will also host the 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 14), July 25-27. Presenting there are:

• Yoonjung Kang (PhD 2000), Tae-Jin Yoon and Sungwoo Han: Lexical diffusion of vowel length merger in Seoul Korean: a corpus-based study
• Gillian Gallagher (PhD 2010): Determining the representation of phonotactic restrictions with nonce words (Poster)
• Suyeon Yun: Acoustic disjuncture in consonant clusters and vowel epenthesis (Poster)

Shigeru Miyagawa’s new article, “A feature-inheritance approach to root phenomena and parametric variation”, has just appeared in the June issue of Lingua. It is jointly authored with Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández (University of Seville). The article compares topic constructions in Japanese, Spanish, and English.

As the summer conference season starts up, here are some events where MIT linguists can be spotted. More updates will follow in the next Whamit! issue.

• Donca Steriade and Gillian Gallagher (NYU, PhD 2010) were invited discussants at the conference on Agreement By Correspondence (ABC), held this past weekend at UC Berkeley.
• The 21st Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 21) will be held May 23-25 at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Mitcho Erlewine, Ted Levin, and Coppe van Urk will present a paper entitled What makes a voice system? On the relationship between voice marking and case. Among the invited speakers is Diane Massam (UToronto, PhD 1982) whose talk is entitled Applicatives and the split argument hypothesis in Niuean.
• This year’s meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association will take place at Brock University in Ontario on May 24-26.Current lab manager and incoming PhD student Erin Olson and alum Michael Wagner (McGill, PhD 2005) are among the presenters of the talk Allophonic variation in English /l/: production, perception, and segmentation. Michelle Yuan is among the presenters of Perception of English corrective focus by native Inuktitut speakers. Anthony Brohan will present Licensing Catalan laryngeal neutralization by cue.Two alumni are also presenting: Bronwyn Bjorkman (UToronto, PhD 2011) will speak on Possession and necessity: from individuals to worlds (with Elizabeth Cowper), and Igor Yanovich (Tubingen, 2013) will present No weak necessity.
• The last of the conferences being held next weekend is GLOW in Asia X at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Yusuke Imanishi’s work on Default ergative: A view from Mayan will be presented in the poster session. Moreover, all three keynote speakers have ties to MIT Linguistics: current faculty Michael Kenstowicz will present The emergence of default accent in Kyungsang Korean; Richard Kayne (NYU, PhD 1969) will speak on The silence of projecting heads; and C.-T. James Huang (Harvard, PhD 1982) will present Passives forever: control, raising and implicit arguments.

• David Pesetsky will give a summer mini-course this week at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and another mini-course in July at the Nova-Lisbon Summer School and Graduate Conference in Linguistics in Lisbon.

The next session of the Phonology Circle will feature practice talks for the Manchester Phonology Meeting.

Date/Time: Wednesday, May 21, 1-3p (Note special date/time)
Location: 32-D831

Claire Halpert (PhD 2012, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota) has signed a contract with Oxford University Press to publish a monograph entitled Argument Licensing and Agreement: A Bantu Case Study in the series “Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax” (edited by Richard Kayne).  Congratulations, Claire!!

This is the last issue of Whamit! for the spring term. Besides a special issue or two over the summer break, we will resume regular publication in September. Have a nice break!

Hadas Kotek’s paper “Wh-fronting in a two-probe system” has appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.  Congratulations, Hadas! Here’s the abstract:

“Prior work on wh-movement has distinguished among several types of wh-fronting languages that permit distinct patterns of overt and covert movement, instantiated for example by the Slavic languages, English, and German. This paper extends the cross-linguistic typology of multiple questions by arguing that Hebrew instantiates a new kind of wh-fronting language, unlike any that are discussed in the current literature. It will show that Hebrew distinguishes between two kinds of interrogative phrases: those that are headed by a wh-word (wh-headed phrases: what, who, [DP which X], where, how…) and those that contain a wh-word but are headed by some other element (wh-containing phrases: [NP N of wh], [PP P wh]). We observe the special status of wh-headed phrases when one occurs structurally lower in a question than a wh-containing phrase. In that case, the wh-headed phrase can be targeted by an Agree/Attract operation that ignores the presence of the c-commanding wh-containing phrase. The paper develops an account of the sensitivity of interrogative probing operations to the head of the interrogative phrase within Cable’s (2010) Q-particle theory. It proposes that the Hebrew Q has an EPP feature which can trigger head-movement of wh to Q and that a wh-probe exists alongside the more familiar Q-probe, and shows how these two modifications to the theory can account for the intricate dataset that emerges from the paper. The emerging picture is one in which interrogative probing does not occur wholesale but rather can be sensitive to particular interrogative features on potential goals.”

LFRG will have several special meetings over the summer, including Yasutada Sudo and Patrick Elliott (6/3) and Matthijs Westera (6/6). The first of these is detailed here.

Speaker: Jacopo Romoli (Ulster)
Title: Redundancy and the notion of local context
Date/Time: Thursday, May 29, 2pm
Location: 32-D831

(Joint work with Clemens Mayr.)

In this talk, I discuss novel data which are problematic for Stalnaker’s (1979) non-redundancy condition, requiring not to assert something that is already presupposed. This condition has been extended to the local level, so that a sentence is deemed not assertible if it contains any part that is redundant in its local context (Fox 2008, Schlenker 2009, Singh 2007 among many others). The problem for this approach comes from disjunctions like Either Mary isn’t pregnant or (she is) and it doesn’t show. The optional presence of she is (pregnant) – a locally redundant part – is not readily predicted by the non-redundancy condition. These data are even more puzzling if compared to corresponding conditionals like If Mary is pregnant, (#she is and) it doesn’t show where the she is (pregnant) part is unacceptable as predicted by the non-redundancy condition. In response to this puzzle, we propose a solution based on Schlenker’s (2009) parsing-based theory of local contexts. In this system, exhaustifying a sentence can modify the local contexts of its parts. As a consequence of this, she is (pregnant) is actually not redundant in the disjunctive sentence above, provided the latter is exhaustified. As we discuss, this solution is not available in an approach like dynamic semantics where local contexts are computed compositionally from the syntactic structure of the sentence in question (Heim 1983, Beaver 2001; see also Chierchia 2009). Therefore, our solution to the disjunctive puzzle above, if correct, is an argument for the parsing-based approach to local contexts. More in general, redundancy provides a testing ground for these two approaches to local contexts, which are provably equivalent in the domain of presupposition projection (Schlenker 2007, 2009). We discuss also other issues that the disjunctive case above raises in connection to exhaustification, presupposition projection, and the calculation of alternatives.

There will be no LFRG meeting this week.

Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Title: Consonant Cluster Splittability in English
Date/Time: Monday, May 12, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

When English speakers express incredulousness, annoyance, etc., they may insert a schwa in the middle of initial consonant cluster, e.g., ‘please’ —> `p-uh-lease’. In this talk I report results of a rating study that investigates acceptability of the schwa insertion in all types of initial clusters existing in English, and discuss what the significant predictors for the epenthesis are.

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Cross-linguistic variation in the strategies of forming alternative questions: Japanese and beyond
Date/Time: Thursday, May 15, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(This is a practice talk for SALT.)

As Gracanin-Yuksek puts it in her recent WAFL talk, current issues in the syntax and semantics of alternative questions (AltQs) involve two main questions: whether AltQs involve deletion and whether they involve a covert scoping operation. Along these two dimensions, there are (at least) three analytic possibilities existing in the literature for the compositional semantic derivation of an English AltQ. One possibility is to analyze the disjunction as undergoing some form of covert scoping operation (Quantifying-in in Karttunen 1977, Larson 1985; focus semantics in Beck & Kim 2006), making it to take scope over the question-forming operator. The other two possibilities involve deletion in the second disjunct whose underlying structure is larger than its surface appearance. In one analysis, the underlying structure of the AltQ is a coordination of two questions, and no covert scoping operation is needed to derive the AltQ meaning (Pruitt & Roelofsen 2011). The other way is to assume both deletion and a covert scoping operation (Han & Romero 2004).

This paper contributes to this debate by focusing on AltQs in Japanese, arguing that they are underlyingly disjunctions of polar questions, along the lines of Pruitt and Roelofsen (2011). After presenting a Hamblin-semantic implementation of such an analysis, I will situate the Japanese-type AltQs in the new cross-linguistic typology of AltQs, which takes into account languages that disambiguate AltQs and Yes/No questions using distinct disjunction markers (such as Finnish and Basque). The resulting picture is that languages vary in the strategies they use in forming alternative questions: one with scoping and one with coordination of full CP-questions.

In July, Rafael Nonato (PhD 2013) will start a post-doctoral fellowship in the
 Programa de Pós Graduação em Antropologia Social (Graduate Program in 
Social Anthropology) of the Museu Nacional  (National Museum) of UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), under the supervision of Prof.
 Bruna Franchetto. His research project will develop an a new account of switch-reference systems and 
related phenomena in the indigenous languages of the Americas.  Congratulations, Rafael, on this exciting project!

Speaker: Benjamin Storme
Title: Present perfective and explicit performatives
Date/Time: Thursday, May 15, 5:30-7p
Location: 32-D831

In this talk, I will propose to extend Lauer (2013)’s analysis of explicit performatives with temporal and aspectual operators from Kratzer (1998) in order to account for the contrast in (1). The performative effect will only arise in LFs with present tense and perfective aspect.

(1) a. I promise that p. (good as a promise)
b. #I am promising that p. (bad as a promise)

I will also propose a revision of the classic analysis of the contrast in (2): the badness of (2a) will no longer be derived by postulating a semantic incompatibility between perfective aspect and present tense (present perfective LFs are needed to derive the contrast in (1)), but by a pragmatic constraint making present perfective LFs unlikely.

(2) a. #John does his homework. (bad to refer to an event happening at the moment of utterance)
b. John is doing his homework. (good to refer to an event happening at the moment of utterance)