Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

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Ling-Lunch 4/17 - Ciro Greco

Speaker: Ciro Grego (Ghent University & University of Milano-Bicocca)
Title: Wh-clustering and the role of coordination in Italian multiple wh-questions
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 17, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Please see the full abstract here (pdf).

MIT @ FASAL 4 and CLS 50

The 4th edition of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages was held in Rutgers, March 29-30. Second-year grad student Ishani Guha presented a poster on “The Other je Clause in Bangla”. Alumnus Mark Baker ‘85 (Rutgers University) gave a talk entitled “On Case Assignment in Dative Subject Constructions in Dravidian: Tamil and Kannada”.

The 50th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society was held this week end at the University of Chicago. Second-year grad students Ruth Brillman and Aron Hirsch gave a talk about asymmetries between subject and object extraction (“Don’t move too close”). Fourth-year grad students Theodore Levin and Ryo Masuda gave a talk on “Case and Agreement in Cupeño: Morphology Obscures a Simple Syntax”. Alumni Jonathan David Bobaljik ‘95 (University of Connecticut) and Jessica Coon ‘10 (McGill University) were among the invited speakers. Jonathan Bobaljik gave a talk entitled “Morpholocality: Structural Locality in Words” and Jessica Coon talked about “Little-v Agreement: Evidence from Mayan”.

No ESSL this week

There will be no ESSL session this week.

Ling-Lunch Special Session 4/19 - Caroline Heycock

Speaker: Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh)
Title: The problem is agreement
Date/Time: Friday, Apr 19, 3-4p (Note special date and time)
Location: 32-D461

In his recent colloquium, Marcel den Dikken outlined some of the striking - and different - agreement patterns that are found in English and Dutch in the kind of specificational sentences in (1):

1. a. The problem is your parents.
    b. The culprit is you.

2. onze grootste zorg {zijn/*is} de kinderen
     our biggest worry {are/*is} the children
     `Our biggest worry is the children.’

The requirement for number agreement with the second DP in Dutch (even in contexts which exclude V2) seems to accord well with the proposal that in these cases the initial DP is a predicate, as in the influential analysis developed by from Williams 1983, Partee 1987, Heggie 1988, Moro 1997 and many others.

In this talk I will present current work, much of it done in collaboration with Jutta Hartmann (Tübingen) in which we have begun to explore the agreement possibilities of these sentences in a number of different Germanic languages, and I will argue that while the facts indeed support an inversion analysis of specificational sentences, the initial nominal does not in fact show the properties of a predicate of the usual kind, but instead behaves like a Concealed Question, as proposed in Romero (2005, 2007).

LFRG 4/7 - Justin Khoo

Speaker: Justin Khoo (MIT Philosophy)
Title: Backtracking counterfactuals, revisited
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 7, 12-1:30p
Location: 66-148

Backtracking interpretations of counterfactuals are weird, but very real. Under a backtracking interpretation, we evaluate the counterfactual by making the requisite changes to how its antecedent would have had to have come about, and then play out the resulting scenario to see whether its consequent would thereby be made true.

For instance, consider the following scenario from Frank Jackson: you see your friend Smith on the ledge of the roof of a twenty story building, poised to jump. Thankfully, he doesn’t! You feel relief, and say to yourself,

(1) If Smith had jumped, he would have died.

It seems pretty clear that the counterfactual you utter is true. Yet now suppose that a mutual friend Beth is also on the scene. Beth objects to your claim on the following grounds. “Smith would have jumped only if there had been a net below to catch him safely. Hence, (1) is false, and instead the following is true:

(2) If Smith had jumped, he would have lived.”

Beth’s utterance of (2) is true on its backtracking interpretation, while your utterance of (1) is true on its non-backtracking interpretation.

I am interested in the conditions under which backtracking interpretations of counterfactuals arise and why they only arise in such conditions. Related to this is the following troubling issue: given that counterfactuals are so semantically flexible, how do we ever communicate using them?

Phonology Circle 4/7 - Benjamin Storme

Speaker: Benjamin Storme
Title: Explaining the distribution of French mid vowels
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 7, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

In French, mid vowels have a peculiar distribution (often called the “loi de position”), with closed mids [e, ø, o, ə] tending to occur in open syllables not followed by schwa and open mids [ɛ, œ, ɔ] in open syllables followed by schwa and in closed syllables. Making sense of this distribution requires addressing the two following questions:

a. Why should syllable structure be relevant for the distribution of vowels along F1?
b. Why do open syllables followed by schwa pattern with closed syllables rather than with open syllables?

In this talk, I will present results of two experiments suggesting that the relationship between vowel quality and syllable structure cannot be derived via duration alone, as hypothesized in most phonological accounts (Morin 1986, Fery 2003, Scheer 2006 among others). Closed mids and open mids do not appear to have a special duration apart from that contributed by F1. Also, French does not seem to have a closed syllable vowel shortening effect.

Instead, I will propose that the relationship between vowel quality and syllable structure can be understood in terms of the perceptual requirements of vowels and consonants. Consonants that are poorly cued by their release transitions require good closure transitions. Building on work by Burzio (2007) and Lisker (1999) on English, I will argue that longer and lower vowels provide better closure transitions than shorter and higher ones. This will derive the preference for open mids and the absence of schwa in closed syllables and open syllables followed by schwa. When the release transitions are good enough, then no pressure is imposed on preceding vowels and the vowel inventory that is best dispersed along F2 and maximizes the number of duration contrasts, namely the inventory with closed mids and schwa, is chosen. This proposal will be formulated using the OT implementation of Dispersion Theory by Flemming (2004).

Syntax Square 4/8 - Annie Gagliardi

Speaker: Annie Gagliardi (Harvard)
Title: Reconciling two kinds of subject-object asymmetries
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 8, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Built into the grammatical architecture of any language we find constraints on possible structures. The processing system that uses these structures appears to have inherent preferences in how we interpret them. By looking at a domain where there exists tension between what constraints a learner might expect their language to conform to and the interpretations that are easier to arrive at, we can learn more about what a learner’s own abilities and expectations contribute to language acquisition. In this talk we look at one case where grammatical constraints pull in the opposite direction of the preferences of the system using those constraints: A-bar extraction of transitive subjects. In particular, we look at the comprehension of relative clauses by children and adults in Q’anjob’al, Mayan language where extraction of ergative marked subjects is reportedly banned. Results of a comprehension experiment with adults and children suggest that this tension does affect language acquisition, and may effect language change.

Ling-Lunch 4/10 - Mark Baker

Speaker: Mark Baker (Rutgers)
Title: On Case and Agreement in Split-Ergative Kurmanji
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 10, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Ümit Atlamaz)

We argue that tense-based split ergativity in Adıyaman Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish) is best accounted for by a theory in which nominative case is assigned by agreement, rather than a theory in which morphological case determines which NP the verb agrees with. In present tense sentences, the subject is nominative, the object oblique, and the verb agrees with the subject, whereas in past tense sentences, the subject is oblique, the object nominative, and the verb agrees with the object. To account for this, we develop a theory in which the agreement-bearing head is Voice (not T). In past tense, this undergoes cyclic Agree, agreeing downward with the object if there is one, otherwise upward with the subject. In present tense, however, VP is a distinct spell out domain, forcing Voice to always agree upward with the subject. Either way, Voice assigns nominative case to whatever it agrees with, and oblique is assigned to all other arguments. Additional support for this theory comes from the order of tense and agreement morphemes, from the passive nature of past stems but not present stems, from the special behavior of plural agreement, and from the fact that Kurmanji does not distinguish ergative, accusative, and dative, and genitive cases. We also include some remarks about how variation among NW Iranian languages relates to our main line of argument—for example, the fact that Central and Southern Kurdish have preserved the split ergative agreement pattern of Kurmanji, but have lost the split ergative case-marking pattern.

Jonah Katz to West Virginia University

Heartiest congratulations to Jonah Katz (PhD 2010), who has accepted a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at West Virginia University!  Jonah is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Berkeley (and was previously a CNRS Post-doctoral Fellow at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Institut Jean Nicod in Paris).  Great news!!

Erlewine to McGill post-doc!

We are delighted to announce that Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine will be a post-doc at McGill university next year, working with Lisa Travis, Jessica Coon and Michael Wagner.  Congratulations, mitcho!!

MIT@GLOW 2014

Fourth-year student Coppe van Urk is back from this year’s GLOW Colloquium in Brussels, where he gave a talk “On the relation between C and T, A-bar movement and ‘marked nominative’ in Dinka”.  Alums with GLOW talks were Elena Guerzoni ’03,  Tue Trinh ’11, Betsy Ritter ’89, and Bronwyn Bjorkman ’11.   This week, Norvin Richards will teach a course on Islands at the GLOW Spring School (a new and exciting addition to the GLOW scene), alongside an array of MIT alums (as we noted a while ago) also teaching at the school: Hagit Borer ’81, Philippe Schlenker ’99 and Charles Yang (Computer Science PhD 2000)).

ESSL/LFRG 4/10 - Manuel Kriz

Speaker: Manuel Kriz (Vienna/Harvard)
Title: Finding truth-value gaps
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 10, 5:30-7p
Location: 32-D831

A sentence with a definite plural like (1) has non-complementary truth- and falsity conditions. It is clearly true if John read all of the books, and clearly false if he read none, but if he read exactly half of them, it seems to be neither true nor false.

(1) John read the books.

We develop an experimental method for detecting such a truth-value gap and apply it to sentences where the definite plural is embedded in the scope of a quantifier (as in (2)) to ground empirically recent theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of homogeneity in plural predication.

(2) Every student read the books.

The paradigm we develop is promising also for the study of and comparison between other phenomena, including presuppositions, vagueness, and scalar implicatures.

Omer Preminger to Maryland

Late breaking news - our most delighted congratulations to Omer Preminger (PhD 2011), who has just accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.  After receiving his PhD, Omer was a post-doc in Masha Polinsky’s lab at Harvard, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University.   His monograph Agreement and its Failures will be published this summer by MIT Press.  Congratulations, Omer!!

Syntax Square 4/1 - Ruth Brillman and Aron Hirsch

Speakers: Ruth Brillman and Aron Hirsch
Title: Don’t move too close
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 1, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

There are numerous cross-linguistic phenomena showing that extraction of subjects is more restricted than extraction of objects. Our focus will be on English: subjects show a that-trace effect, non-subjects do not; subjects cannot undergo tough-movement, non-subjects can; matrix subject wh questions do not in general license parasitic gaps, non-subject questions do; and so forth.

The range of subject/non-subject asymmetries may look disparate, but we argue that they can be accounted for in a unified way under a cross-linguistically operative spec-to-spec anti-locality constraint, (1), following Erlewine (2014).

(1) Movement of a phrase from the specifier of XP must cross a maximal projection other than XP. Movement from position α to β crosses γ if and only if γ dominates α but does not dominate β.

Anti-locality prohibits movement from spec-TP to spec-CP with TP complement to C. This in general rules out subject movement, except in particular circumstances, e.g. when there is an XP intervening between TP and CP, so TP is not complement to C and movement from spec-TP to spec-CP is thus not anti-local.

We look in detail at the English subject/non-subject asymmetries, and show that they follow from anti-locality, and neutralize in those circumstances where anti-locality permits subject movement.

Ling-Lunch 4/3 - Aron Hirsch

Speaker: Aron Hirsch
Title: Exhaustivity and polarity-mismatch: Economy in accommodation
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 3, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

When can the answer to a constituent question be exhaustive, and when can’t it? This talk focuses on the relationship between exhaustivity and polarity. I report experimental data showing that the puzzle is multi-layered. First: an answer can be inferred to be exhaustive only when it matches the question in polarity (Uegaki 2013, Spector 2003, i.a.).

(1) Which of the men have beards?
a. Ryan does. (can be interpreted ‘only Ryan does’; complete answer)
b. Ryan doesn’t. (cannot be interpreted ‘only Ryan doesn’t’; partial answer)

Second: an answer that mismatches the question in polarity can, nonetheless, be overtly exhaustified with ‘only’. (2b), as well as (2a), is reasonably felicitous.

(2) Which of the men have beards?
a. Only Ryan does.
b. Only Ryan doesn’t.

Why can (1b) not be interpreted as exhaustive when (1a) can? Why can’t (1b) be interpreted as exhaustive at the same time that (2b) is felicitous?

I argue that the resolution to the puzzle reveals something deep about the nature of accommodation.

To satisfy question/answer congruence requirements, when a negative answer is given to the positive question, (1/2b), an unasked negative question must be accommodated; the negative answer is congruent to this accommodated negative question. I argue that accommodation incurs a cost (pragmatic or processing), which is regulated by economy considerations. In particular, there is a constraint on accommodation “Avoid Redundant Accommodation” by which a new question can be accommodated only to convey something that couldn’t be conveyed with an answer congruent to the original question. The contrasts between (1a) and (1b), and (1b) and (2b) follow from this constraint.

In the last part of the talk, I report two additional sets of experimental results providing direct support for the proposal.

Colloquium 4/4 - Adamantios Gafos

Speaker: Adamantios Gafos (Haskins Laboratories, Universität Potsdam)
Date/Time: Friday, Apr 4, 3:30-5p
Location: 32-141

Title/Abstract to be announced.

Yusuke Imanishi to Kwansei Gakuin University

Yusuke Imanishi has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Kwansei Gakuin University.  Congratulations, Yusuke!!

LFRG 3/17 - CUNY poster presentations (encores)

Time: Monday March 17, 12-1:30
Location: 66-148
Subject: CUNY posters

This past weekend, MIT Linguistics presented two posters at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (http://cuny14.osu.edu). Martin Hackl, Erin Olson, and Ayaka Sugawara presented “Processing asymmetries between Subject-Only and VP-Only”. Aron Hirsch presented “Exhaustivity and Polarity Mismatch”. Come to LFRG for an encore performance of these presentations! All are most welcome.

Phonology Circle 3/17 - Gillian Gallagher

Speaker: Gillian Gallagher (NYU)
Title: Evidence for featural and gestural representations of phonotactics
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 17, 5pm
Location: 32-D461
(Note special time and room)

In this talk, I present experimental results that assess Quechua speakers’ representations of two phonotactic restrictions and argue that the results are best accounted for in a model with both traditional phonotactic constraints on features and a distinct set of constraints on gestural coordination.

A repetition experiment compares forms that violate the cooccurrence restriction on pairs of ejectives and the ordering restriction on plain stops followed by ejectives, in both disyllabic (*k’ap’i, *kap’i) and trisyllabic (*k’amip’a, *kamip’a) stimuli. Accuracy on the cooccurrence restriction violating forms is constant across disyllables and trisyllables, and errors on these stimuli are consistently phonotactic repairs. For the ordering restriction, accuracy is higher in the trisyllables than the disyllables, and errors are evenly split between repairs and non-repairs. It is argued that the cooccurrence restriction is best analyzed as a phonotactic constraint in the usual sense, but that behavior on ordering restriction violating forms suggests that this constraint is largely encoded as a preference for particular gestural coordinations.

(Welcome back, Gillian!)

Syntax Square 3/18 - Ted Levin

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Towards an EPP-movement theory of control
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 18, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I argue in favor of a Movement Theory of Control (MTC) as proposed by (O’Neil 1995; Hornstein 1999 et seq.). However, unlike previous proposals of this sort which argue that control-movement is triggered by thematic requirements of the controlling predicate (θ-features), I suggest that control, like raising, is triggered by EPP-requirements. In the first half of the talk, I motivate this alternative by building on the work of Legate (2003) and Sauerland (2003), arguing that raised arguments follow identical movement steps as those of controllers (contra e.g. Chomsky 2000, 2001; Baltin 2001). If raising and controlling arguments undergo identical movement operations, the most parsimonious analysis of the constructions is one in which the trigger of both operations is identical. As raising is thought to be triggered by EPP-features, I contend that we should reduce control to an instance of EPP-movement. In the second half of the talk, I argue that evidence from Japanese direct passives, a non-canonical control environment, force the adoption of an EPP-MTC.

Ling-Lunch 3/20 - Adam Szczegielniak

Speaker: Adam Szczegielniak (Rutgers)
Title: The syntax of the semantics of ellipsis
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 20, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

The talk argues for an analysis of ellipsis that combines:(i) the licensing of the antecedent-anaphor relationship in elided structures via mutually entailing Givenness, modulo focus (Rooth 1992, Merchant 2001) with (ii) a syntax based phase driven account of ellipsis (Rouveret 2012, Chung 2013, Boskovic 2014). The connection between the syntax and semantics of ellipsis will be the observation that the lower bound of a Givenness Domain is encoded in the syntax in the form of a [G] operator that can trigger overt XP movement (Kucerova 2012).

Data will come from Polish and other Slavic VP (1) and TP (2) ACD structures (Szczegielniak 2005, Craenenbroeck & Liptak 2006).

1.Jabedeczytal[kazdksiazke[cotybedziesz]]
Iwillreadeverybookthatyouwill
‘I will read every book that you will.’
2.Jabedeczytal[kazdaksiazke[coty]]
Iwillreadeverybookthatyou
‘I will read every book that you will.’

Based on the interaction of both (1) and (2) with (i) Negation (Witkos 2008, Zeijlstra 2013), (ii) post verbal subjects (Zubizaretta 1998, Gallego 2013), (iii) Subject in-situ (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2006), (iv) verb stranding (Gribanova 2013), (v) contrastive vs. presentational focus and topic (Neelman & Titov 2009, Konietzko & Winkler 2010), the following claims will be put forward and defended:

A. Ellipsis is triggered by an [E] feature that can be present on a phase head H (Gengel 2008). The feature targets H’s complement and marks Given strings as lacking PF (provided the string is in a mutually entailing relationship with the antecedent modulo focus, Merchant 2001).
B. Phase extension (Den Dikken 2007) is carried out via head movement, but is ‘closed’ when head movement is preceded by XP movement to a phase edge.
C. XP Movement to ‘close’ a vP phase results in XP Focus interpretation, subsequent movement can generate contrastive readings of the displaced XP.
D. Givenness movement is phase based, but Givenness domains are established via Functional Application (Kucerova 2012).
E. MaxElide (Takahashi & Fox 2005, Hartman 2011) is a condition on the placement of [E] features.
F. VP raising to Spec TP is a form of Predicate Inversion (Bailyn 2004, Den Dikken 2006) and can be driven by Givenness, that in turn feeds ellipsis.

My proposal that syntactically constrained movement can ‘feed’ an ellipsis site, combined with existing evidence that movement can ‘evacuate’ constituents from ellipsis sites (Vincente 2010), supports the claim that elided strings not only have syntactic architecture, but also that this structure participates both in syntactic and semantic computations that feed discourse.

Erlewine speaks for his supper at CUNY

Fifth-year student Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (mitcho) will speak this Tuesday in New York at a CUNY Syntax Supper on the topic of “Anti-locality and anti-agreement”.  Mitcho’s talk will present a theory of the cross-linguistic specialness of local A-bar extraction of subjects in the Mayan language Kaqchikel and other languages.

Kotek to McGill with Mellon Fellowship

Heartiest congratulations to fifth-year student Hadas Kotek, who has accepted a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill University!!

ESSL/LFRG 3/20 - Yimei Xiang

Time: Thursday, March 19, 2014, 5-30-7
Location: 32-D831
Speaker: Yimei Xiang (Harvard)
Title: Exhaustification, Focus Structure, and NPI-licensing

It is well-known that NPI any must stay in DE contexts. However, any can also be licensed within the c- command domain of only. In particular, any part of the any-phrase can not be focused. Previous studies attribute the licensing effect in (1a) to the Strawson-DE condition. However, this condition has been argued to be neither necessary nor sufficient (Crnic 2011, Gajewski 2011). I will show how an exhaustification-based theory (Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998, Chierchia 2013) captures the (anti-)licensing effects in (1a-c), and then discuss various potential syntactic theories (Rooth 1996, Wagner 2006 a.o.) for focus-association, so as to explain the ungrammaticality of (1d).

(1) a. Only JOHNF read any paper.
b. *John only read ANYF paper.
c. *John only read [any PAPER]F, (he didn’t read every book).
d. *John only read any PAPERF, (he didn’t read any book).

MIT linguists@CUNY Sentence Processing Conference@Ohio State

MIT linguists had three poster presentations at this week’s 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing:  Exhaustivity and polarity-mismatch by Aron Hirsch (at the Special Session on Experimental Pragmatics), Processing asymmetries between Subject-Only and VP-Only by Martin Hackl, Erin Olson and Ayaka Sugawara, and Computing the structure of questions: Evidence from online sentence processing by Hadas Kotek and Martin Hackl.

 

LFRG 3/10 - Manuel Kriz

Speaker: Manuel Kriz (Vienna/Harvard)
Time: Monday, March 10, 12-1:30.
Location: 66-148

Sentences with definite plurals display a property known as ‘homogeneity’: (1a) is true if John read (roughly) all of the books, (1b) is true if he read none of the books. If he read half of the books, neither sentence is true.

(1)a. John read the books.
b. John didn’t read the books.

The talk will be devoted to presenting this phenomenon in greater detail - including the way it extends to collective predicates - and laying out the problem of homogeneity projection. A sentence like (2) with a definite plural embedded unter a quantifier still has an extension gap (i.e. cases where neither it nor its negation are true).

(2) Every girl read the books.

The development of a principled theory to derive which situations are in the extension gap of such sentences poses considerable difficulties. The lack of a fully satisfactory theory forces an exploration of these issues by way of demonstrating how and why the approaches that have been tried fail.

Phonology Circle 3/10 - Snejana Iovtcheva

Speaker: Snejana Iovtcheva
Title: Paradigm Uniformity in the Bulgarian vowel-zero alternation
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 10, 5p (Note special time)
Location: 32-D461 (Note special room)

This paper proposes an analysis of the vowel-zero alternation in Standard Bulgarian using Output-to-Output (OO) correspondence. In particular, the paper proposes that the language has a general markedness M constraint that targets non-round mid-vowels [e/ә] in open/light medial syllables triggering a systematic Syncope in the inflectional <no.kәt, *nokә.t-i/nokt-i> and derivational <*nokә.t-ov/nokt-ov, nokәt.-če> morphology of the language. This M constraint is then shown to interact systematically with the phonotactics of the language producing expected exceptions to the Syncope process. More crucially, it is also shown that the M constraint interacts with symmetrical paradigm-internal (McCarthy 2005) Output-to-Output faithfulness F constraints, producing some unexpected exceptions such as in the case of masculine-inflected en-derived adjectives and plural-inflected ec-derived nouns <begl-e.c-i>.

Based on an analysis of the inflectional paradigm patterns, the paper claims that under the condition of uneven suffixal distribution, the under-application of the Syncope process in forms with more than one deletion site - as in <nokә.t-en/*nokt-en, nokәt.-n-a/*nokә.te-n-a> - is systematically controlled by intra-paradigmatic pressure for uniformity (Kenstowicz 1996), including majority-rules effects (McCarthy 2005).

The claim of paradigm-internal correspondence is further supported by the fact that while the Syncope fails to apply in certain inflectional forms, it is regular throughout the derivational morphology. Similar asymmetry between derivational and inflectional morphology is further observed in other phonological processes in the language, such as Palatalization.

Additional treatment of the post-positioned vowel-initial definite article and the specific vowel-initial numeral morpheme <(dva) nokә.t-a> provide a nice contrast that serves to demonstrate that while certain morpho-syntactic dependencies in the Bulgarian morphology obey asymmetric base-derivative dependencies (Benua 1997), the inflectional morphology can only be treated uniformly if we assume symmetric paradigm-internal dependencies.

Ling-Lunch 3/13 - Hadas Kotek

Speaker: Hadas Kotek
Title: What intervenes where and why
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 13, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk I introduce new data on intervenetion effects in wh-questions which motivate a new empirical description of intervention configurations. I show that, contrary to descriptions of wh-intervention in the literature, (a) English superiority-obeying questions sometimes exhibit intervention effects, (b) such effects can sometimes be avoided in superiority-violating questions, and (c) non-interveners can be forced to act as interveners in certain environments. I discuss challenges that this landscape poses for current theories of intervention.

Brillman published in Studies in African Linguistics

Congratulations to Ruth Brillman! Her paper about “Second person agreement allomorphy in Masarak” was published in Studies in African Linguistics.

MIT goes to WCCFL

Several of our folks unaccountably left the subzero weather of Boston to travel to Los Angeles for the 32nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) last weekend at USC.

Coppe van Urk presented a talk entitled Intermediate positions in Dinka: Evidence for feature-driven movement, and Juliet Stanton spoke on “Factorial typology and accentual faithfulness”. Yusuke Imanishi presented a poster entitled “Default ergative: a view from Mayan”, and Ted Levin presented a poster on “Balinese Pseudo-Noun Incorporation: Licensing under Morphological Merger”.

Invited keynote speaker Sabine Iatridou wins the prize for the longest talk title: “About determiners on event descriptions, about time being like space (when we talk), and about one particularly strange construction”.

As usual, there were plenty of familiar alumni faces giving talks, including Gillian Gallagher PhD’10 (NYU), Marlies Kluck (‘08-9 visitor, Groningen), Heejong Ko PhD ‘05 (Seoul National University), Tania Ionin BCS PhD ‘03 (Illinois), Susanne Wurmbrand PhD ‘98 (Connecticut), and former faculty visitor Rajesh Bhatt (UMass).

Colloquium 3/14 - Marcel den Dikken

Speaker: Marcel den Dikken (CUNY Graduate Center)
Title: The attractions of agreement
Date/Time: Friday, Mar 14, 3:30-5p
Location: 32-141

Please see the full abstract here (pdf).

Agreement in specificational copular sentences is a complex matter, empirically as well as theoretically. Patterns that are attested are often not easy to make fall out from a restrictive theory of Agree relations; patterns that are not attested would sometimes seem hard to exclude. In this paper, I will try my hand at coming to terms with a number of prima facie problematic φ-feature agreement patterns in specificational copular sentences, with particular emphasis on pseudoclefts and their close relatives (though double-NP specificational copular sentences will also be addressed).

LFRG 3/3 - Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine

Speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine
Title: Focus and reconstruction
Time: Monday, 12-1:30
Room: 66-148

The focus operator ‘only’ must c-command its focus associate at LF, and therefore cannot associate with material which has moved out of its scope. In most cases, this is true even if scope reconstruction of the moved associate into a position under ‘only’s scope at LF is independently possible. I will discuss various potential solutions to this puzzle, and their own problems. Audience participation welcome.

Phonology Circle 3/3 - Juliet Stanton

Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Title: Factorial typology and accentual faithfulness
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 3, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D831

(This is a practice talk for WCCFL.)

In many languages, the phonology of morphologically complex words is influenced by their morphological composition. This influence can be manifested as accentual faithfulness, where the stress of a complex word resembles the stress of its base or another related word. The question I address is the following: what types of constraints evaluate accentual faithfulness? I show that a modified version of Benua’s (1997) theory of Base-Derivative (BD) correspondence models accentual faithfulness effects in a large group of accentually similar Australian languages, and makes accurately restrictive predictions regarding the broader typology of BD correspondence.

Syntax Square 3/4 - Laura Grestenberger

Speaker: Laura Grestenberger (Harvard)
Title: Two voice mismatch puzzles in Sanskrit and Greek
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 4, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Sanskrit and Greek both have binary voice systems in which active morphology alternatives with non-active (middle) morphology. In this talk I will present two problems in the morphosyntax of these languages, both of which concern exponence of voice morphology in unexpected syntactic environments (“voice mismatches”).

The first one comes from deponent verbs, which take non-active morphology, but syntactically and semantically behave exactly like active agentive verbs. The second problem arises in contexts in which a distinct passive morpheme is available. Contrary to what is expected in standard approaches to Voice, this passive morpheme obligatorily co-occurs with middle morphology (Sanskrit) or active morphology (Greek). I propose that both puzzles can be solved by adopting an approach in which only active and middle are values of vP, while passive is a distinct functional head. In this approach, only passive is valency-changing, while active/middle are sensitive to their syntactic environment but do not operate on it. I will show that this predicts the distribution of active and middle morphology in languages like Sanskrit and Greek, as well as where potential mismatches can occur.

Ling-Lunch 3/6 - Ted Gibson

Speaker: Ted Gibson
Title: A pragmatic account of complexity in definite Antecedent-Contained-Deletion relative clauses
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 6, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Pauline Jacobson, Peter Graff, Kyle Mahowald, Evelina Fedorenko, and Steven T. Piantadosi.)

Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2012; HKV) provide data that suggest that in a null context, antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) relative clause structures modifying a quantified object noun phrase (NP; such as every doctor) are easier to process than those modifying a definite object NP (such as the doctor). HKV argue that this pattern of results supports a “quantifier-raising” (QR) analysis of both ACD structures and quantified NPs in object position: under the account they advocate, both ACD resolution and quantified NPs in object position require movement of the object NP to a higher syntactic position. The processing advantage for quantified object NPs in ACD is hypothesized to derive from the fact that – at the point where ACD resolution must take place – the quantified NP has already undergone QR whereas this is not the case for definite NPs. Although in other work it is shown that HKV’s reading time analyses are flawed, such that the critical effects are not significant (Gibson, Mahowald & Piantadosi, submitted), the effect in HKV’s acceptability rating is robust. But HKV’s interpretation is problematic. We present five experiments that provide evidence for an alternative, pragmatic, explanation for HKV’s observation. In particular, we argue that the low acceptability of the the / ACD condition is largely due to a strong pressure in the null context to use a competing form, by adding also or same. This pressure does not exist with quantified NPs either because the competing form is absent (*every same) or because the addition of also actually degrades the sentence. In support of this interpretation, we show that the difference between the the / ACD and every / ACD conditions (a) persists even when the relative clause contains no ellipsis and thus nothing is forcing QR; (b) disappears when either also or same is added; and (c) disappears in supportive contexts. Together, these findings show that HKV’s QR hypothesis should be rejected in favor of a pragmatic account.

LFRG 2/24 - Aron Hirsch

Speaker: Aron Hirsch
Title: Covert vs. overt exhaustification and polarity mismatch
Date/Time: Monday, February 24, 12-1:30p
Location: 66-148

When can the answer to a constituent question be interpreted as exhaustive, and when can’t it? This paper establishes a link between exhaustivity and polarity, both for covert exhaustification with exh and overt exhaustification with only. I report two sets of experimental data. Exp. 1 shows that an answer can be parsed with exh only if it and the question match in polarity (following Spector 2005, Uegaki 2013): (1/2a) can be interpreted exhaustively; (1/2b) can only be interpreted as partial answers.

(1) Which of the officers have a beard?
a. (exh) Ryan has a beard.
b. (*exh) Ryan doesn’t have a beard.
c. Only Ryan doesn’t have a beard.

(2) Which of the officers don’t have a beard?
a. (exh) Ryan doesn’t have a beard.
b. (*exh) Ryan does have a beard.
c. Only Ryan does have a beard.

Exp. 2 shows that only has a less restricted distribution than exh, but still shows subtle effects of polarity-sensitivity: only can exhaustify an answer which mismatches the question in polarity, (1/2c), but only if the dialog takes place in the right kind of context. I argue that exh and only both carry a presupposition which requires polarity match. When only occurs with polarity-mismatch, a question of the opposite polarity to the question actually asked is accommodated. I claim that accommodation incurs a cost that economy considerations regulate. Economy differentiates between exh and only, as well as between different contexts with only to predict the full distribution of the operators.

Phonology Circle 2/24 - Michelle Fullwood

Speaker: Michelle Fullwood
Title: Asymmetric correlations between English verb transitivity and stress
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 24, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

It is well-known that lexical categories affect phonological behavior (Smith 2011). Perhaps the best-known example is that English disyllabic nouns are likely to be trochaic (94%), while disyllabic verbs are likely to be iambic (69%) (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Kelly & Bock 1988). In this talk, I will show that the asymmetry goes further: English disyllabic intransitive verbs are more likely to be trochaic than transitive verbs, even after controlling for morphological category and syllabic profile. I then explore possible explanations for the asymmetry and sketch a grammar that, based on the influence of prosodic environments, would result in the observed stress patterns.

Syntax Square 2/25 - Norvin Richards

Speaker: Norvin Richards
Title: Contiguity Theory and Pied-Piping
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 25, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Cable (2007, 2010) argues, on the basis of data from Tlingit, that wh-questions involve three participants: an interrogative C, a wh-word, and a head Q, which is visible in Tlingit but invisible in English. In Cable’s account, QP standardly dominates the wh-word, and wh-movement is always of QP. The question of how much material pied-pipes under wh-movement, on Cable’s account, is essentially a question about the distribution of QP. Cable offers several conditions and parameters governing the distribution of QP.

I will try to derive Cable’s conditions on the distribution of QP from Contiguity Theory, a series of proposals about the interaction of syntax with phonology that I have been developing in recent work.

Two Linguistics majors named Burchard Scholars

Two of our undergraduate Linguistics majors have been selected as two of 32 students selected for MIT’s Burchard Scholars program:  Alyssa Napier (‘16) (who is double-majoring in Linguistics and Chemistry) and Oliva Murton (‘15).   Quoting the Burchard Scholars website: “The Burchard Scholars Program brings together distinguished members of the faculty and promising MIT sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated excellence in some aspect of the humanities, arts, or social sciences. The format is a series of dinner-seminars with discussions on current research topics. A Burchard Scholar can be a major in any department of the Institute.”

Norvin Richards @ UCLA

While we were trudging through snow, Norvin traveled to UCLA this week, where he gave a colloquium on “Comtiguity and Pied-Piping”.

ESSL 2/27 - Leon Bergen

Time: Thursday, February 27, 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831
Speaker: Leon Bergen
Title: Pragmatic reasoning as semantic inference

A number of recent proposals have used techniques from game theory to formalize Gricean pragmatic reasoning (Franke, 2011; Jäger, 2013). In this talk, I will discuss two phenomena that pose fundamental challenges to game-theoretic accounts of pragmatics. The first are manner implicatures, such as the following contrast (Horn, 1984):

1) a. John started the car.
b. John got the car started.

While both sentences are (plausibly) truth-conditionally equivalent, 1b. receives a marked interpretation due to its more complex form. The second set of phenomena are embedded implicatures which violate Hurford’s constraint (Hurford, 1974; Chierchia, Fox, & Spector, 2009):

2) a. Some of the students passed the test.
b. Some or all of the students passed the test.
c. Some or most of the students passed the test.

Standard game-theoretic models do not have the resources to explain the contrast between 2b. and c., as these sentences differ neither in their semantic content nor in their syntactic complexity. In order to account for these phenomena, I propose a realignment of the division between semantic content and pragmatic content. Under this proposal, the semantic content of an utterance is not fixed independent of pragmatic inference; rather, pragmatic inference partially determines an utterance’s semantic content. This technique, called lexical uncertainty, derives both M-implicatures and the relevant embedded implicatures, and preserves the derivations of more standard implicatures.

LingLunch 2/27: Hedde Zeijlstra

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Goettingen) Title: Universal Quantifier NPIs and PPIs: Evidence for a convergent view on the landscape of polarity-sensitive elements Date/Time: Thursday Feb. 27, 12:30-1:45p Location: 32-D461

Most known NPIs and PPIs, such as NPI/PPI quantifiers over individuals (like the any and some-series in English) are existentials/indefinites and never universal quantifiers. No PPI or NPI meaning ‚everybody’ or ‚everything’ has been reported. However, in the domain of modals, the picture seems to be reverse. Most attested NPIs and PPIs are universal quantifiers (cf. Homer t.a., Iatridou & Zeijlstra 2013) . Why have Positive Polarity Items that are universal quantifiers only been attested in the domain of modal auxiliaries and never in the domain of quantifiers over individuals? I first argue that universal quantifier PPIs actually do exist, both in the domain of quantifiers over individuals and in the domain of quantifiers over possible worlds, as is predicted by the Kadman & Landman (1993) – Krifka (1995) – Chierchia (2006. 2013) approach to NPI-hood. However, since the covert exhaustifier that according to Chierchia (2006, 2013) is induced by these PPIs (and responsible for their PPI-hood) can act as an intervener between the PPI and its anti-licenser, universal quantifier PPIs often appear in disguise; their PPI-like behaviour only becomes visible once they morpho-syntactically precede their anti-licenser. A conclusion of this paper is that Dutch iedereen (‚everybody’), opposite to English everybody, is actually a PPI. A second claim made in this paper is that universal quantifier modals that are NPIs are so because they have a lexical requirement that requires some abstract negation to be spelled out elsewhere in the structure (after Postal 2000). The question as to why NPIs that result from this mechanism only surface in the domain of modal auxiliaries and not elsewhere is due to their particular syntactic properties and the way how this lexical/syntactic requirement is acquired. Most discussion on the nature of NPIs and PPIs concerns two questions: (i) why are such elements are sensitive to the polarity of the clauses they appear in; and (ii) what is the range of variation in their licensing contexts? The general conclusion of this talk is that different NPIs/PPIs of different strengths are only superficially similar and that the underlying reasons as to why they are NPIs/PPIs can be quite different: some ill-licensed NPIs/PPIs give rise to contradictory assertions, whereas others violate syntactic or lexical requirements.

Syntax Square 2/18 - Coppe van Urk

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: Intermediate movement is regular movement: Evidence from Dinka
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 18, 12-1p (Note special time)
Location: 32-D461

One problem in a derivational view of syntax is how intermediate steps of a successive-cyclic movement are triggered. To deal with this, several authors have suggested that intermediate movement is a special operation, not triggered like regular movement, either because it is not feature-driven or because it happens at a different point in the derivation (e.g. Heck and Mu ̈ller 2000, 2003; Chomsky 2000). This talk brings facts from Dinka (Nilotic; South Sudan) to bear on this issue, a language in which the left periphery interacts morphosyntactically with A ‘-movement in a number of ways. I show that, in these interactions, intermediate movement behaves just like regular movement. In particular, both consistently feed phi-agreement. I argue that this similarity can be captured if terminal and intermediate movement are established in the same way, and are feature-driven (Chomsky 1995; McCloskey 2002; Preminger 2011; Abels 2012).

Phonology Circle 2/18 - Takashi Morita

Speaker: Takashi Morita
Title: Prominence correspondence
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 18, 5:30p (Note special date)
Location: 32-D831

Prominent phonological units are likely to appear in metrically prominent positions. For instance, syllables with a more sonorous nucleus tend to constitute the head of a foot, receiving stress (de Lacy, 2002a,b, 2004; Kenstowicz, 1997). Likewise, high-toned syllables, considered more prominent than low- toned ones, tend to be placed in foot-head positions (de Lacy, 2002b).It has been suggested that syllables, just as feet, also contain a metrically prominent position: the first mora of their nucleus by default (Kager, 1993). Syllable-internal metrical prominence gives an explanation for preference of falling diphthongs over rising diphthongs. Given a language with the default falling metrical prominence contour, rising diphthongs in the language cause disagreement between metrical prominence and sonority; sonority rises in the diphthongs while metrical prominence falls in the domain. This is a motivation that syllable-internal metrical prominence also requires sonority to correspond just as in feet. Since sonority is sensitive to metrical prominence in both feet and syllables, tone, whose relation to foot-internal metrical prominence has been reported (de Lacy, 2002b), is also expected to be associated with syllable-internal metrical prominence. The present paper provides detailed evidence from Tokyo Japanese (TJ) for the mora-level correspondence between tone and metrical prominence, and gives an formal analysis of it within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). Based on this evidence, we can com- plete the claim that metrical prominence, segmental prominence (or sonority), and tonal prominence must all agree, or at least must not disagree.

Hirsch gives evidence in Tübingen

Second-year student Aron Hirsch is back from the conference Linguistic Evidence 2014 in Tübingen, where he presented a paper coauthored with Martin Hackl, entitled “Presupposition projection and incremental processing in disjunction”.

No Ling-Lunch this week

There is no Ling-Lunch scheduled for this week.

Visting Members, Spring 2014

Please join us in extending our warmest welcomes (and welcome backs) to the visiting members of the department for this term.

Visiting Scholars

  • Larissa Aronin (Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel) is working on “developing the novel direction of ‘Multilingualism and Philosophy’” and “will continue philosophical discussion, interpretation and conceptualization of multilingualism in an age of globalization.”
  • Toni Borowsky (University of Sydney) works on phonetics and phonology, in particular using evidence from language games.
  • Tianshan Dai’s (Shenzhen Polytechnic University) research interests include biolinguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition.
  • Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh) works on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, with particular reference to English and the other Germanic languages, and to Japanese. During her stay, Caroline is looking to work on three projects: “reconstruction effects, particularly in relatives; “embedded root phenomena”; and (incipiently) a project on possible connections between syntactic priming and attrition.”
  • Fuyin (Thomas) Li (Beihang University), who will arrive in June, has a project entitled “Bridging Cognitive Linguistics and Generative Grammar: Their Philosophical Basis.”
  • Tsuyoshi Sugawara (Ube National College of Technology, Japan) will arrive in April. His research interests include lexical semantics, semantics, and morphology.

Visiting Student

  • Alexandra Vydrina (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris & LLACAN) is a PhD student whose interests include syntax, semantics, fieldwork, endangered languages, and Mande languages. She writes: “The topic of my PhD research is the typologically and theoretically oriented description of the Kakabe language (Mande), a minor language spoken in Guinea which has not been described before.”

MIT linguists to go to GLOW

Congratulations to 4th-year students Coppe van Urk and Ted Levin, who have each had a paper accepted to the next GLOW Colloquium, to be held this April in Brussels. The GLOW Colloquium will be immediately followed by the first Glow Spring School, at which our very own Norvin Richards will teach a course on Islands (alongside an array of MIT alums also teaching at the Spring school: Hagit Borer (PhD 1981), Philippe Schlenker (PhD 1999) and Charles Yang (Computer Science PhD 2000)).

Roger Schwarzschild to join MIT Linguistics faculty

We are delighted to be able to publicly announce that Roger Schwarzschild will be joining the MIT Linguistics faculty starting this Fall as Professor of Linguistics.

Roger received his PhD from UMass Amherst in 1991. He has taught at Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and since 1995 has been a member of the Linguistics faculty at Rutgers. Roger is one of the most creative and brilliant semanticists in the world. He has made profound contributions in many areas, including pluralities, focus, the semantics of indefinites, and most recently measure terms and comparatives. Much of his work is also devoted to the ways in which semantics interacts with other aspects of language, including pragmatics, syntax and phonology. Roger is known as one of the best explainers in the field: a great speaker and dedicated teacher. We consider ourselves lucky beyond words that Roger will be joining us, and look forward to welcoming him to MIT next Fall!

Michel DeGraff promoted to Full Professor

Heartiest congratulations to our colleague Michel DeGraff on his promotion to the rank of Full Professor!!

Wataru Uegaki at Maryland

Fourth-year grad student Wataru Uegaki was at the University of Maryland, College Park over the weekend for their 2nd Philosophy and Linguistics Conference (PHLINC2: Language and Other Minds). Wataru presented on “Emotive Factives and the Semantics of Question-Embedding.”

Pesetsky book featured in MIT News article

David Pesetsky and his recent LI monograph on Russian case morphology were featured in an MIT News Office article by Peter Dizikes, Cold case: A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian.

MIT linguists help solve the California drought crisis

Michelle Fullwood, Ryo Masuda, and Ted Levin were at the Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting this weekend. Michelle talked about English verb transitivity and stress (Asymmetric Correlations Between English Verb Transitivity and Stress) and Ryo about Chechen and Ingush verb doubling (Revisiting the phonology and morphosyntax of Chechen and Ingush verb doubling). Ryo and Ted gave a joint presentation about case and agreement in Cupeño (Case and Agreement in Cupeño: Morphology Obscures a Simple Syntax).

The presenters report a particularly wet conference with continuous rainfall throughout the three days. With two inches of rainfall in Berkeley and up to 11 inches in the area, the linguists might take credit for bringing relief to the California drought.

LFRG 2/10 - Wataru Uegaki

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Emotive factives and the semantics of question-embedding
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 10, 12:00pm
Room: 66-148

At least since Karttunen (1977), it has been observed that emotive factives such as “surprise”, “amaze” and “annoy” exhibit puzzling embedding behavior. As in (1) below, they embed declaratives and constituent wh-complements, but don’t embed polar questions (PolQs) and alternative questions (AltQs).

(1) a. It is surprising that they served coffee for breakfast. (declarative)
b. It is surprising what they served for breakfast. (constituent question)
c. *It is surprising whether they serve breakfast. (PolQ)
d. *It is surprising whether they served coffee or tea for breakfast. (AltQ)

This fact poses an interesting challenge for the semantics of question-embedding. First of all, since this embedding behavior holds across predicates of similar intuitive semantic class cross-linguistically (e.g., German, French and Japanese), it is desirable if it can be derived from the semantics of these predicates, rather than from idiosyncratic selection restrictions. However, in the standard treatment of question-embedding, where embedded questions are converted to some form of their answer, it is not clear why emotive factives are incompatible with PolQs and AltQs. This is so because there is no semantic anomaly in the predicted truth-conditions of surprise + PolQ/AltQ sentences: ‘x is surprised by the answer of whether p’ or ‘x is surprised by the answer of whether p or q’.

In this talk, I propose a solution to this puzzle employing the independently established distinction between strongly exhaustive and weakly exhaustive readings of questions (Heim 1984; Beck & Rullmann 1999). According to the proposal, a strongly exhaustive reading is ruled out in questions embedded under emotive factives as it would violate a principle similar to Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (Dalrymple et al. 1998). On the other hand, AltQs and PolQs are inherently strongly exhaustive (George 2011, Nicolae 2013), which conflicts with the requirement against strong exhaustivity under the relevant predicates. After giving the detailed account of the embedding behavior of emotive factives, I lay out the general typology of attitude predicates that the proposed view entails, and discuss some open issues.

Phonology Circle 2/10 - Organizational Meeting

Phonology Circle will meet on Mondays at 5pm in 32-D831 this semester. Today’s meeting will be an organizational one to plan the schedule. Please contact Michael Kenstowicz if you cannot attend but would like to reserve a date.

No Syntax Square This Week

There is no Syntax Square meeting this week. Please contact the organizers, Mia Nussbaum and Michelle Yuan, if you would like to present. The following dates are still open: Feb 25, Apr 1, Apr 8, May 6, and May 13.

Ling-Lunch 2/13 - Elena Anagnostopoulou

Speaker: Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
Title: Approaching the PCC from German
Date/Time: Thursday Feb. 13, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

“In this talk, I focus on a lesser known/studied case arguably falling under the PCC, namely PCC with weak pronouns, addressing some issues one is confronted with in an attempt to characterize the phenomenon. Based on previous research (Anagnostopoulou 2008), I present evidence that the weak PCC does arise in German, contra Cardinaletti (1999), Haspelmath (2004), under two conditions: (i) The PCC arises only when weak pronouns occur in the Wackernagel position. (ii) In addition, the subject must follow the weak pronoun cluster in order for the effect to become visible. I explore how the weak PCC can be analyzed in German, pointing to some questions concerning a) the relative order of Wackernagel pronouns, and from there to clitics showing the PCC in Romance and to other weak pronouns in Germanic languages and b) the order of the subject relative to the pronouns showing PCC effects.”

ESSL 2/13 - Discussing Kent Johnson’s paper “Gold’s Theorem and cognitive science”

The ESSL will be meeting this Thursday at 5:00 PM in the 8th floor seminar room. We will be having an informal discussion of Kent Johnson’s paper “Gold’s Theorem and cognitive science”. The paper and discussion should appeal to anyone with an interest in language acquisition or learnability. The conversation will be most useful if as many people as possible have read the paper, so if you are interested in participating, please use the Stellar website for the ESSL (https://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/hackl-lab/index.html) for access to this paper, as well as Gold’s original paper. If you are unable to access the Stellar site, please contact Erin Olson, ESSL Lab Manager (ekolson@mit.edu) or Martin Hackl (hackl@mit.edu). Dinner will be provided.

Colloquium 2/14 - Elena Anagnostopoulou

Speaker: Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
Title: Decomposing adjectival/ stative passives
Time: Friday February 14th, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-141

This talk argues for a decomposition analysis of different types of adjectival/stative passives in terms of the following domains (Kratzer 1996, Marantz 2001, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2006, forthcoming, Ramchand 2010 and others):

(1) [VoiceP [vP [ResultP ]]]

I focus on the distribution of Voice in adjectival/stative passives. Three views have been expressed in the literature:

a) Adjectival/stative passives never contain Voice (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Embick 2004).

b) Adjectival/stative passives sometimes contain Voice (Anagnostopoulou 2003).

c) Adjectival/stative passives always contain Voice (McIntyre 2013, Bruening to appear).

The diagnostics I employ for Voice are by-phrases, instruments, agent-oriented and manner adverbs and crucially not the Disjointness Restriction (Kratzer 1994 building on Baker, Johnson & Roberts 1989), which is linked to the type of passive hidden in the structure (passive vs. middle; Spathas, Alexiadou & Schäfer 2013, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer, forthcoming).

On the basis of these diagnostics, I argue that stative passives may contain Voice in all languages under investigation, and parametrization in the properties of Voice should be traced to the nature of the underlying event: specific event (Greek, Russian, Swedish; Anagnostopoulou 2003, Paslawska & von Stechow 2003, Larsson 2009) or event kind (English, German; Gehrke 2011).

I furthermore argue that Kratzer’s (2000) resultant state vs. target state dichotomy is important for understanding the distribution of Voice and, more generally, for understanding the properties and architecture of stative passives within and across languages. The stativizing morpheme may embed Voice only in resultant state adjectival passives and not in target state adjectival passives (Anagnostopoulou 2003). In target state adjectival passives, Voice, when present, is necessarily external to the stativized vP. I present evidence from verb classes in favor of the claim that target state passives systematically lack Voice and offer a potential reason for why Voice is absent in target state passives based on a phenomenon of coercion of participles formed by manner verbs from resultant-/manner to target-state/result readings. This phenomenon has implications for our understanding of “manners”, “results” and the “manner-result complementarity hypothesis” (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998, 2008 and related literature).

MIT Linguistics Colloquium Schedule, Spring 2014

The colloquium series talks are held on Fridays at 3:30pm. Please check the Colloquium webpage for any updates.

February 7: Raj Singh, Carleton
February 14: Elena Anagnostopoulou, University of Crete
March 14: Marcel den Dikken, CUNY
March 27: Sharon Inkelas, UC Berkeley
April 4: Adamantios Gafos, Haskins Laboratories, Universität Potsdam
April 25: Richard Kayne, NYU
May 2: Matthew Gordon, UCSB
May 9: Julie Legate, UPenn

24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

24.943 Syntax of a Language (Family): Chinese

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

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

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

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

24.964 Topics in Phonology: Stress with Feet

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

The full syllabus is available here (pdf).

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

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

Syntax Square Continues on Tuesdays

Syntax Square will continue at its regularly scheduled time on Tuesdays 1-2pm in 32-D461. The organizers for the term are Mia Nussbaum and Michelle Yuan. The following dates are open for presentaton: Feb 11, 25, Mar 18, Apr 1, 8, May 6 and 13. Please contact the organizers to claim a date.

21M.269 Introduction to Music Cognition (Studies: Western Music History)

Instructor: Martin Rohrmeier

Lecture:  MW2-3.30  (4-152)

Information:

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

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

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

LFRG 2/6 - Organizational meeting

LFRG will be kicking off the semester with an organizational meeting in the 8th floor conference room on Thursday, February 6 at 5 PM.

Ling-Lunch 2/6 - Danny Fox

Ling-Lunch, the weekly informal talk series for all linguistics topics will be held at its usual time and location (Thursdays 12:30pm, 32-D461) this semester. The first talk is scheduled for this week and will be by Danny Fox. The organizers are Juliet Stanton and Athulya Aravind. Please contact them to reserve a presentaton spot — they report that the following dates are still open: Feb 20, 27, Mar 6, 13, Apr 10, 17, 24, May 1, 8, and 15.

Speaker: Danny Fox (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem / MIT)
Title: Extraposition and scope: evidence for deeply embedded late merge
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 6, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk I will address various puzzles that pertain to the syntactic and semantic representations associated with ‘extraposition from NP’. I will argue for a resolution of these puzzles based on the assumption that “late merge” (of the sort postulated by Lebeaux and further motivated by Fox and Nissenbaum) can apply in deeply embedded positions.

Colloquium 2/7 - Raj Singh

Speaker: Raj Singh (Carleton)
Title: Implicature and free-choice signatures: embedding, processing complexity, and child development
Time: Friday February 7th, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-141

Scalar implicatures are inferences that strengthen what is sometimes called the “basic meaning” of the sentence:

(1) John ate some of the cookies

(1a) Basic Meaning: that John ate some, possibly all, of the cookies

(1b) Scalar Implicature: that John did not eat all of the cookies

(1c) Strengthened Meaning: that John ate some but not all of the cookies (BM + SI)

This strengthening has been shown to generate various detectable “signatures,” some of which are highlighted in (2):

(2) SI Signatures

(2a) SIs tend to disappear in DE environments (e.g., the restrictor of “every”).

(2b) SIs are detectable, but not very robust, in non-DE environments (e.g., the scope of “every”).

(2c) SIs are processed slow: (1a) is processed faster than (1c) (cf. Bott & Noveck, 2004; and much work since).

(2d) SIs show up late in acquisition: There is a stage of development at which children behave as if they assign (1a) to (1) but do not assign (1c) to (1) (cf. Noveck, 2001; and much work since).

So-called “free-choice” inferences, exemplified in (3), have been shown to also disappear in negative environments. Taking this to be one of the signatures of an SI (cf. (2a)), it has been argued that free-choice inferences should be derived in the cognitive system that computes SIs (e.g.,Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002; Schulz, 2005; Alonso-Ovalle, 2005).

(3) John may eat the cookies or the pie

(3a) Basic Meaning: that John is allowed to eat one, and possibly both, of the cookies and the pie

(3b) Free-Choice: that John is allowed to eat the cookies and he is allowed to eat the pie

In stark contrast with the SI in (1), however, free-choice (3b) is not processed slower than (3)’s basic meaning (3a) (cf. (2c); Chemla & Bott, 2014), and free-choice (3b) is preferred to the basic meaning (3a) in positive embeddings, such as in the nuclear scope of “every” (cf. (2b); Chemla, 2009).

In this talk, I present evidence that free-choice and SIs also have diverging developmental signatures (cf. (2d)). Specifically, I present evidence that children (3;9-6;4, M = 4;11) compute conjunctive free-choice SIs for disjunctive sentences (reporting on joint work with Ken Wexler, Andrea Astle, Deepthi Kamawar, and Danny Fox). Our finding replicates earlier results showing that children often interpret disjunctions as if they were conjunctions (Paris, 1973; Braine and Rumain, 1981), and extends this to embedding in the scope of “every.” We argue that this conjunctive SI follows from: (i) Katzir’s (2007) theory of alternatives in the steady state, (ii) the assumption that children differ from adults by not accessing the lexicon when generating alternatives, and (iii) Fox’s (2007) mechanism for free-choice computation in the steady state. We further provide evidence that children at this stage of development share the adult preference for free-choice SIs in matrix and embedded positions.

These data raise the challenge of explaining why free-choice and SIs both disappear in negative environments but differ with respect respect to developmental trajectories, embeddability, and processing complexity (see Chemla & Singh, 2014 for generalizations to other scalar items). I will explore strategies for addressing this challenge.

24.979 Topics in Semantics: The Linguistics of the Conversational Scoreboard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the Spring 2014 Term!

Welcome to the spring semester for new and returning members of the department. Whamit!, the departmental newsletter, resumes regular Monday publication this week. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Ryo Masuda, David Pesetsky, Kai von Fintel and new student editor Benjamin Storme, who replaces Michelle Fullwood following her three-year tenure.

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 winter break.

McGill/MIT Workshop on Gradability and Quantity in Language and the Brain

The ‘McGill/MIT Workshop on Gradability and Quantity in Language and the Brain’ will be held at MIT on January 31-February 1st in Room 32-141. It is a two day workshop that brings together a group of neuroscientists with an interest in language and a group of experimental and formal linguists interested in the brain, in an attempt to enhance the dialogue between the linguistic and the neurophysiological cultures, and help to close the gap between these two growing groups of researchers. The theme of the workshop is centered on aspects of gradability and quantity as it pertains to the cognitive domains of Number, Space, and Time.

http://brainlang.scripts.mit.edu

The workshop is open and all are welcome to attend. To access the background material for the talks the following information is required: username: brainlang, password: mitmcgill2014

The invited speakers are:

  • Katrin Amunts, University of Düsseldorf/Forschungszentrum Jülich
  • Irene Heim, MIT
  • Andreas Nieder, University of Tübingen
  • Martin Hackl, MIT
  • Roumyana Pancheva, USC
  • Bernhard Schwarz, McGill University
  • Veronique Izard, CNRS & Université Paris Descartes
  • Manfred Krifka, ZAS and Humbolt University
  • Yoad Winter, Utrecht University
  • Roger Schwarzschild, Rutgers University
  • Galit Sassoon, Bar-Ilan University
  • Yonatan Loewenstein, The Hebrew University at Jerusalem
  • Hans Otto Karnath, University of Tübingen
  • Yosef Grodzinsky, McGill University

Giblin, Steddy, and Watumull’s letter to the Guardian

Grad students Iain Giblin and Sam Steddy and recent visiting student Jeffrey Watumull (Cambridge) responded to a recent article on linguistics by Harry Ritchie in the UK newspaper The Guardian. Their letter wasn’t posted online, but here is a scan of the print edition.

Gaurdian Scan (Copier)

MIT Linguists in Rome this weekend

David Pesetsky gave a talk on language and music at Rome’s 2014 Festival of Sciences on January 26, based on his joint work with Jonah Katz (PhD 2010). Noam Chomsky was also in attendance, giving talks about politics and linguistics on January 24 and 25. More information here and here.

Latest book by Pesetsky published

David Pesetsky’s book “Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories” has just been published in the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs.

Kotek and Erlewine to appear in LI

Congratulations to fifth-year students Hadas Kotek and Michael Erlewine! Their paper “Covert pied-piping in English multiple wh-questions” has been accepted for publication in Linguistic Inquiry.

IAP Mini-Course on Statistics, 1/20-1/24

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

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

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

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

Day 3
Handling Discrimination and Reaction time data; ANOVA

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

Day 5
Linear mixed effects models

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

MIT at the LSA meeting

MIT had a strong presence at this year’s LSA Annual Meeting, held Jan 2-5 in Minneapolis. The following talks and posters featured MIT presenters:

  • Michael Erlewine: Association with traces and the copy theory of movement
  • Michael Erlewine and Hadas Kotek: Morphological blocking in English causatives
  • Iain Giblin and Sam Steddy: Disambiguating the Scope of In-Situ Wh-Phrases with Telugu Prosody
  • Aron Hirsch and Martin Hackl: Presupposition projection and incremental processing in disjunction
  • Yusuke Imanishi: When ergative is default: Ergativity in Mayan
  • Patrick Jones: Cyclic evaluation of post-lexical prosodic domains: evidence from Kinande boundary tones
  • Hadas Kotek: Intervention effects follow from Relativized Minimality
  • Hadas Kotek and Martin Hackl: Wh-words must QR locally: evidence from real-time processing
  • Theodore Levin: Pseudo-Noun Incorporation is M-Merger: Evidence from Balinese
  • Miriam Nussbaum: The Interpretation of Indifference Free Relatives
  • Juliet Stanton: A cyclic factorial typology of Pama-Nyungan stress
  • Suyeon Yun : Two Types of Focus Movement

In addition Patrick Jones won a Student Abstract Award, for having one of the three highest-ranked abstracts authored by a student. Congratulations, Patrick!

Several recent alumni were also present:

  • Bronwyn Bjorkman (University of Toronto): Multiple Agrees: Towards a non-unified theory of feature valuation.
  • Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota) and Maria Stolen (University of Minnesota): Fixed aspect in Amharic Conditionals
  • Ora Matushansky (Utrecht University) and E.G. Ruys (Utrecht University): Some indefinites are degrees
  • Brian Buccola (McGill University) and Morgan Sonderegger (McGill University): On the expressivity of Optimality Theory vs. rules: An application to opacity
  • Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University) and Rachael Hardy (McMaster University): Two scrambling strategies in German: Evidence from PPs
  • Young Ah Do (Georgetown University): The asymmetrical base-inflected relation constrains child production and comprehension

Phonology Circle 12/9 - Morgan Sonderegger

Speaker: Morgan Sonderegger (McGill)
Title: Phonetic and phonological variation on reality television: dynamics and interspeaker variation
Date/Time: Monday, Dec 9, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

This talk examines two types of variability in phonetics and phonology about which relatively little is known: (1) the dynamics of the accents of individuals from day to day, and (2) differences among speakers of the same language in the structure of variability. We examine a number of variables (focusing on VOT and t/d deletion) in a corpus of spontaneous speech from a setting which is particularly well-suited to examining (1) and (2) — a British reality television show (Big Brother UK) where individuals live in a house with no outside contact for three months — using statistical models of synchronic variability across speakers, and dynamics within individual speakers. Speakers show several qualitatively different types of dynamics; the most common types are day-by-day variability and absolute stability in the use of a variable. There is a surprising degree of variability across speakers in the quantitative strength of each variable’s conditioning factors, e.g. the effect of place of articulation on VOT. However, nearly all speakers show the same qualitative effects of each conditioning factor (e.g., bilabials < velars for VOT). We discuss the relevance of these findings for theories of language change, phonetics, and phonology, as well as directions for future work with this corpus.

Whamit!’s annual Winter semi-hiatus

With Fall semester classes ending this week, we will go on our regular Winter semi-hiatus until classes resume at the beginning of February. As always, we will report exciting breaking news as it happens (that’s why it’s just a semi-hiatus), but otherwise — see you in 2014!

Phonology Circle II 12/13 - Sandrien van Ommen

Speaker: Sandrien van Ommen (Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, OTS) (joint study with Rene Kager)
Date/Time: Friday, Dec 13, 3 pm (please note unusual time)
Location: 32-D831
Title: Language-specific metrical segmentation in Dutch, Turkish, Polish and Hungarian

With the current study we investigated the role of stress as a boundary marker in processing. Previous studies have shown that listeners interpret stressed or strong syllables as potential word-beginnings in a.o. English (Cutler & Norris, 1988), and Dutch (Quené & Koster, 1998; Vroomen & de Gelder, 1995). This is interpreted as evidence for the Metrical Segmentation Hypothesis, which predicts that listeners have and use a parsing ability based on edge-aligned stress. Unfortunately, most empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from languages with (statistically dominant) word-initial stress. Evidence for a facilitatory effect of right-edge aligned stress is sparse and inconclusive (see a.o. Toro-Soto et al., 2007, Cunillera et al. 2008, Kabak et al., 2010). We designed a cross-linguistic experiment to address the question of language-specificity in metrical segmentation. In this experiment, we measured response latencies in a non-word spotting task with six different metrical conditions. The participants were speakers of Dutch (penultimate word-stress, variable), Polish (penultimate word-stress, fixed), Turkish (word-final stress, variable) and Hungarian (word-initial stress, fixed).

Besides finding the expected overall effect of facilitation of the native canonical stress pattern in (non-)word segmentation, we conclude to have found a language-specific anticipitory use of stress in segmentation. Furthermore, the results invite us to further investigate the role of peripherality and variability of stress in processing. To gain more insight into what role these factors may have, we recently started designing a computational model for the acquisition and use of metrical patterns. This is a very recent and tentative project that we welcome discussion on.

Syntax Square 12/3 - Yusuke Imanishi

Speaker: Yusuke Imanishi
Title: Default ergative: A story of Ixil
Date/Time: Tuesday, Dec 3, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

I will discuss the unexpected emergence of the ergative in intransitive clauses of Ixil (Mayan). This occurs when an instrumental phrase is fronted to a clause-initial position (Ayres 1983, 1991; Yasugi 2012). I will argue that the intransitive subject receives ergative Case as syntactic default Case because it would be otherwise Case-less. It will be shown that a fronted instrumental phrase blocks the assignment of absolutive Case to the intransitive subject. In other words, the unexpected instance of the ergative indicates failure of absolutive Case assignment. To formulate this analysis, I will propose (i) a model of default ergative Case assignment and (ii) the Absolutive Case Parameter in Mayan (cf. Aldridge 2004, 2008; Legate 2008; Coon et al. 2012).

Ling-Lunch 12/5 - Juliet Stanton

Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Title: Constraints on English preposition stranding
Date/Time: Thursday, Dec 5, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I discuss an asymmetry in English preposition stranding, illustrated by the following contrasts:

(1) Which bench were you sitting on?
Which holiday do you eat lamb on?

(2) Not a single bench will I ever sit on.
*Not a single holiday will I ever eat lamb on.

I show that the ability of a given preposition (P) to be stranded is partially dependent on whether or not P accepts a pronoun as its complement, i.e. whether or not P is an antipronominal context (Postal 1998). Certain A-bar extractions permit stranding of antipronominal Ps, while others do not.

I extend the theory of wholesale late merger (Takahashi 2006, Takahashi & Hulsey 2009) and propose that while a subset of A-bar extractions obligatorily leave full copies in the base position, others don’t. I show that this proposal derives the observed restrictions on P-stranding, and present some additional evidence in support of the analysis.

AAAS congratulations for Wayne & Joseph

Congratulations to Joseph Aoun (MIT Linguistics PhD 1982, President of Northeastern University) and to Professor of Linguistics Emeritus Wayne O’Neil on their election as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science!

Colloquium 12/6 - Gillian Ramchand

Speaker: Gillian Ramchand (University of Tromsø/CASTL)
Time: Friday December 6th, 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Minimalism and Cartography (joint work with Peter Svenonius)

Abstract:

While many current syntacticians have felt queasy about embracing the full extent and number of the functional decompositions as proposed in classic cartography (e.g. Cinque 1999), we believe that cartography in the broad sense is essential for any generative theory - it consists in establishing what the category labels of the symbolic system are, how they are hierarchically organized, and how rigidly. We too find it implausible that extremely fine-grained functional sequences of highly abstract heads with no deterministic relationship to compositional semantics is either universal or innate. However, we do think that the parts of the functional sequence that are universal and driven by innate mechanisms are directly related to pressure from the interfaces, and in particular to the facts about human concept formation. So we will push a strong semantically grounded thesis about why templatic effects of a certain sort emerge. It is an empirical question how fine-grained the universal spine is (cf. also Wiltschko, to appear), although we suspect with Wiltschko that it is rather abstract. In this talk I will first outline the basis for a methodological reconciliation between the practice and results of cartography, and more minimalistic pressures to explain and ground the complex ordering effects we see on the surface. Secondly, I will exemplify with a case study. Using the domain of English auxiliary orders, I argue that one cannot ignore the detailed mapping evidence, and that understanding it is crucial to making progress on the more theoretical questions of universality vs. language particularity, locality effects/phases, and the mapping to the cognitive-intentional systems of mind/brain.

In this talk therefore, I will offer entertainment both for those who like to talk about the ‘big picture’ and and for those who like to get their hands dirty: (i) an articulation of distinctive kind of research programme which many are actually embarked on but which needs a name and some more visibility, (ii) a novel compositional semantic take on aspectual auxiliaries and the modal circumstantial/epistemic distinction and (iii) a new perspective on ‘affix’-hopping.

Phonology Circle 11/25 - Juliet Stanton

Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Title: Factorial typology and accentual faithfulness
Date/Time: Monday, Nov 25, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

I investigate the nature of accentual faithfulness constraints and their rankings relative to markedness constraints, starting from an analysis of stress in 23 Pama-Nyungan (PN) and neighboring Australian aboriginal languages (e.g. Pintupi, Diyari, Warlpiri). In many of these systems, unsuffixed forms are stressed identically, but suffixed forms differ according to the type of paradigmatic uniformity effect observed. The proposed account differs from prior work (e.g. Crowhurst 1994, Kager 1997, Kenstowicz 1998) as it does not appeal to feet and uses directional base-derivative (BD) identity constraints (Benua 1997) to model cyclic effects.

Predictions of the constraint set are explored through a factorial typology. To constrain the typology’s predictions, I introduce the visibility hypothesis: constraints backed by positive evidence from frequent forms dominate constraints that lack such evidence. Integrating the visibility hypothesis into the factorial typology results in accurately restrictive predictions for the typology of stress-morphology interactions.

A Brief Whamit! Issue

We have a shortened Whamit! due in part to Thursday and Friday being holidays. Have a nice Thanksgiving!

Phonology Circle 11/18 - Ryo Masuda

Speaker: Ryo Masuda
Title: The morphophonology of verb doubling in Chechen/Ingush
Date/Time: Monday, Nov 18, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

As described by Conathan & Good (2001) and Nichols (2011), Chechen and Ingush (Northeast Caucasian) exhibit a case of word-level reduplication, henceforth verb doubling, in which the presence of a clause chaining clitic ‘a on a simple intransitive verb triggers insertion of an infinitival form of the verb (1).

(1) Ahwmad sialxana wa ‘a wiina dwa-vaghara
Ahmed yesterday stay.INF & stay.ANT DEIX-go.WP
‘Ahmed, having stayed yesterday, left.’ (Chechen)

The doubling is blocked in complex verb constructions with a preverbal particle (2), object, or deictic marker in the verb phrase.

(2) Ahwmada, kiexat jaaz ‘a dina, zheina
Ahmed.ERG letter write & do.CVANT book read.PRES
‘Ahmed, having written a letter, reads a book.’ (Chechen)

I argue that this instance of verb doubling is a consequence of a prosodic requirement on the chaining clitic, namely to be enclitic to a non-final stressed element (cf. Good 2005). I then situate the Chechen/Ingush case within a larger body of clitic placement and verb doubling phenomena, whose accounts have included appeals to the syntactic component of the grammar (Franks and Bošković 2001), and discuss consequences for the syntax-phonology interface.

Syntax Square 11/19 - Ruth Brillman

Speaker: Ruth Brillman
Title: Too tough to see
Date/Time: Tuesday, Nov 19, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

This talk argues for a deep syntactic similarity between gapped degree phrases (GDPs) and tough-constructions (TCs). Building on novel observations as well as previous findings (Akmajian 1972, a.o.), I argue that GDPs contain a tough-movement structure within them, plus an additional layer of syntactic structure particular to GDPs. I argue that TCs, and the TC core within GDPs, involve both an A-step and an A-bar step (cf. Hicks 2007, Hartman 2012). This explains the syntactic and semantic similarities and differences, between the two constructions.

Ling-Lunch 11/21 - Aron Hirsch

Speaker: Aron Hirsch
Title: Presupposition projection and incremental processing in disjunction
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov. 21, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Presupposition projection in conjunction shows asymmetries sensitive to the linear order of the conjuncts: presuppositions project cumulatively out of the first conjunct, and out of the second conjunct only if not entailed by the asserted content of the first conjunct. One possibility is that this asymmetry is linked to general processing considerations. This predicts similar asymmetries to be observable in complex sentences with other sentential connectives. A well-known counter-example is disjunction. The existence presupposition triggered by the definite description the bathroom does not project in (1) (Partee 2005), independent of order:

(1) Either there is no bathroom, or the bathroom is in a funny place.
Either the bathroom is in a funny place, or there is no bathroom.

The aim in this talk is to show that disjunction in fact does show linear order asymmetries consistent with conjunction, and is directly supportive of presupposition evaluation being integrated with incremental parsing.

We build the argument in three steps. (i) We identify a confound in (1) which interferes with projection in both orders, making (1) not a fair test case for global projective asymmetry (Gazdar 1979). (ii) We construct new examples which remove the confound, and show that to the extent that these elicit a stable intuition, the intuition is asymmetric. (iii) We report experimental results demonstrating that even with the confound in place, examples like (1) show traces of asymmetry at an intermediate stage of parsing, predicted by the processing account we advocate.

Donca Steriade Speaks at Harvard, 11/22

Faculty member Donca Steriade will be giving a talk at Harvard’s GSAS Workshop on Indo-European and Historical Linguistics this Friday.

Speaker: Donca Steriade
Title: Latin t-participles and t-derivatives: a new analysis
Date/Time: Friday, Nov 22, 4:30p
Location: Boylston Hall 103

Full abstract is available here (pdf).

Ling-Lunch 11/14 - Dennis Ott

Speaker: Dennis Ott (HU Berlin/MIT)
Title: Deletion in disjunct constituents
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov 14, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Parenthesis has received little attention in linguistic theory, despite the fact that the phenomenon raises fundamental questions concerning the division of labor between “sentence grammar” and “discourse grammar.” Some researchers (e.g., Haegeman 1991, Espinal 1991, Peterson 1999) have argued tha parentheticals are syntactically “orphan” constituents (or “disjuncts”), and hence beyond the purview of syntax, whereas other approaches take the linear intercalation of parentheticals into their host clauses to be a sign of syntactic integration (e.g., Emonds 1976, Potts 2005, de Vries 2012). Integration analyses invariably rely on construction-specific machinery, hence imply a prima facie undesirable enrichment of UG. Non-restrictive appositives in particular are often taken to be syntactically integrated, either implicitly (Espinal 1991) or explicitly (Heringa 2012). In this talk, I contest this view and develop a novel argument for taking the relation between non-restrictive appositives and their host clauses to be non-syntactic (established in “discourse grammar”). Building on Burton-Roberts’ (2006) intuitive characterization of appositives as “reduplicative reformulations,” I show that appositive disjunct constituents are sentential fragments, derived by familiar mechanisms of PF-deletion (Merchant 2004, Ott & de Vries in press). Crucially, the fact that the antecedent of appositive-internal ellipsis is the host clause itself entails that deletion is antecedent-contained, and hence irresolvable, on the assumption that the appositive fragment is syntactically integrated into the host. Ellipsis being resolvable, appositives must be taken to be separately generated expressions whose linear insertion into the host is a matter of discourse/production rather than syntax proper.

 

Did we really forget to tell you about this?

For shame!

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MIT phonologists at UMass

Several students, faculty, visitors and alumni were at UMass Amherst for Phonology 2013 over the weekend. Presenting were:

Aron Hirsch: Is the domain for weight computation the syllable or the interval?

Gillian Gallagher (PhD 2010, NYU): Identity preference without the identity effect in Cochabamba Quechua

Eduard Artés Cuenca (visitor from CLT – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): Valencian hypocoristics: when morphology meets phonology

Jonah Katz (PhD 2010, UC Berkeley): Against a unified sonority scale

Juliet Stanton: A cyclic factorial typology of Pama-Nyungan stress

Michelle Fullwood: The perceptual dimensions of sonority-driven epenthesis

Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009, CNRS, Paris): Error-driven versus Batch models of the early stage of the acquisition of phonotactics: David defeats Goliath.

Tara McAllister Byun (PhD 2009, New York University), Sharon Inkelas (UC Berkeley) and Yvan Rose (Memorial University of Newfoundland): Explaining child-specific phonology with a grammar of articulatory reliability: The A-map model.

SNEWS at MIT, 11/16

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS for short) will be held on Saturday November 16th at MIT, in room 32-D461. The tentative program can be found here.

(M@90)@YouTube

As you may remember, on September 20 and 21 of this year, MIT Lingustics hosted M@90, a Workshop on Metrical Structure, Stress, Meter and Text Setting — to celebrate Moris Halle’s 90th birthday.

Thanks to Tim Halle and his colleagues at Video Visuals, the workshop was recorded (both talks and discussion) and can now be watched in its entirety on Youtube at http://goo.gl/XETSLA. Our deepest thanks to Tim and to all the speakers and participants!

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MIT morphologists at UC San Diego

The 2nd American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM 2) was also held this weekend, at UC San Diego. Faculty member Adam Albright headed a tutorial session on modeling analogical inference and change, and 2nd year grad student Isa Kerem Bayirli gave a talk entitled On An Impossible Affix.

No Syntax Square This Week

Ruth writes: “There’s no Syntax Square this week. But never fear, the talk will regularly resume next Tuesday (with talks each week until the end of the semester!)”

Ling-Lunch 11/7 - Coppe van Urk

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: A’-movement, case and “marked nominative” in Dinka
Date/Time: Thursday, Nov 7, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

“In this talk, I examine a type of ”marked nominative” system that is found in many African languages (e.g. Koenig 2006, 2008), and has the following two characteristics:

1. Non-initial subjects occur in a morphosyntactically marked case, which may be used for obliques elsewhere.
2. Initial subjects are in the unmarked case, used also for objects and in default contexts.

This is an unusual system, both because of the case alternation and because the subject case described in (1) is unlike ergative (it shows no sensitivity to properties of the verb) and unlike nominative (it can be used to mark obliques).

I study ”marked nominative” in Dinka (Nilotic; South Sudan) and argue that it arises when C, and not T, is responsible for licensing the subject. I propose that, as a result of this, A’-movement may interfere with structural licensing of the subject. In this situation, an adposition may be merged directly with the subject, so that it requires no outside licensing, following Halpert’s (2012) treatment of augment morphology in Zulu. The presence of this adposition causes the subject to be look like an oblique. I show that this analysis makes sense of the Dinka pattern, and the profile of such ”marked nominative” systems in a diverse set of languages (Koenig 2006, 2008; Dimmendaal 2007).”

A mea culpa from Whamit

We discovered that emails sent to Whamit from non-MIT email accounts, including Gmail, were not getting through to us. This may have particularly affected alumni, visitors and Harvard members who have tried to contribute to Whamit in the past.

We’re sorry if you were left thinking that your submission wasn’t important enough — it was our mistake.

The issue has since been fixed, so please do submit news for publication, whether they be academic in nature (conference visits, accepted/published papers, fieldwork trips, invited talks) or otherwise (childbirth, climbing a mountain), to us at whamit@mit.edu.