Whamit!

What: Even more Turkshop results
Who: Benjamin Storme
When: Thursday, May 16, 5:30
Where: 32-D831

The final lab meeting of the year will be dedicated to results of projects created by Turkshop participants. We will hear from Benjamin Storme about his project on wh long extraction in French.

We are delighted to announce that our very own Yasutada Sudo, who received his PhD from this department last summer (dissertation: On the Semantics of Phi Features on Pronouns), has accepted a position as Lecturer in Semantics at University College London  (the British counterpart of a tenure-track Assistant Professorship.)

Yasu will be moving to London from Paris, where he has spent the past year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institut Jean Nicod.  Congratulations, Yasu!!

An article by Martin Hackl on the Syntax-Semantics Interface has appeared in a special June issue of the journal Lingua.  The purpose of the special issue, as summarized by its editor, Luigi Rizzi, is “to present some fundamental ideas and empirical results of modern syntactic research, and make them available to the scientific communities interested in the study of language as a cognitive capacity” - an especially important task at a time when interest in linguistic questions is increasing within cognitive science.

Next weekend, three talks from MIT will be presented at the 20th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association at the Arlington campus of the University of Texas.

At this year’s AFLA,  Norvin Richards, one of three invited speakers at the conference, will be asking and answering the question “Why are so many Austronesian languages verb-initial”.  Fourth-year student Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine will be speaking on ”Topic, Specificity, and Subjecthood in Squiliq Atayal” (research arising from his fieldwork in last summer as a member of the NSF-hosted East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute in Taiwan).  Third-year student Ted Levin will be speaking on the topic of  ”Dissolving the Balinese Bind: Balinese Binding and The A/A-Bar status of Spec TP”.   But that’s not all!    Joey Sabbagh  (PhD 2005) is one of the conference organizers, so we know it will be a great meeting.

Third-year grad student Isaac Gould has been chosen to receive the 2013 James A.and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching, given by MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Isaac’s award letter describes the prize as follows: “This prize recognizes those instructors in our School who have demonstrated outstanding success in teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and who have been nominated by students themselves for work above and beyond the ordinary classroom responsibilities. This prize indicates that you have really made a difference in the lives of our remarkable students, an achievement that is as elusive and difficult as it is rewarding. It is a great honor to be so named.”

Isaac has been a teaching assistant for two classes, our undergraduate introductory class 24.900 Introduction to Linguistics in Fall 2011 and the first-year graduate class 24.951 Introduction to Syntax in Fall 2012, and was an outstanding teacher in both classes. This is a great honor for Isaac.  We are very proud of him!

Congratulations!!

P.S.  Isaac is in fact the second linguistics graduate student to win this award in the last four years.  Click here to learn who our 2010 winner was.

The final linguistics colloquium of the semester takes place this Friday.

Speaker: Emmanuel Chemla (LSCP-CNRS Paris)
Date/Time: May 17 (Friday), 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Polarity items are acceptable in subjectively monotone environments (Based on joint work with Vincent Homer and Daniel Rothschild)

Abstract:

This talk is part of a reflection about the status of linguistic generalizations of the form: “Sentence S is acceptable to the extent that it satisfies property P”, where a linguistic intuition is related with an abstract, objective, mathematical property P. As a case study, we will defend the following version of the good-old generalization about the distribution of NPIs: “NPIs are acceptable *to the extent that* they are in an environment that is recognized as downward entailing”. We will present two sets of results in favor of this subjective version of the generalization. First, we will show that the acceptability of an NPI for a given speaker best correlates with the ability of this particular speaker to recognize that the environment is downward-entailing (Chemla, Homer, Rothschild, 2011). Second, we will show that the presence of a polarity item influences inferences comprehenders are willing to draw. Roughly, they create illusions of monotonicity (contra Szabolcsi, Bott, McElree, 2008). We will show that the shape of these illusions provides further direct evidence in favor of the generalization we defend and against previous approaches (in particular, they go against the idea of local licensing of NPIs under double negations, see Chemla, Homer, Rothschild, in preparation). We will conclude with a discussion about: (a) the position of our generalization with respect to critical configurations discussed in the literature about polarity items (Schwarz/Heim puzzle, non-assertive environments such as questions, etc.), (b) what such results teach us about the linguistic ability and its interface with other abilities.

The weekend before last, David Pesetsky journeyed to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where he was a keynote speaker at the 22nd annual conference on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL 22).  In his talk, entitled “Dvuxètapny case assignment and Richards’ conjecture: the Tangkic language Russian, and the Slavic language Lardil”, he argued that the proposal of a deep kinship between Russian and Lardil case marking proposed by Norvin Richards in the article blurbed here runs even deeper.  FASL 22 was brilliantly organized by our own Ivona Kučerová (PhD 2007), with a great team of McMaster students.

The 23rd Semantics and Linguistic Theory conference was held at UC Santa Cruz on May 3-5, 2013. Current students and alumni friends at the conference included:

Igor Yanovich, Variable-force modals on the British Isles: semantic evolution of *motan
Edwin Howard, Superlative Degree Clauses: evidence from NPI licensing
Uli Sauerland (PhD 1998), Presuppositions and the alternative tier
Philippe Schlenker (PhD 1999), Monkey Semantics: Towards a Formal Analysis of Primate Alarm Calls (invited talk)
Wataru Uegaki and Paul Marty, Investigating the alternative-sensitivity of ‘know’
Alexander Podobryaev, Two kinds of indexicals, one kind of monster
Ezra Keshet (PhD 2008), Sloppy identity unbound
Guillaume Thomas (PhD 2012), Is the present tense vacuous?

Last Wednesday, the department said our enthusiastic but tearful good-bye to Maziar Toosarvandani, who has been an active, much appreciated member of the department for the past two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow — and is now taking up an Assistant Professor position at UC Santa Cruz (as reported here). The grad students presented Maziar with two books about MIT and the Stata Center to remember us by, sentimental speeches were made, N. Paiute nominals and the Persian ezafe construction were discussed, and lots of great food was consumed!

photo credit: Snejana Iovtcheva

Speaker: Neil Myler (NYU)
Title: Building and interpreting possession sentences in Cochabamba Quecha
Date/Time: Tuesday, May 7, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available here (pdf).

This talk develops an analysis of the syntax and semantics of three different predicative possession constructions in Cochabamba Quechua, a Quechuan language of Bolivia, and draws out the consequences of that analysis for the theory of thematic roles and their place in the grammar.

Speaker: Neil Myler (NYU)
Title: Building and interpreting HAVE sentences in (mostly) English
Date/Time: Thursday, May 9, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

The full abstract is available here (pdf).

The literature on the syntax and semantics of possession sentences is vast. However, much of it can be seen as trying to deal with two major puzzles: what we might call the too many meanings puzzle (why do possession constructions across languages have the ability to convey a myriad of seemingly unrelated meanings, like kinship, body parts, permanent ownership, abstract attributes, etc.?), and the too many (surface) structures puzzle (why do possession constructions vary so much in their surface syntax across languages, from transitive HAVE constructions, to existential BE constructions containing an oblique possessor, to copular BE constructions containing a PP possessee?; Why is the transitive HAVE pattern relatively rare?).

I suggest that a solution to both of these puzzles is forthcoming if we take thematic roles out of the syntax, and instead have them be read off from the output of syntax in the semantic component (a conclusion argued for already on different grounds by Schäfer 2008; Wood 2012; Bruening 2013; Marantz 2009, 2013). The post-syntactic conception of thematic roles has an important consequence: whether a given argument-introducing head takes a complement or specifier is determined in the syntax, but whether it assigns a thematic role or not is determined in the semantics. This means that the notion of “syntactic argument of head X” is potentially independent of the notion of “semantic argument of head X”. I argue that this independence is key to understanding the syntactic structures of possession sentences and how they give rise to the gamut of apparently unrelated “possessive” interpretations. In particular, I argue for the following hypotheses, which rely on this conception:

• HAVE and BE are realizations of the same abstract light verb ‘v’. Semantically, this ‘v’ is a type-neutral identity function, which will simply pass the denotation of its complement up the tree (this follows a long tradition of proposals that BE and HAVE are meaningless in themselves).
• This ‘v’ is spelled out as HAVE only if it occurs in the environment of Kratzer’s (1996) Voice, and Voice takes a specifier. Otherwise, this ‘v’ is spelled out as BE. (i.e., HAVE is simply the transitive form of BE- much in the spirit of Hoekstra 1994. The analysis also follows the tradition of Freeze 1992 and Kayne 1993 in taking HAVE to be BE+”something else”, but takes the “something else” to be something other than an incorporated preposition).
• The thematic roles associated with permanent ownership and the various inalienable possession relations (the part-of relation, kinship, etc) are associated with distinct DP-internal argument-introducing heads, but languages may vary in whether they first-merge the possessor in a possession sentence into the specifier of one of these DP-internal positions, or somewhere higher up in the tree.
• The main source of cross-linguistic variation in the syntax of possession sentences is thus the position in which the possessor is introduced into the structure. If the possessor is introduced in spec-VoiceP, we have a HAVE construction/language. If the possessor is introduced anywhere lower than spec-VoiceP (e.g. in a spec position inside the possessee DP itself, in the spec of a pP which takes the possessee as its complement, in the spec of an applicative head, etc.), then we have a BE construction/language.

What: Even more Turkshop results
When: Thursday, May 9, 5:30
Where: 32-D831
Who: Despina Oikonomou, Ruth Brillman, Wataru Uegaki, Paul Marty

This week’s lab meeting will be dedicated to results of projects created by Turkshop participants. We will hear from Despina Oikonomou, Ruth Brillman, Wataru Uegaki and Paul Marty.

Speaker: Andrew Nevins (University College London)
Date/Time: Friday May 10th, 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Agree-Link, Derivational Sandwiching, and Agree-Copy

Abstract:

Recent work on agreement with coordinated DPs has largely converged on the hypothesis that agreement is established in two steps (a move anticipated in Pesetsky & Torrego 2004). Adopting the terminology in Arregi and Nevins 2012, we can refer to these as Agree-Link, or the syntactic establishment of an Agree relation between Probe and one or more Goals, and Agree-Copy, or the postsyntactic (PF) copying from Agree-Linked Goal(s) onto the Probe. Evidence for this split of Agree into two separate steps comes from the fact that they can be derivationally intercalated by postsyntactic operations such as Linearization in Hindi and Slovenian (Bhatt and Walkow, to appear; Marusic, Nevins and Badecker, to appear) postsyntactic morpheme displacement in Bulgarian (Arregi and Nevins, to appear), and Vocabulary Insertion in West Germanic (van Koppen 2005).

Further evidence for this two-step analysis of agreement comes from a different empirical domain, namely, variation in the interaction of agreement with case syncretisms due to postsyntactic impoverishment in Basque dialects and Indo-Aryan languages. In both cases, variation in the realization of agreement is due to a uniform establishment of syntactic Agree-Link relations, coupled with dialect- or language-particular differences in the application of Agree-Copy and its derivational interaction with postsyntactic impoverishment rules. The variation found is thus largely reduced to familiar feeding and counterfeeding interactions among operations in a derivational theory.

The interaction of agreement and case syncretism in these languages thus converges with crosslinguistic coordination patterns in providing evidence for a strongly derivational theory of Agree in which the latter is established in two steps: hierarchically defined syntactic Agree-Link, followed by postsyntactic Agree-Copy, which can interact in different derivationally defined ways with other postsyntactic operations. As such, it provides converging evidence for the view that minimalist and Distributed Morphology approaches to inflection involve sequenced derivational ordering of specific elementary operations (Müller 2008, Epstein & Seely 2002).

Speaker: Isa Bayirli
Title: On an Impossible Affix
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 30, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

This talk presents a new argument to substantiate the view that the morphological identity of a grammatical object is not lexical idiosyncrasy and that it reflects the syntactic behavior of this object. The empirical claim of this talk will be:

A topic or focus associated morpheme is never an affix.

I will argue that this follows from the syntactic fact that a syntactic head with topic or focus feature cannot trigger head movement. Evidence will be provided from Turkish, Bulgarian, Japanese, Finnish and Pazar Laz. I will show that when we translate these ideas into a non-lexical based implementation of Mirror Theory, we make the prediction that in those languages where there is always a suffix on the verb, this suffix cannot be a topic-focus associated morpheme. I will finally show that the prediction seems to be true.

Who: Matthew Brand, Randal Thurston, Kai von Fintel
What: “The Language of Forms”
Where: Monadnock Room, Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center
When: May 1, 6–7pm, Reception to follow

This Wednesday evening, Kai will join two artists in the latest event in a series of events (Catalyst Conversations) bringing together artists and scientists. Learn more at http://www.catalystconversations.net/events/.

NB: Two more linguistics connections: Matt Brand is the husband of Amy Brand (née Pierce), 1989 PhD from MIT BCS (with Ken Wexler as chair) and former linguistics editor at MIT Press. Amy is now Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments and Information at Harvard. Plus, the assistant to the director of the Catalyst Conversations is 2008 MIT Linguistics PhD Sarah Hulsey.

Please don’t be confused: the event series is titled “Catalyst Conversations”, but it takes place at the Broad Institute, not at Catalyst restaurant.

Ling-Lunch will not meet this week. There will be a session next week with a talk by Neil Myler (NYU).

Ken Wexler’s recently-published work on grammar and autism was featured by the MIT news office.

Title: More Turkshop results
Date/Time: Thursday, May 2, 5:30
Location: 32-D831 (Note room!)

This week’s lab meeting will be dedicated to results of projects created by Turkshop participants. Stay tuned for more details.

Speaker: Sam Zukoff
Title: The Phonology of Verbal Reduplication in Ancient Greek
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 22, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

In this talk I put forward an analysis of reduplication in Ancient Greek, focusing on the behavior of consonant-initial roots in perfect-tense reduplication. Particular attention will be paid to two questions. First, how are we to analyze the underlying representation of reduplication in Ancient Greek? I will propose two potential analyses, and consider their theoretical and empirical implications, including asking briefly what is reduplication? Both potential analyses will promote the notion that Ancient Greek reduplication displays morphological fixed segmentism, and that we can explain the reduplicative patterns without referencing reduplicative templates or templatic constraints. Second, how are we to explain the differences in the shape of the reduplicant between roots beginning with different sorts of clusters (namely stop + sonorant versus other clusters)? I will propose a solution based on syllabification. Consideration of certain additional facts about syllable weight will require us to adjust the account slightly by appealing to minor re-ranking within a stratal OT model.

Speaker: Gary Thoms
Title: Remnant movement and discontinuous deletion
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 23, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

In this paper I propose that chains are subject to a constraint that bans discontinuous deletion of copies. Initial motivation for this constraint comes from consideration of the properties of regular cyclic movement chains (considering data from Boskovic 2002), but then the rest of the paper is devoted to showing that this constraint is active in constraining remnant movement. Remnant movement is in principle possible, but only if it derives a representation which does not require discontinuous chain reduction. Evidence for this comes from two main sources: (i) a pervasive left-right asymmetry in possible RM derivations; (ii) variation in the availability of “true” VP-fronting. The former is supported by an analysis of the availability of “headless fronting” and extraposition-fed leftward movement, all of which fails to follow from existing theories of RM. The latter is supported by consideration of when fronted VPs behave like moved categories, with novel data showing that the ban on reconstruction into fronted VPs (Barss’ generalization) is lifted when the relevant representation does not fall foul of the discontinuous deletion constraint. I describe a few ways in which languages get around the RM problem presented by VP-fronting (“matching”” analyses, spelling out traces and not leaving traces) and indicate that this may in fact derive us a plausible typology of its language-internal and cross-linguistic distribution. I conclude by considering what kind of theory of movement and deletion this kind of constraint requires.

LFRG will meet twice this week.

Speaker: Ciro Greco (University of Milan-Bicocca)
Date/Time: Wed 24 April, 11:30 am (note special time!)
Location: 32-D831 (note special location!)
Title: “Are subject islands just subject islands? Experimental evidence from Italian”

Abstract TBA

Speaker: Edwin Howard
Date/Time: Fri 26 April, 11:30 am
Location: 32-D461
Title: “Superlative Degree Clauses: evidence from NPI licensing” (Practice talk for SALT 23)

Abstract

Speaker: Ayesha Kidwai (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Title: EX-It: On the syntax of finite clause extraposition and pronominal correlates in Hindi and Bangla
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 25, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk, I revisit the familiar question of finite clause extraposition in Hindi and Bangla, and the co-ocurrence of this phenomenon with pronominal correlates in the matrix clause. Examining the facts from rightward scrambling, WH-construal and bound anaphora in the two languages, I will suggest that such a non-canonical rightward positioning of finite complements is effected by a generalised, and revised, version of TH/EX (Chomsky 1999/2001). I propose that while this ‘displacement’ is driven by interface conditions holding both at the PHON and SEM interfaces . Furthermore, I will suggest that that the distribution of correlate/expletive pronominals that may occur in construction with such finite clauses is fundamentally unrelated to the extraposition operation per se, and relates instead to a SEM interface requirement on the merger of complement CPs in the verbal projection.

The Experimental Syntax and Semantics lab will not meet on 4/25.

Speaker: Mark C. Baker (Rutgers)
Date/Time: Friday 26 April, 3:30-5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: On Dependent Ergative Case (in Shipibo) and Its Derivation by Phase

Abstract:

Focusing on new data from the Shipibo language (Panoan, spoken in Peru), I defend a simple “dependent case” theory of ergative case marking, where ergative case is assigned to the higher of two NPs in a clausal domain. I show how apparent failures of this rule can be explained assuming that VP is a spell out domain distinct from the clause, and this bleeds ergative case assignment for c-command relationships that already exist in VP and are unchanged in CP. This accounts for otherwise anomalous case patterns in ditransitives, reciprocals, and dyadic experiencer verbs. In contrast, applicatives of unaccusative verbs do have ergative subjects, and this is a notable success for the dependent case theory as opposed to popular theories according to which ergative is an inherent case. Finally, I show how case assignment interacts with restructuring to explain constructions in which ergative case appears to be optional. An additional theoretical implication of this work, I claim, is that it shows us more precisely where dependent case marking applies: not in the syntax proper, nor at PF proper, but precisely at Spell-Out, seen as the dynamic interface between syntax and PF.

Speaker: Bronwyn M. Bjorkman (University of Toronto)
Title: Possession and necessity: from individuals to worlds
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 18, 12:30-1:45p Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Elizabeth Cowper.)

The modal use of possession is well known from the “semi-modal” ‘have (to)’, but is not unique to English: the same broadening from possession to necessity is found in many languages, including Spanish, Catalan, German, and Hindi (Bhatt 1997). We argue that this grammaticalization path is available because possession and necessity are both built on a prepositional relation of containment or inclusion. In possession this relation holds between individuals, in necessity between sets of worlds corresponding to the modal base and the proposition.

Many have proposed that the syntax of possession is prepositional, and that verbal have (and its counterparts in other languages) occurs when the possessive preposition occurs where be would otherwise appear (Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, a.o.). Levinson (2011) has recently argued that this possessive preposition should be identified as (non-locative) WITH, expressing a relation of inclusion or containment. We argue that this relation of containment or inclusion also appears in the composition of universal modality, but between sets of worlds rather than individuals. A modal operator composes first with a modal base (i.e. a set of epistemically or deontically accessible worlds), and then with a proposition (also modelled as a set of worlds). A universal modal operator requires that a proposition be true in all accessible worlds—-i.e. the set of worlds corresponding to the modal base must be a subset of the set of worlds corresponding to the proposition.

This subset relation mirrors the inclusion/containment relation expressed by possessive WITH. It is this common semantic core, we propose, that is reflected by the grammaticalization of ‘have’ from possession to necessity.

As announced earlier Friday, this colloquium talk will be held Saturday (4/20), 12:00pm, in room 32-D461.

Speaker: Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (University of Toronto Mississauga)
Date/Time: 19 April (Fri), 3:30 - 5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Phases as domains of linguistic computation: Second position clisis in Eastern Armenian

Abstract:

This talk explores the relevance of phases as domains of linguistic computation by bringing evidence from the positional distribution of an auxiliary clitic in Eastern Armenian. After a brief discussion of my general framework, I will turn to the distribution of the Eastern Armenian auxiliary in focus-neutral contexts. I will show that the auxiliary can best be analyzed as a second position clitic in the vP phase domain (akin to other second position clitics in the CP domain). I will then look at the distribution of the auxiliary in sentences involving focused constituents, wh-phrases and negation and will provide a syntactic account of these facts based on movement of the auxiliary to the focus head (similar to other cases of verb movement to focus heads in other languages). I will finally argue that in order to unify the distribution of the auxiliary in these two contexts, the notion of phasehood should be extended to include focus heads. I will show how this proposal may pave the way for an analysis of the distribution of the auxiliary in sentences involving multiple foci. This talk draws heavily on the parallelism between CP and vP both in terms of their status as phases, but also their structural make-up. To the extent that it succeeds in accounting for the presented facts, it provides further support for this parallelism.

(The bulk of this talk is based on joint work with Karine Megerdoomian.)

Speaker: Ciro Greco (University of Milan-Bicocca)
Date/Time: Wed 24th April 11:30 (note special time!)
Location: 32-D831 (note special location!)
Title: Are subject islands just subject islands? Experimental evidence from Italian

Donca Steriade is at UC Berkeley this week, giving a trio of lectures on Greek, Latin, and Romance phonology. The first, given in their departmental colloquium series, is entitled “The role of free bases in cyclic phonology;” her second and third lectures discuss “The cycle without containment.”

Speaker: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (University of Manchester)
Title: Lexical storage and the cyclic reapplication of phonological processes
Date/Time: Monday, Apr 8, 5-6:30p
Location: 32-D831

This talk seeks to describe and explain the peculiar properties of phonological processes applying in cyclic domains smaller than the word, i.e. in sublexical domains. In stratal-cyclic phonological frameworks such as Lexical Phonology and Stratal Optimality Theory, such processes are assigned to the highest stratum in the grammar: the stem level. To characterize the stem-level syndrome, rule-based Lexical Phonology imposed special conditions on rule application at the stem level: stem-level rules were claimed to exhibit stratum-internal cyclic reapplication, to be structure-preserving, and to undergo blocking in nonderived environments. English stress assignment provides a classic example of cyclic reapplication within the same stratum: in a word like [_WL [_SL [_SL imàgin-] átion-] less-ness], foot creation applies twice in the two inner stem-level cycles, and does not apply in the outer word-level domain.

The Lexical Phonology approach to the stem-level syndrome made a number of incorrect predictions. Notably, English has a large set of phonological processes whose domain excludes word-level suffixes, but which nonetheless do not show cyclic reapplication, structure preservation, or blocking in nonderived environments. The GOAT split in the London vernacular is a particularly salient example. In contrast, the stem-level syndrome has altogether dropped off the agenda in current optimality-theoretic frameworks relying on output-output correspondence. Such frameworks do not recognize the notion of cyclic domain, and so cannot sort phonological processes into classes according to domain size. This stance is also unsatisfactory insofar as it fails to account for striking generalizations: in particular, cyclic reapplication within the same stratum is only found at the stem level.

This talk outlines an alternative approach to the stem-level syndrome, where the special properties of stem-level phonological processes emerge from more fundamental grammatical mechanisms. I propose that the distinguishing trait of stem-level linguistic expressions is that they are stored nonanalytically, i.e. as whole output forms generated by the stem-level morphology and phonology. In contrast, word-level and phrase-level constructs are either not stored, or stored analytically (i.e. decomposed as strings of stem-level pieces). Given independently motivated assumptions about morphological blocking, together with the input-output faithfulness technology of Optimality Theory, these postulates about lexical storage make accurate predictions about the behaviour of stem-level phonological processes. Notably, cyclic reapplication turns out to be closely correlated with neutralization (Chung’s Generalization).

Reference:
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2012. The architecture of grammar and the division of labour in exponence. In Jochen Trommer (ed.), The morphology and phonology of exponence, 8-83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [See pp. 15-40.]

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 9, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

This week’s session of Syntax Square will be a discussion of Benjamin Bruening’s manuscript No such thing as defective intervention, which will be led by Coppe.

This week’s Ling-Lunch will feature two shorter talks.

Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 11, 12:30-1:45pm
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Benjamin Storme
Title: Hittite present tense and its interaction with aspect

In this talk, I will show that Hittite, which has a present tense (PRES) and an asymmetric imperfective morphology (IPFV versus zero), patterns basically as English and Japanese.

When PRES refers to the utterance time, IPFV and zero are in complementary distribution: IPFV associates with eventives, and zero with statives (cf English examples in (1)). IPFV has a wider use than the English progressive, though: it must also be used in generic sentences with an eventive predicate.

(1a) *John builds a house (now).
(1b) John is building a house (now).
(1c) John is in his office (now)
(1d) *John is being in his office (now).

When PRES does not refer to the utterance time but to an interval in the future, the restriction on eventives no longer holds, as in Japanese.

When PRES refers to an interval in the past in its so-called « historical present» use, the situation is more contrasted: in one text, it behaves as PRES referring to the utterance time (eventives have to associate with IPFV) ; in another text, it behaves as PRES referring to an interval in the future or as PAST (eventives don’t need to associate with IPFV, as it is the case for English historical presents).

Speakers: Anthony Brohan and Sudheer Kolachina
Title: Backward Control in Telugu: An illusion?

(Based on squib for 24.951)

The phenomenon of Backward control is evidence of crucial importance when it comes to choosing between the two dominant approaches to control discussed in the literature- Hornstein’s movement theory of control (Hornstein, 1999) and Landau’s empty category-PRO coreferenced with the controller through Agree (Landau, 2001).In recent years, there have been claims about the existence of Backward control in Telugu, a Dravidian language (Haddad, 2007, 2009a,b) and a movement-based analysis has also been proposed to account for these structures. In this squib, we evaluate these claims by taking a closer look at the data on which they are based. The results of our study suggest that what appear to be backward control structures in Telugu are the result of a combination of constraints on the distribution of pro and scrambling effects. We also present an alternate analysis of the structures discussed in previous work which is supported by additional evidence from the language.

References:
Y.A. Haddad. Adjunct control in Telugu and Assamese. PhD thesis, Citeseer, 2007.
Y.A. Haddad. Adjunct control in Telugu: Exceptions as non-exceptions. Journal of South Asian Linguistics, 2:35–51, 2009a.
Y.A. Haddad. Copy Control in Telugu. Journal of linguistics, 45(1):69–109, 2009b.
N. Hornstein. Movement and control. Linguistic inquiry, 30(1):69–96, 1999.
I. Landau. Elements of control: Structure and meaning in infinitival constructions, volume 51. Springer, 2001.

What: Turk workshop, part 4
When: Thursday, April 11, 5:30-7
Where: 32-D461

This week will be the fourth part of the Turkshop. Our goal for this session is to discuss some basics of data visualization and data analysis. For this session, please download and install R 3.0: http://cran.r-project.org/ and R Studio 0.97.x: http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/desktop. Materials and slides from the Turkshop can be found here: http://web.mit.edu/hackl/www/lab/turkshop/.

Title: Question-answer congruence and (non-)exhaustivity
Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Date/time: Fri April 12, 11:30am
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

It has been observed that the exhaustive inference of question-answers arises only when the polarity of the answer matches that of the question (Spector 2005; Schulz and van Rooij 2006). For example, although B’s answer in (i) gives rise to the inference that Sue is the only person that B will invite, B’s answer in (ii) does not readily give rise to the inference that Sue is the only person that B will not invite.

(i) A: Who among Sue, Bill and Mary will you invite?
     B: I will invite Sue. [Exhaustive inference: I will not invite Bill and Mary.]

(ii) A: Who among Sue, Bill and Mary will you invite?
      B: I won’t invite Sue. [No exhaustive inference: I will invite Bill and Mary.]

Previous approaches to this phenomenon stipulate mechanisms that are specific to the polarity-mismatching question-answer pairs (Spector 2005; Schulz and van Rooij 2005). In this talk, I provide an account of the phenomenon in terms of an arguably general constraint on the generation of alternatives to be used in the calculation of exhaustivity. The idea relies on the assumption that an answer can be congruent to a question in different “degrees of strength”, extending the notion of question-answer congruence by Rooth (1992). The constraint requires that an alternative for an utterance given a question be at least as congruent to the question as the original utterance. I will discuss how this mechanism accounts for the basic paradigm while leaving several issues currently unresolved. If time permits, I would also like to compare the proposed constraint on alternatives with Katzir’s (2008) and Fox and Katzir’s (2011) mechanism for the generation of structural alternatives.

We are very pleased to announce that fifth-year student Young Ah Do has accepted a position at Georgetown University as Visiting Assistant Professor in Phonology for the coming academic year. Congratulations, Young Ah!!

On Friday, David Pesetsky delivered the 15th annual Pinkel Lecture at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at UPenn. He presented joint work with Jonah Katz on Language and music: same structures, different building blocks.

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Successive-Cyclic Case Assignment: Case Alternation and Stacking in Korean
Date/Time: Tuesday, Apr 2, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

In general, Case theory excludes the option of a DP receiving more than one Case. However, certain constructions arguably demonstrate that this is possible (e.g. see McCreight 1988, Bejar & Massam 1999, Richards 2013, and Pesetsky in press). In this talk, I will examine two separate, but related, phenomena which are problematic for theories which do not permit multiple case assignment - case alternation and case stacking. Case Alternation occurs when a DP displays one of two (or more) case markers in the same structural position. Case Stacking occurs when those two case morphemes are realized simultaneously. Korean demonstrates both phenomena as seen in (1).

(1a) Cheli-eykey/-ka/-eykey-ka ton-i     iss-ta
     Cheli-DAT/-NOM/DAT-NOM    money-NOM exist-DEC
‘Cheli has money.’

(1b) Swunhi-ka  Yenghi-eykey/-lul/-eyekey-lul chayk-ul cwu-ess-ta
     Swunhi-NOM Yenghi-DAT/ACC/-DAT-ACC       book-ACC give-PST-DEC
‘Swunhi gave Yenghi a book.’

In (1a), the subject Cheli displays dative-nominative alternation and stacking. Similarly, the indirect object Yenghi in (1b) displays dative-accusative alternation and stacking. I posit that the examples in (1) and related constructions can be captured if we adopt a cyclic view of case assignment. In Korean (and maybe in fact all languages) DPs receive case in every case assignment domain (i.e. phase) they occupy. Case alternation is captured in this system by restricting the pronunciation of stacked case morphemes via morphological rules.

RUMMIT, the Rutgers-UMass-MIT phonology meeting, will be held at UMass Amherst on Saturday, Apr 6. The program is available here (pdf). This week’s Phonology Circle will feature two practice talks for RUMMIT.

Date/Time: Wednesday, Apr 3, 3-5p (Note special date/time)
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Aron Hirsch
Title: Weight effects on stress placement: syllables or intervals?

The distribution of stress is sensitive to the weight of rhythmic units such that heavier units more strongly attract stress. In this talk, we address the question as to what is the “unit” of weight. The traditional approach has been to link weight to syllable structure, with the domain over which weight is computed being the syllabic rime (i.e. nucleus + coda). Steriade (2012), however, has recently argued for an alternative non-syllable-based approach under which the domain for weight computation is the total vowel-to-vowel interval, i.e. the distance from the beginning of one vowel to the beginning of the next vowel. This talk reports preliminary results from a nonce word production experiment designed to arbitrate between the two approaches: is the unit of weight the syllable, or is it the interval?

Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Title: Predicting distributional restrictions on prenasalized stops

Previous studies on prenasalized stops have focused mainly on issues of derivation and classification, but little is known about their distributional properties. The current study fills this gap. I present results of a survey documenting positional restrictions on NCs, and show that there are predictable and systematic constraints on their distribution. The major finding is that NCs are optimally licensed in contexts where they are perceptually distinct from plain oral and plain nasal stops. (This is a shorter version of 3/11’s Phonology Circle talk.)

Speaker: Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (University of Manchester)
Title: Lexical storage and cyclic locality in phonologically driven allomorph selection
Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 4, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

If exponence proceeds cyclically, so that cycles define local domains for allomorph selection, then empirical evidence from the size of allomorph selection domains can be used to determine the size of lexically stored exponents. Spanish, for example, exhibits a well-known instance of phonologically driven allomorph selection in which allomorphs containing stressed [jé] and [wé] alternate with allomorphs containing unstressed [e] and [o]: e.g. cué nta ‘count/tell.3 SG’ ~ contámos ‘count/tell.1PL ’. In the deverbal adjective [N [V co ntá ] ble] ‘countable’, the monophthongal allomorph c onta- is chosen during the second cycle of the derivation, when stress moves to the second syllable. This instance of allomorphy must therefore involve competition between stems (i.e. between two exponents of the verb lexeme CONTAR), rather than between roots (i.e. between two exponents of the √-node √CONT ). Two lines of evidence support this analysis of the Spanish diphthongal alternation. First, the assumption of stem storage removes the need for declension diacritics in Spanish nominal and adjectival morphology. Secondly, it correctly predicts that, historically, lexemes that share a root but belong to different categories can cease to display the same allomorphic behaviour: e.g. the stem of the verb contár ‘count/tell’ still participates in the diphthongal alternation, whereas the stem of the noun cuénto ‘fable, fibb’ no longer does (cf. cuentéro ‘fabulist, fibber’). These results provide evidence against theories of morphology that restrict lexical storage to roots and to exponents of single functional heads.

Reference
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo. 2013. The Spanish lexicon stores stems with theme vowels, not roots with inflectional class features. Probus 25(1).

Because of the Smolensky talk this Thursday, we will not have a lab meeting this week. Instead, mitcho and Hadas will be in the 8th floor lounge between 4-6pm to help Turkshop participants solve any problems they may have encountered with their experiments (note unusual time/location!). The next Turkshop meeting will take place on 4/11.

It has now been officially confirmed that Whamit!, the independent voice of MIT Linguistics for more than five years, has been acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp for almost $3.4 million dollars.  Though described by some as a “brazen attempt to silence a brave beacon of hope in a gray sea of otherwise identical boring linguistics department blogs all starting with the letter wh”, others have denied the presupposition, claiming that it is merely an implicature.  In a carefully worded statement released earlier today, Murdoch promised no “change in editorial” policy under his leadership.  ”Whamit will continue to bring you those fabulous pumpkin-carving pictures  you love each Halloween, and there is no current plan to curtail Whamit’s award-winning, hard-hitting crime coverage.  Only now we will do it with verve.”  Verve could not be reached for comment.  Meanwhile a viral video insisted “there will be some changes made”, others beans, and still others expressed relief that Whamit had at least not been acquired by Fox News.  Participating in the negotiations over the sale were over nineteen current MIT faculty, graduate students, recent alums, current visitors, former visitors and former alums.  Speaking off the record, noted semanticist Irene Heim commented that “it will take us the rest of our lifetime to drink the champagne that they spilled that evening”, but declined to elaborate.

Please join us at LFRG this week for a talk by a recent MIT PhD in philosophy:

Title: Exhaustified Counterfactuals
Speaker: Paolo Santorio (University of Leeds)
Date/time: Fri April 5, 11:30am
Location: 32D-461

Standard accounts of counterfactuals make use of a notion of closeness or similarity between worlds, whether in the semantics proper, or in the mechanisms of context change associated to utterances of counterfactuals. I present evidence that this is a mistake. The phenomena that Stalnaker and Lewis took to be hallmarks of closeness—-in essence, apparent failures of monotonocity—-are better explained by systematic exhaustification of scalar items in the antecedents. This suggests that counterfactuals are monotonic in the antecedent position, both on a static and a dynamic understanding of logical consequence. I (somewhat tentatively) explore how a monotonic account of this kind can deal with a number of standard issues in the literature, including reverse Sobel sequences and failures of transitivity in the logic of counterfactuals.

Maziar Toosarvandani, who has been an exciting presence in our department for the past two years as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, is concluding his fellowship this Spring, and has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. During his time at MIT, Maziar taught both semantics and syntax classes, a seminar on the syntax and semantics of the Iranian languages, and two undergraduate field methods (on Zazaki and Uyghur) - while continuing his own research on Southern Paiute. Congratulations on your new position, Maziar - we will miss you!!

Over the spring break, first-year graduate student Isa Kerem Bayirli was in Germany for two events: he gave a talk entitled “On Suffixhood” at the University of Potsdam, and he later gave the talk at the Workshop on Verbal Morphosyntax held at the University of Stuttgart. Isa reports both sessions were exciting and thought-provoking.

This week are several MIT Linguists in Sweden, for the 36th annual meeting of Generative Linguistics in the Old World.  Presentations and posters by current MIT linguists and recent alums at the GLOW Colloquium and associated Workshops include:

Adam Albright and Giorgio Magri: Perceptually Motivated Epenthesis Asymmetries in the Acquisition of Clusters

Robert Berwick:  Darwinian Linguistics

Bronwyn M. Bjorkman: Accounting for the absence of coreferential subjects in TP coordination

Patrick Grosz and Pritty Patel-Grosz: Structural Asymmetries - The View from Kutchi Gujarati and Marwari

Ivona Kučerová : Long-Distance Agreement in Icelandic revisited: An interplay of locality and semantics

Norvin Richards and Coppe van Urk: Dinka and the architecture of long-distance extraction

Sam Steddy: Palatalisation Across the Italian Lexicon

Gary Thoms: Anti-reconstruction, anti-agreement and the dynamics of A-movement

Maziar Toosarvandani and Coppe van Urk: The directionality of agreement and nominal concord in Zazaki

Charles Yang: Tipping Points

Speaker: Sam Steddy
Title: Palatalisation and the Role of Morphological Bases Across the Italian Lexicon
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 18, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

I propose that a palatalisation rule in Italian misapplies because of base-to-derivative correspondence effects. In previous work I showed that the rule misapplies in verbal morphology because verbs stand in a stress-dependent correspondence relationship with the base from of their paradigm: under- or overpalatalisation result when the stressed syllable of their infinitive contains a [±strident] segment. I now propose a means of unifying this work with Giavazzi’s (2012) account of the rule’s application in nouns and adjectives, wherein post-stress segments avoid neutralisation. Derivational verbs may underpalatalise as their suffixes reassign stress: when stress is reassigned to a syllable containing a relevant stem-final, the segment will not palatalise. The reason that stress does not prevent palatalisation in relevant underived verbs appears to be diachronic, but I will nonetheless suggest that a synchronic constraint targeting forms without a derivational base will shed further light on palatalisation in the contemporary language. In particular, and in line with phonetic theory, it will show that the contemporary neutralisation has become less aggressive, now targeting only the most front vowel /i/. This fact accounts for the as-yet unexplained failure of the fem.pl suffix /-e/ to trigger the rule.

What: ESSL Turkshop project presentations
When: Monday 18 March, 6:00 - 7:00 pm
Where: 32-D831

Please note the special meeting place and date/time!

Aron Hirsch, Lilla Magyar and Mia Nussbaum will present their Turkshop projects.

Speaker: Yusuke Imanishi
Title: When ergative is default: Ergativity in Kaqchikel and Q’anjob’al (and Mayan)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Mar 19, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

In this preliminary talk, I will explore the possibility that ergative is assigned as a default Case only when a nominal lacks a structural Case. I will begin with an investigation of the contrastive alignment between the ergative and grammatical functions in ergative splits of Kaqchikel and Q’anjob’al. I will also show that this analysis has a consequence for syntactic ergativity (e.g. a ban on A-bar extraction of the ergative subject) in the two languages (and possibly other ergative languages both within and outside Mayan). Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the proposed analysis can capture a novel generalization on the correlation between non-verbal predicates and ergative alignment patterns in some Mayan ergative splits (Imanishi 2012).

Speaker: Noah Constant (UMass Amherst)
Title: “Deriving the Diversity of Contrastive Topic Realizations”
Day/Time: Wednesday, March 20, 3:30-5:00pm
Location: 32-D461

Information structural notions like topic/focus, given/new and contrastive/non-contrastive have a diverse range of effects on sentence structure and pronunciation. In this talk, I look at Contrastive Topic (CT) constructions, and present a novel account of their meaning and structure that can make sense of the range of CT marking strategies attested in the world’s languages. I will cover languages that mark CT prosodically (e.g. English), those that employ a discourse particle (e.g. Mandarin), and those that have a dedicated CT position in the syntax (e.g. Czech).

A typical example of contrastive topic is given in (1). The object is pronounced with falling prosody, marking ‘the beans’ as the answer to the question of what Fred ate. The subject, on the other hand, bears a distinct rising contour, marking ‘Fred’ as a contrastive topic. The effect is to imply additional questions about what other people ate.

(1) (What about FRED? What did HE eat?)
     FRED … ate the BEANS.

I review Büring’s (2003) account of CT and point out several challenges for it—for example, it doesn’t extend to CT questions (attested in Japanese) and it fails to account for effects of CT marking on word order and prosodic phrasing. In its place, I introduce a new model of contrastive topic that posits a Topic Abstraction operator in the left periphery, and defines CT as the focus associate of this operator. In English, the abstraction operator is lexicalized as a tonal clitic to an intonational phrase. The influence of information structure on phrasing is captured via a scope-prosody correspondence constraint requiring the operator and its associate to be realized within a single prosodic domain.

The topic abstraction account is supported by a range of typologically diverse data. For one, it provides a simple way of understanding the possibility of dedicated CT positions in the syntax. Additionally, the account predicts the existence of CT morphemes that occur at a distance from the topic phrase itself, which are attested in Mandarin and Paraguayan Guaraní.

Speaker: Martin Rohrmeier (MIT, Intelligence initiative Fellow)
Title: Introduction to musical syntax
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 21, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In recent years, the cognitive link between music and language has been subject to various debates across disciplines ranging from linguistics, music, psychology, computer science, up to evolution and anthropology (e.g. Patel, 2008; Rebuschat, Rohrmeier, Cross & Hawkins, 2011; Katz & Pesetsky, submitted). One particular domain, in which an overlap between music and language has been frequently discussed, is syntax. Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1983) have specified a theory of tonal (Western) music which postulates nested, recursive dependency relationships that are modeled in analogy to linguistic syntax. However, a number of features of generative musical rules is not sufficiently specified in their theory. This point is addressed by a novel approach to describe musical syntax, which specifies an exact, general set of recursive generative rules and casts empirical predictions (Rohrmeier, 2011). In my presentation I will give an introduction into musical syntax and what it means to *hear* musical dependency and tree structures. I will compare these predictions with recent converging experimental evidence from cognitive and computational work.

All relevant musical concepts will be introduced and no particular music theoretical knowledge is required.

Katz, J. & Pesetsky, D. (submitted). The Identity Thesis for Language and Music, lingBuzz/000959 (2009).
Lerdahl, F. & Jackendoff, R. (1983). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA.
Patel, A.D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. Oxford University Press, New York.
Rebuschat, P., Rohrmeier, M., Cross, I., Hawkins (2011) Eds. Language and Music as Cognitive Systems. Oxford University Press.
Rohrmeier, M. (2011). Towards a generative syntax of tonal harmony. Journal of Mathematics and Music, 5 (1), pp. 35-53.

A summary of Miyagawa, Berwick, and Okanoya’s Frontiers in Psychology article, “The emergence of hierarchical structure in human language,” appeared in Science (March 8, 1132-1133). The brief piece was based on the news article Science carried on their news website.

Undergraduate linguistics major Rebecca Reed (‘14) has been selected as one of 32 students to MIT’s Burchard Scholars program for 2013.  Quoting the official announcement: “the award recognizes sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated outstanding abilities and academic excellence in some aspect of the humanities, arts, and social sciences, as well as in science and engineering.”  Congratulations, Rebecca — we are all very proud!!

There will be no LFRG this week or next since people will be out of town for spring break. However, we’d like to draw your attention to our schedule for next month.

April 5: Paolo Santorio (University of Leeds) “Exhaustified Counterfactuals”
April 12: Wataru Uegaki “Question-answer congruence and (non-)exhaustivity”
April 19: TBA
April 26: Edwin Howard “Superlative Degree Clauses: evidence from NPI licensing” Practice talk for SALT 23

As you can see, April 19 is still available, and so is all of May. If you have an idea, a paper or some work you’d like to share with us, please get in touch with Mia or Edwin.

Speaker: Juliet Stanton
Title: Positional restrictions on prenasalized stops: a perceptual account
Date/Time: Monday, Mar 11, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Previous studies on prenasalized stops have focused mainly on issues of derivation and classification, but little is known about their distributional properties. The current study is an attempt to fill this gap. I present results of two surveys documenting positional restrictions on NCs, and show that there are predictable and systematic constraints on their distribution. The major finding is that NCs are optimally licensed in contexts where they are perceptually distinct from plain oral and plain nasal stops. I propose an analysis referencing auditory factors, and show that a perceptual account explains all attested patterns.

Coppe van Urk will be reporting on a paper from ACAL 44.

Title: On Object Marking in Kikuria
Original Presenters: Rodrigo Ranero, Michael Diercks, and Rebekah Cramerus (Pomona College)
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 12th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461

The talk presents data regarding object marking in Kikuria and an interesting pattern of interaction between cliticization and clitic-doubling.

Speakers: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Hadas Kotek
Title: Blocking in English causatives
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 14, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

There is much work on the two causative constructions in Japanese: *lexical* causatives, which are monoclausal constructions with listed, unproductive morphological forms; and *analytic* causatives, which are biclausal and utilize a productive causative suffix -(s)ase. In particular, Japanese causatives exhibit a *blocking effect*, where for verbs which have a listed, lexical causative form, this lexical causative can “block” the use of the more general analytic causative. In this talk we present new data on causatives in English and argue that “make” causatives and lexical causatives in English are the same as (or at least strikingly similar to) the two causatives in Japanese, in terms of syntactic structure, semantics, and also the blocking of “make” causatives by corresponding lexical causatives. However, in English this “blocking” is often not apparent, because the causee can intervene between “make” and the verb. This data provides evidence for certain spellout processes (such as fusion, in DM terms) being sensitive to linear adjacency, and also is an argument for post-syntactic construction of derivational morphology as in DM and contra the Lexicalist Hypothesis.

First-year students Ruth Brillman and Juliet Stanton have been awarded Linguistic Society of America Fellowships to attend the 2013 LSA Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Michigan.  Congratulations Ruth and Juliet!!

Norvin Richards and 3rd-year student Coppe van Urk were in our nation’s sequestered capital this weekend to present a joint paper on “Dinka and the Syntax of Successive-Cyclic Movement” at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 44), hosted by Georgetown University.  Also presenting at ACAL was our very recent alum Claire Halpert (PhD 2012), now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.  Her talk was entitled “Revisiting the Zulu Conjoint/Disjoint Alternation: Mismatches in Prosody/Syntax Mapping”.

What: Turk workshop, part 3
When: Thursday, March 14, 5:30-7
Where: 32-D461

This week will be the third part of the Turkshop. Our goal for this session is to cover the technical details of everything you need to know in order to set up your own experiment: creating an items file, randomizing using the Turkolizer, creating an HTML template, approving and rejecting subjects on Turk. Please remember to install Python 2.7.3 on your computer; you can download Python here. Materials and slides from the Turkshop can be found here.

Norvin Richards’ paper “Lardil ‘Case Stacking’ and the Timing of Case Assignment” has appeared in the latest issue of Syntax.  Highly recommended to everyone interested in case or the grammar of Lardil (Tangkic, Australia)!

Speaker: Amanda Swenson and Paul Marty
Title: Local Agreement without local binding: What the syntax and prosody of Malayalam taan teach us
Date/Time: Tuesday, March 5, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Jayaseelan (1997) among others has described the Malayalam anti-local form taan ‘self’ as a subject oriented, bound variable that requires a 3rd person antecedent. In this talk, we provide new data from the first systematic exploration of a second reading taan can have, namely an addressee (ADR) reading. We provide a detailed description of the syntactic and prosodic conditions under which 3rd person and ADR readings occur and argue for a unified account of these readings (contra Asher & Kumari 1997). We provide novel data that suggest the so-called Blocking Effects described in the literature are not an intervention phenomenon but rather the result of the morphosyntactic properties of taan. Contra recent radical revisions of Binding Theory (Rooryck & Vanden Wyngaerd 2011, Reuland 2011), we argue that local Agreement (i) always occurs between the nearest subject nominal and taan, but (ii) never results in local binding because of the anti-local nature of taan.

Speaker: Igor Yanovich
Title: Variable-force modality on the British Isles
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 7, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Recent semantic fieldwork in the Pacific Northwest uncovered modals which may render sometimes English necessity modals, other times English possibility ones without being ambiguous (Rullmann et al. 2008, Peterson 2010, Deal 2011). The analyses for those modals either attribute the peculiar behavior to a radical difference from the “European standard” in the semantics of the modal (Rullmann, Matthewson and Davis), or in the shape of the overall modal system (Deal). In this talk, I add to the typology of variable-force modality the Old English *motan (>modern must), which is analyzed in the earlier literature as a possibility modals with perhaps marginal necessity uses. Only by the end of the 15th century did the modal become a normal necessity modal it is now.

I show that in Old English ‘Alfredian’ prose *motan was an unambiguous modal carrying a presupposition of determined future which explains the peculiarities of the modal’s distribution, and creates a variable-force effect. Then I turn to the semantics of the modal in the AB dialect of Early Middle English (a literary variety written in the West Midlands in the first half of 13th century, remarkably focussed for the period of overall decline in English text production). I show that in Early Middle English, *moten (<*motan) was truly ambiguous between necessity and possibility. We can thus observe in the history of English a change from a true non-ambiguous variable-force modal, into a modal ambiguous between possibility and necessity, into a normal necessity modal.

What: Turk workshop, part 2
When: Thursday, March 7, 5:30-7
Where: 32-D461 (note the unusual location!)

This week will be the second part of the Turkshop. mitcho will teach a tutorial on regular expressions (a useful tool for life!) and then we will discuss individual participants’ ideas and designs for their own experiments. If you are a participant, we remind you that you should come with a question in mind that you would like to explore during the Turkshop and (as much as you can) also with some idea for a design. Materials from the Turkshop can be found here.

Speaker: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)
Date/Time: Friday 8 March, 3:30 - 5pm
Venue: 32-141
Title: Current relevance meets inchoativity: On what makes a perfect aspect

Abstract:

Here are some big questions: Why do viewpoint aspects (like perfective, imperfective, or perfect) recur in language after language with similar, but not identical, semantics? What if any universal properties are shared by the language-specific instantiations of each aspect? How much variation is permitted, and what do the differences follow from?

In this talk I address a sub-part of the big questions; my goal is to isolate the common properties shared by present perfects cross-linguistically. I concentrate mainly on Niuean (Polynesian), with brief looks at Japanese, St’át’imcets, Russian, Blackfoot, Mandarin and Saanich. Pushing Portner’s (2003) analysis of English to its logical limits, I propose that the present perfect is purely a pragmatic phenomenon, consisting only of a current relevance presupposition. Following Portner, I assume that the other salient property of the present perfect – that it places events within the Perfect Time Span – is derivable from other parts of the grammar.

The claim that perfects contribute only current relevance predicts that current relevance does not have to be associated solely with viewpoint aspect. I show that this prediction is confirmed by Niuean. The Niuean perfect displays current relevance effects and places events within the Perfect Time Span, yet differs from the English perfect in the readings obtained with each Aktionsart. In Niuean, perfect activities or stage-level states can receive a simple present-tense interpretation, perfect individual-level states receive an inchoative interpretation, and there are no universal perfect readings. I argue that all the properties of the Niuean perfect fall out from an analysis of it as an inchoativizer; it adds an initial change-of-state to any predicate. This shows that current relevance can be associated with a process operating at the level of event structure. The analysis of Niuean may also extend to Japanese teiru, as well as several other puzzling aspects cross-linguistically.

On September 20-21, 2013, MIT Linguistics will host a Conference on Metrical Structure: Text-setting and Stress. The conference marks a number of new developments in these fields as well as a number of 90th anniversaries: among them, the publication of Roman Jakobson’s O češkom stixe (1923), the first typological study of meter and stress, hailed as the beginning of Prague School phonology; Eduard Hermann’s Silbenbildung im Griechischen und in den andern indogermanischen Sprachen (1923), the first typological study of syllable weight as applied to quantitative meter; and other 1923 events of significance for the theory of metrical structure. The abbreviated name of the conference is M@90.

We are soliciting abstracts for two poster sessions: one on the role of metrical structure in stress and the other on the role of metrical structure in poetics. The abstracts should be limited to two pages including references and data and submitted in pdf format. Abstract deadline is April 30 2013. Accepted poster presenters will be notified by May 20, 2013. The address to which abstracts should be sent is stressmeter [æt] mit [dɑt] edu.

Fourth-year graduate student Hadas Kotek has been awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant by the National Science Foundation that will allow her to conduct linguistic experimental work on the real-time processing of multiple wh-questions in English.  Her project, entitled “Experimental Investigations of Multiple Wh-Questions”  will test the differing predictions of two prominent approaches to the syntax and semantics of these questions — focusing on so-called intervention effects, which have been central to current debates about the syntax and semantics of multiple wh-questions.   The research will be carried out at our Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab. (Martin Hackl and David Pesetsky are the faculty co-investigators on the grant.)

Congratulations, Hadas!!

Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Title: To Metathesize or Not to Metathesize: Phonological and Morphological Constraints on Tunisian Arabic Nouns
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 25, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

In Tunisian Arabic spoken in Tunis some monosyllabic nouns with underlying /CVCC/ undergo metathesis of the vowel and the following consonant, e.g., /tamr/ -> [tmar] ‘dates’, while others maintain the underlying order, e.g., /xubz/ -> [xubz] `bread’. In this talk I report distributions of CVCC and CCVC nouns in Tunisian Arabic obtained from my recent fieldwork and investigate the phonological and morphological principles and their interactions that affect the metathesis patterns.

Syntax Square will not meet this week.

The following time slots are still available for the semester: 3/12, 3/19, 4/2, 4/9, 4/30, 5/7, 5/14. Please contact Ruth or T.C. if you’d like to give a talk.

Speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine
Title: Ergativity without ergative Case
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 28, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Mayan languages exhibit an ergative-absolutive pattern in their verbal agreement morphology but do not show morphological case alternations on nominals. Furthermore, a subset of Mayan languages show an extraction asymmetry whereby the A-bar extraction of subjects of transitives (aka “ergative arguments”) requires special verbal morphology, known as Agent Focus. Kaqchikel, spoken in Guatemala and recently also in Cambridge, is one such Mayan language with Agent Focus.

In this talk I will argue that Kaqchikel’s morphologically ergative agreement pattern and syntactically ergative extraction asymmetries are both epiphenomenal, and do not reflect an underlying ergative-absolutive system of Case assignment (contra Coon, Mateo Pedro, & Preminger, 2011 ms; Assmann et al, 2012 ms). Agreement in Kaqchikel is the result of a process of phi-agreement which is independent of nominal licensing (abstract Case). The extraction asymmetry is the result of a particular anti-locality constraint which bans movement which is too close. Support for these claims comes from new data on the distribution of Agent Focus in Kaqchikel, as well as from the pattern of agreement in Agent Focus, as discussed in Preminger (2011).

A paper by Shigeru Miyagawa, Bob Berwick and Kazuo Okanoya on the evolution of syntax has just appeared in the journal Frontiers of Psychology. The paper, entitled “The emergence of hierarchical structure in human language”, was featured in a write-up by the MIT News office, and can be found on-line on the Frontiers of Psychology website.

We propose a novel account for the emergence of human language syntax. Like many evolutionary innovations, language arose from the adventitious combination of two pre-existing, simpler systems that had been evolved for other functional tasks. The first system, Type E(xpression), is found in birdsong, where the same song marks territory, mating availability, and similar “expressive” functions. The second system, Type L(exical), has been suggestively found in non-human primate calls and in honeybee waggle dances, where it demarcates predicates with one or more “arguments,” such as combinations of calls in monkeys or compass headings set to sun position in honeybees. We show that human language syntax is composed of two layers that parallel these two independently evolved systems: an “E” layer resembling the Type E system of birdsong and an “L” layer providing words. The existence of the “E” and “L” layers can be confirmed using standard linguistic methodology. Each layer, E and L, when considered separately, is characterizable as a finite state system, as observed in several non-human species. When the two systems are put together they interact, yielding the unbounded, non-finite state, hierarchical structure that serves as the hallmark of full-fledged human language syntax. In this way, we account for the appearance of a novel function, language, within a conventional Darwinian framework, along with its apparently unique emergence in a single species.

What: Turk workshop, part 1
When: Thursday, Feb 28, 5:30-7
Where: 32-D461 (note the unusual location!)

This week will be the first part of the Turk workshop. We have three goals for this week’s meeting: we will (1) discuss crowd sourcing as an experimental tool in linguistics, (2) introduce basic experimental designs for Turk-based studies, and (3) get familiarized with the Turk interface.

Syntax Square will not meet this week because we are on a Monday schedule on Tuesday.

There are still quite a few slots available for the semester: 2/26, 3/12, 3/19, 4/2, 4/9, 4/30, 5/7, 5/14. Please contact T.C. or Ruth if you have any ongoing/complete syntactic work or interesting articles/books you’d like to present.

Speaker: Abhijit Debnath (Centre for Neural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hyderabad)
Title: Search for a Minimal Agent Predicate Link preference in Recursive Agent Distribution Strategy for Embedded Clauses
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 21, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

(Joint work with Gautam Sengupta (University of Hyderabad).)

Full abstract is available (pdf).

The current paper reports two reading experiments in Bangla, (also introducing an ongoing ERP experiment) carried out in order to ascertain whether a Minimal Agent Predicate Association could be a the default preference that results in increase of processing complexity when the number of association links between any agent and the predicates of the sentence (which are the verbs either in matrix clause or embedded clause) increases. Bangla provides a more sensitized design for the tests by providing the location of the matrix verb (having control information) at the end of a sentence (like Japanese).

Speaker: David Gow
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 21, 5:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Title: Imaging interaction: Using Granger causality analysis of MRI-constrained MEG/EEG to understand the dynamic processes that support speech perception and enforce phonotactic constraints

Abstract:

Traditional behavioral techniques and BOLD imaging provide important tools for identifying the components of linguistic and cognitive processes, but are severely limited in their ability to support strong inferences about the dynamic interactions between those components. In this presentation we will present an alternate approach that uses well-established statistical methods rooted in simple intuitions about causality to track the evolving interactions between different brain regions during the perception of spoken language based on high spatiotemporal resolution reconstructions of cortical activity. We will discuss applications of this technique to exploring the role of top-down lexical influences on speech perception and the role they play in producing and enforcing phonotactic regularity.

To celebrate Presidents Day and the joy of being a linguist, a group from Martin Hackl’s Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab went on a snow-shoeing hike in the White Mountains.  As of press time, they had not returned …  But Mitcho’s photos make it clear that they did reach their destination!

Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara, presenting work in collaboration with Martin Hackl, Su Lin Blodgett (Wellesley college), and Ken Wexler.
Date/Time: Fri Feb 22, 11:30am
Location: 32-D461
Title: Scalar Presupposition and the Generation of Alternatives in the Acquisition of Only

Abstract:

This talk presents a novel account of a curious and ill understood phenomenon of L1-Acquisition concerning only (Crain et al. 1992, 1994 a.o.). Our account is based on the assumption that only always triggers a scalar presupposition (in addition to presupposing the prejacent) as well as on Fox & Katzir’s (2011) mechanism for generating the set of alternatives relevant for the interpretation of only. In support, we present new data from ongoing experiments indicating that the factors identified by our account modulate children’s success in interpreting sentences with only.

Last weekend, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science took place in Boston, including several talks and panels devoted to linguistics, with MIT faculty and alumni well-represented.  Our own Michel DeGraff presented his paper “A Null Theory of Creole Formation” in a session on historical syntax that formed part of a day of sessions on the Biology and Evolution of Human Language, which also featured papers by Tony Kroch (PhD 1974) and Mark Liberman (PhD 1973).  Earlier in the day, a session on The Bases of Human Language in Human Biology included talks by Stephen Anderson (PhD 1968) and David Poeppel (BCS PhD 1995).

Phonology Circle is scheduled for Mondays 5-7p this semester. There is a brief organizational meeting today at 5pm. If you cannot attend but would like to make a presentation this term, contact Michael Kenstowicz.

Speaker: Junya Nomura
Title: Syntax of Associative Plurals and Licensing of Empty Nouns
Date/time: Tuesday, Feb 12th, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

It’s been claimed by many researchers (Rizzi (1986), Lobeck (1993,1995) among others) that agreements involve licensing of empty elements. Licensing can be done between a verb and a DP or can be DP-internal. In this talk, I would like to propose two claims about associative plurals.

First, following Vassilieva (2005) and Zhang (2008), I will show that associative plurals should be analyzed to contain an empty noun and that what seems to be a head noun is really a modifier. The evidence for this consists of modifier-like morphology of associative plurals and positions of plural marker.

Second, I will provide evidence that the empty noun inside associative plurals must be licensed by agreeing with a plural morphology. In some languages (Japanese, Turkish, Chinese among others), this licensing is done DP-internally, and the claim that the empty noun requires a licensing is difficult to check. However, other languages, for example Kaqchikel and Maltese, adopt licensing by a verb and the claim is falsifiable. I found some evidence in Kaqchikel that the licensing is really necessary. That is, in some constructions, such as First Conjunct Agreement and Agent Focus, a verb cannot agree with an argument in some positions. In these position, associative plurals are not possible, even though ordinary plurals are possible even when there is no plural morphology.

A new paper, “Visser’s Generalization: The Syntax of Control and the Passive” by 3rd-year student Coppe van Urk has just appeared in Linguistic Inquiry.  Congratulations, Coppe!!

Following up on their introductions at the Departmental Lunch last week, Whamit! extends our warmest welcome to the new visiting members of the department for this semester.

Visiting Scholars

• Heriberto Avelino (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) His research investigates the phonotactics of complex nasals and nasal neutralization avoidance by examining a number of diverse languages which include in its repertoire pre-occluded nasals (DN) as in /tàlúgn/ ‘rooster’ (Nothern Pame, Otomanguean) and post-occluded nasals (ND) as in /ambo/ ‘to climb’ (Karitiana, Tupi).
• Gary Thoms (University of Edinburgh) His research interests are in literary linguistics and syntax.

Postdoctorate Fellow

• Martin Rohrmeier  is an Intelligence Initiative post-doctoral fellow whose research concerns music cognition and learning and the relation of musical structure to linguistic structure.  Martin studied philosophy, mathematics and musicology in Bonn, Germany, and completed his PhD in musicology in 2010, under the supervision of Dr. Ian Cross.  He has held a research internship with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and most recently has been a postdoctoral researcher working with Stefan Kölsch at the Free University of Berlin.  While in Berlin, Martin regularly improvised music for  showings of silent films (and he has many other musical talents as well).

Visiting Students

• Maria (Malu) Luisa de Andrade Freitas (University of Campinas) Her research studies person hierarchy phenomena in two native South American languages: Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní) and Ikpeng (Carib family).
• Moreno Mitrović (University of Cambridge, Jesus College) His research is on the syntax and semantics of coordinate construction in Indo-European.
• Tomislav Socanac (University of Geneva) He is part of a research project that aims to account for the cross-linguistic properties of the subjunctive mood category.

This semester the experimental syntax-semantics lab meetings will take place on Thursdays, 5:30-7pm in 32-D831. An organizational meeting will take place this Thursday, 2/14. A tentative schedule for the rest of the semester is given below. Please email Hadas Kotek if you are interested in presenting at this venue.

Starting on February 28th, we will offer a 5-week workshop on the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (dates below). The workshop is designed for people with little or no experience doing experimental work, and will provide tools and technical assistance to allow participants to develop, run and analyze their own (simple) experiment. We plan to cover general topics such as the use of experimental methods in linguistics and experimental design and also much more technical issues like creating input files and html templates for Turk and using R to analyze the results. The workshop is planned to be hands-on, as we think people will benefit from it the most this way, but observers are also welcome. We will provide more details about the workshop in the lab meeting next week, but feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Important: As part of the workshop we hope that each participant will develop and run their own small experiment. We are now in the process of trying to get the department to fund these experiments and therefore need to have a participant head count. If you think you may want to participate, please let Hadas know. If you later decide you can’t make it that’s ok, but if you only decide later that you want to participate we may not be able to fund you.

Schedule for this semester:
Feb 14: Organizational meeting
Feb 21: David Gow
Feb 28: Turk workshop I
March 7: Turk workshop II
March 14: Turk workshop III
March 21: OPEN
March 28: No meeting, spring break
April 4: Turk workshop IV
April 11: Turk workshop V
April 18: OPEN
April 25: OPEN
May 2: OPEN
May 9: OPEN
May 16: OPEN

24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
Instructors: Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim
Wednesday and Friday 10-11:30a, 32-D461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.954/

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

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

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.

24.956 Topics in Syntax
Uttering theory: topics in the relation between syntax and phonology
Instructor: Norvin Richards
Wednesday 12-3p, Room 32-D461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.956/

Current Minimalist theories posit a number of parametric differences between languages, which amount to stipulating the distributions of various types of overt movement. In this class we will spend the semester exploring the idea that we can reach deeper explanations for syntactic phenomena like these by allowing the syntax to make more reference to phonology thatn we are used to. I’ll argue for universal conditions on the phonological consequences of certain kinds of syntactic relations, and claim that some of the operations performed by the syntax (movement operations, in particular) are driven by the need to meet these universal conditions. In the end, the relevant parametric differences between languages will be independently necessary phonological and morphological ones, having to do with stress, prosody, and the distribution of various types of affixes.

The resulting theory will account for the distribution of overt wh-movement (in single wh-questions), EPP effects, and head-movement in a number of languages. Time permitting, we will go on to consider phenomena like scrambling and DP structure, and develop new answers to a variety of traditional and not-so-traditional questions (why is PRO always null? why are ergative languages with fixed word order typically either SOV or verb-initial? why do some languages, but not others, allow nominative subjects in infinitives (Szabolcsi 2007)? why can languages like Chichewa optionally leave wh in situ in all positions except for preverbal subjects, which must overtly move via clefting? why is extraposition to the right of the verb in German possible just when the VP has been topicalized (Haider’s puzzle)?). We’ll also discuss the consequences of the approach for the architecture of the grammar.

Registered students will be asked to do in-class presentations (either of relevant readings or of the student’s own research), and to hand in a (possibly very rough draft of a) final paper.

24.964 Topics in Morpho-Phonology
The analysis of cyclic and and pseudo-cyclic phenomena
Instructors: Donca Steriade, David Pesetsky
Mondays 2-5, 32-D461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.964/

Full syllabus is available here. (pdf)

In these lectures, we propose to explore some well-known problems in the functioning of the phonological cycle; to examine and debate some solutions. We will also document and solve some less well-known problems that bear some resemblance to the cycle. A central topic will be a proposed unified view of all cyclic-like interactions in phonology, based on recent work. A related important goal of the class will be the clarification or elimination (not yet sure which) of differences between cyclic computations, as motivated in phonology, and cyclic spell-out in syntax.

This is a collaborative venture. The two instructors will take turns proposing alternative solutions to problems laid out. Exercises will be designed to give a chance to all participants to engage in the debate. After completion, the problems will be discussed in class.

24.979 Topics in Semantics
“Free Relatives, Free Choice”
Instructors: Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou
Mondays 10-1, 32D-461
http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp13/24.979/

This semester, we will explore the syntax and semantics of free relative constructions and of free choice expressions.

Whamit! welcomes all the members of the MIT Linguistics community to the spring semester. The editorial staff is comprised of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Michelle Fullwood, Ryo Masuda, and David Pesetsky.

We look forward to receiving items for inclusion in Whamit! throughout the semester, including reports of acceptance to conferences and journals. To submit items for inclusion please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.

Hope to see you all at the Registration Day Lunch today at noon at the 8th floor lounge!

The updated schedule for this term’s MIT Linguistics Colloquium is posted below. All talks are on Fridays, 3:30-5:00 p.m. in room 32-141 unless otherwise noted. For further information, please contact the organizers for this semester, Yusuke Imanishi and Wataru Uegaki.

March 8: Lisa Matthewson (UBC)
April 5: Sharon Inkelas (UC Berkeley)
April 19: Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (University of Toronto Mississauga)
April 26: Mark Baker (Rutgers)
May 10: Andrew Nevins (UCL)
May 17: Emmanuel Chemla (LSCP-CNRS (Paris))

There will be a special meeting of the Phonology Circle on 2/4, featuring a WCCFL practice talk by Suyeon Yun. (Please note the time!)

Title: The Role of Acoustic Cues in Nonnative Consonant Cluster Repairs
Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Date/time: Mon Feb 4, 10:30am
Location: 32D-461

This paper describes a comprehensive typology of consonant cluster repairs in loan adaptation, namely vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion, and crosslinguistic asymmetries concerning sites of epenthetic vowels and deleting consonants. I argue that presence or absence of certain acoustic cues play a crucial role in determining the site of epenthesis or deletion to achieve perceptual similarity between the source language input and the borrowing language output, and provide a P-map (Steriade 2008) analysis of the typology.

Syntax Square is scheduled for Tuesdays at 1-2pm this semester. The organizers are Ruth Brillman and Tingchun Chen — please contact them for scheduling issues, if you have ongoing or completed syntactic work you’d like to share, or if there’s an interesting article/book you’d like to discuss.

This week, there are two sessions of Syntax Square for WCCFL practice talks.

Speaker: Ted Levin
Title: Untangling the Balinese bind: Binding and voice in Austronesian
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 4, 1:30-2:30p
Location: 32-D461

Full abstract is available. (pdf)

Voice alternations in Balinese interact with binding phenomena in a way that appears problematic for standard views of the A/A-bar distinction. In simple sentences, movement to Spec-TP does not create new antecedents for binding, suggesting that Spec-TP is an A-bar position. In raising constructions, however, movement to the higher Spec-TP does create new antecedents for binding, behavior expected of an A-position. This paradox is dubbed the Balinese Bind by Wechsler (1998), who uses the phenomenon to demonstrate the superiority of HPSG approaches. In this paper, I argue that the paradox is illusory, and that Balinese Spec-TP is an unambiguous A-position, if we adopt a new account of the Balinese voice system and the Agree-based theory of Binding advanced by Rooryck and Vanden Wyngaerd (2011).

Speaker: Hrayr Khanjian
Title: Complementizer concord in Western Armenian
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 5, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Full abstract is available. (pdf)

This paper accounts for the typologically unique double headed CP structure found in Western Armenian (WA), as an instance of concord. Certain CPs in WA can have two heads, where one is head-initial and the other is head-final. For these phrases, it is possible to omit one of the heads, and end up with either a head-initial or head-final phrase. These double headed CPs present two major challenges which I present solutions for. First, how to account for the phonological and syntactic differences between the head-initial and the head-final CPs. Second, how to compositionally derive the desired semantics of the doubly headed CPs.

The first LFRG meeting is a practice talk for WCCFL by Mitcho and Isaac this Wednesday.

Future meetings are tentatively planned for Fridays at 11:30. Please contact this semester’s organizers, Edwin Howard and Miriam Nussbaum, if there is a scheduling conflict or if you would like to present something.

Speaker: Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Isaac Gould
Title: Domain Readings of Japanese Head Internal Relative Clauses
Date/Time: Wednesday, Feb 6, 11:30a
Location: 32-D831

The structure and interpretation of Head-Internal Relative Clauses (HIRC) differ from head-external variants, and these differences are not yet well understood. We present a study of the interpretation of Japanese HIRC with quantificational heads, and show novel evidence that the HIRC corresponds to the domain of the quantifier, rather than its witness set. We propose that HIRC denote the maximally informative set which can be the domain of the HIRC’s head quantifier. Sources of inter-speaker variation will also be discussed.

MIT was particularly well represented at the Annual Meeting of the LSA from Jan 3-6 in Boston, with 26 presentations (plenary, invited talks, regular talks, and posters) by current MIT affiliates, and many many more by past affiliates.

On Friday David Pesetsky delivered an invited plenary address, with the title: “Что дѣлать? ‘What is to be done?’”

In addition, the following talks and posters featured MIT presenters:

• Adam Albright and Youngah Do: Featural overlap facilitates learning of phonological alternations
• Jonathan Barnes, Alejna Brugos, Elizabeth Rosenstein, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Nanette Veilleux: Segmental sources of variation in the timing of American English pitch accents
• Robert C. Berwick: Languages do not show lineage-specific trends in word-order universals
• Robert C. Berwick, Marco Idiart, Igor Malioutov, Beracah Yankama, Aline Villavicencio: Keep it simple: language acquisition without complex Bayesian models
• Young Ah Do: Children employ a conspiracy of repairs to achieve uniform paradigms
• Young Ah Do and Michael Kenstowicz: The Base in Korean noun paradigms: evidence from tone
• Ellen Duranceau: Open access at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: implementation and impact (In symposium: Open Access and the Future of Academic Publishing)
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine: Locality restrictions on syntactic extraction: the case (but not Case) of Kaqchikel Agent Focus
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Isaac Gould: Domain readings of Japanese head internal relative clauses
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Hadas Kotek: Intervention effects and covert pied-piping in English multiple questions
• Kai von Fintel: Taking an Open Access Start-up Journal to the Next Level (In symposium: Open Access and the Future of Academic Publishing)
• Suzanne Flynn, Janet Cohen Sherman, Jordan Whitlock, Claire Cordella, Charles Henderson, Zhong Chen, Aileen Costigan, James Gair, and Barbara Lust: The Regression Hypothesis revisited: new experimental results comparing child and dementia populations refute its predictions
• Peter Graff, Paul Marty, and Donca Steriade: French glides after C-Liquid: the effect of contrast distinctiveness
• Aron Hirsch and Michael Wagner: Topicality and its effect on prosodic prominence: the context creation paradigm
• Samuel Jay Keyser: Generative grammar at MIT
• Hadas Kotek: Intervention, covert movement, and focus computation in multiple wh-questions
• Paul Marty and Peter Graff: Cue availability and similarity drive perceptual distinctiveness: a cross-linguistic study of stop place perception
• Paul Marty, Peter Graff, Jeremy Hartman, and Steven Keyes: Biases in word learning: the case of non-myopic predicates
• Shigeru Miyagawa: A typology of the root phenomena (In symposium: The Privilege of the Root, co-organized by Shigeru Miyagawa and Liliane Haegeman)
• Sruthi Narayanan, Elizabeth Stowell, and Igor Yanovich: Ought to be strong
• Gregory Scontras, Peter Graff, Tami Forrester, Noah D. Goodman: Context sensitivity in collective predication
• Daeyoung Sohn: Absence of reconstruction effects and successive-cyclic scrambling
• Maziar Toosarvandani: Coordination and subordination in Northern Paiute clause chaining
• Rory Turnbull, Paul Marty, and Peter Graff: Complementary covariation in acoustic cues to place of articulation
• Suyeon Yun: Phonetic grammar of compensatory lengthening: a case study from Farsi

In addition, a large contingent of MIT linguists is off to Arizona this weekend to present at WCCFL 31:

• Tingchun Chen: Restructuring in Squliq Atayal
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine and Isaac Gould: Domain Readings of Japanese Head Internal Relative Clauses
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine: The (anti-)locality of movement: the case (but not Case) of Kaqchikel Agent Focus
• Hrayr Khanjian: Complementizer Concord in Western Armenian
• Theodore Levin: Untangling the Balinese Bind: Binding and Voice in Austronesian
• Suyeon Yun: A Unified Account of Nonnative Cluster Repairs

At the LSA Annual Meeting in January, David Pesetsky was officially inducted as a 2013 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, for “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. David joins an impressive group of MIT faculty who have been elected as LSA fellows, include Irene Heim (in 2012), Morris Halle (in 2006) and Noam Chomsky (in 2007). As David noted at this time last year, the list of fellows also includes four former faculty, and about a sizeable fraction of the current fellows (22 of 84) are alumni of our PhD program.

A photo of the momentous occasion can be found here.

Congratulations, David!!

Ling-Lunch will keep its usual schedule of Thursdays 12:30-1:45p in 32-D461. Please contact the term’s organizers, Isa Kerem Bayirli and Despina Oikonomou, if you would like to present a talk.

There will be no meeting of the Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab this week; the first meeting will be next week, day and time TBA.

If you are interested in participating in the lab meetings or in attending the Turk workshop that will take place during 3 or 4 lab meeting time slots throughout the semester, please indicate your availability in this Doodle poll. The Turk workshop will meet for the first time on the last week of February and then every 2-3 weeks after that, depending on participants’ schedules. Please contact Hadas if you have any questions; we will announce the lab meeting time and more details about the Turk workshop later this week.

Speaker: Suyeon Yun
Title: Optionality and Gradience in Compensatory Lengthening: Case Studies and Theoretical Implications
Date/Time: Monday, Dec 10, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

This study investigates the scalar nature of compensatory lengthening, which has traditionally been treated as a categorical phenomenon (Hayes 1989, Kavitskaya 2002, Yun 2010, among others). Based on case studies from Farsi and Turkish, I show that compensatory lengthening can take place in a systematically gradient fashion, and argue that this gradient occurrence of compensatory lengthening serves as evidence that speakers’ knowledge of duration preservation is active in synchronic grammar (cf. Hayes and Steriade 2004), not originating from “innocent misapprehension” (Ohala 1981, Blevins 2004). The gradient compensatory lengthening will be formulated within a weighted-constraint model (Flemming 2001). Also, I seek to account for the categorical and obligatory occurrence of compensatory lengthening as well as gradient and optional ones in a unified way based on phonetic characteristics of the consonants involved.

Speaker: Ermenegildo Bidese (MIT)
Title: CP-Erosion in semi-speakers’ Cimbrian: A tentative study about syntax contraction
Date/Time: Tuesday, Dec. 11, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

‘Semi-speakerness’ is a phenomenon quite wide-spread in language islands, especially when (i) in small communities a stronger standard comes to exert a huge pressure on the minority language (ML), and (ii) the process of language death takes place very slowly (Dorian 1981). It manifests itself through a partly (or even severely) eroded competence in the production of the ML displaying deviant morphological forms (deficient paradigms and the tendency to eliminate irregularities and marked forms by the process of analogical leveling) and a skewed syntax. In my talk I will present data from semi-speakers’ Cimbrian that seem to support the idea that intheir language competence some subparts of the CP layer are ‘inactivated’ or inaccessible (focalization and d-linking or familiarity topics) whereas other parts of the CP layer (wh-movement) show a higher capacity to survive. An analogy would be to an urban landscape after an earthquake, where some infrastructures are put down, whereas others remain intact. The challenge will be to find out whether we can predict which structures are more likely to ‘break down’.

Speaker: Ermenegildo Bidese
Title: A binary system of complementizers in Cimbrian relative clauses
Date/Time: Tuesday, Dec 4, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

The system of Cimbrian relative clauses manifests itself in a complex scenario: two different complementizers occur in this context: i) the ‘autochthonous’ (Germanic) bo, cognate of Southern German wo, and ii) the ‘allochthonous’ ke, borrowed from Italian (che), which is gradually spreading. In my talk I provide empirical evidence for a crucial specialization of both complementizers: the former shows up only in restrictive relative clauses, the latter in both restrictive and non-restrictive relatives, giving rise to a binary system. In my analysis I aim to explain the binary system of Cimbrian relative complementizers directly addressing the general discussion about relative clauses, showing once more the relevance of both linguistic contact and microvariation for the theory of grammar.

Speaker: Yusuke Imanishi (MIT)
Date/Time: December 6 (Thu), 12:30-1:45p
Place: 32-D461
Title: Parameterizing (non-)split ergativity in Mayan

Abstract:

Recent studies (Coon 2010, Mateo Pedro 2009, 2011) have shown that a split ergative pattern in Mayan languages such as Chol and Q’anjob’al is bi-clausal by taking the form of nominalization. Under these analyses the split ergativity in these languages derives from a particular agreement paradigm in Mayan: genitive = ergative.

These studies leave open an interesting question why other Mayan languages like Kaqchikel do not exhibit split ergativity the way that Chol and Q’anjob’al do (Mateo Pedro and Imanishi 2012).

In this preliminary talk, I address this question and attempt to propose a parametric analysis of the variation in Mayan regarding (non-)split ergativity. The languages I look at include Kaqchikel/Tzutujil/Q’eqchi’ (non-split ergative languages) and Chol/Q’anjob’al (split-ergative languages).

I focus on the independent property of a non-verbal predicate (NVP) in the languages hinted at by Coon et al. (2011): whether an NVP in a given language has the ability to raise the subject. I then argue for the generalization
(i) If an NVP in a given language does not raise the subject, the language displays (Chol/Q’anjob’al-type) split ergativity.
(ii) If an NVP in a given language raises the subject, the language does not display (Chok/Q’anjob’al-type) split ergativity.

I further address some exceptions to the generalization.

The Experimental Syntax and Semantics Lab will hold its end-of-semester lab meeting, led by Martin Hackl, on Thursday 12/6 at 5:30 pm in 32-D831.

A paper by fourth-year student Hadas Kotek called “Wh-Fronting in a Two-Probe System” (earlier version available here) has been accepted for publication by Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Congratulations Hadas!

Speaker: Edith Aldridge (University of Washington)
Date/Time: 7 December, 3:30-5 pm
Location: 32-141
Title: Two Types of Ergativity and Where they Might Come from

Abstract:

Aldridge (2004), Legate (2008), and Coon et al. (2011) have demonstrated for several language families that there are at least two types of ergative language, one in which absolutive case is licensed solely by T and one in which v (also) plays a role. In this presentation, I propose an account of this variation in Austronesian languages as well as suggest a diachronic explanation for this variation. Specifically, I show that most Formosan languages like Seediq are T-type languages, while Philippine languages like Tagalog tend to be v-type. I then show how this distinction can result from two innovations in the reanalysis of a clausal nominalization as a finite root clause. The T-type system results from the first innovation. A reduced clausal nominalization nP is reanalyzed as verbal. Genitive case (which is identical to ergative in the modern languages) is assigned to the external argument in nP. Since n has no structural case feature to license the internal argument, this DP moves to the edge of nP to check case with T. This movement derives the well-known absolutive restriction on A’-extraction, since the object will come to occupy the outer specifier of the nP or vP phase. The ergative system arises when nP is reanalyzed as vP. Philippine languages, which constitute a lower-order subgroup in the Austronesian family, have undergone a second innovation which fully transitivized this vP, resulting in the acquisition of a structural case feature on transitive v.

Date: Monday, Nov. 26
Time: 5pm
Location: 32D-831
Presenter: Suyeon Yun (MIT)
Title: The Role of Acoustic Cues in Consonant Cluster Adaptation

In this talk I will argue that cross-linguistic asymmetries in nonnative cluster repairs - namely vowel epenthesis and consonant deletion - result from perceptual similarity between the clusters and their repaired forms. Expanding my survey in Yun (2012), I suggest some new typological generalizations. First, when the edge consonant is a stop, a vowel is most likely to be epenthesized after the stop. If not, the edge stop deletes, while the non-edge stop does not  (e.g., gdansk (Polish) → [gədænsk] (English; Yun 2012), ‘compact’ → [khəmpɛkthɨ] (Korean; Yun 2012), ‘blanket’ → [lɛnketti] (Finnish; Karttunen 1977), ‘compact’ → [kompak] (Indonesian; Yun 2012)). Second, when the edge consonant is a sonorant, a vowel is epenthesized before the sonorant. (e.g., lbovskij (Russian) → [ylbovskij] (Kirghiz; Gouskova 2003), rubl’ (Russian) → [rubɯl] (Kirghiz; Yun 2012)). While vowel-adjacent sonorants frequently delete, word-edge sonorants do not delete; even in a language where deletion can be a repair strategy, word-edge sonorants undergo epenthesis rather than deletion (e.g., ‘Swaziland’ → [suasilaan] vs. ‘Seattle’ → [siiaatul] (Inuktitut; Pollard 2008)). In addition, I will report several interesting asymmetries concerning positions, source languages, places of articulation, and voicing in stop adaptations, which cannot be explained by standard phonological constraints. Based on the typology, I will argue that acoustic cues, such as stop release bursts and sonorant-internal cues, play a crucial role in consonant cluster adaptation and formulate them as phonetically-based faithfulness constraints. And it will be shown that interactions between  fixed rankings of the phonetically-based constraints (based on the P-map hypothesis (Steriade 2001/2008)) and markedness constraints successfully account for the comprehensive cross-linguistic patterns of the nonnative cluster repairs.