The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics
Next week Friday 09/06 we will be meeting from 2:00 to 3:00 pm in 32-D8461.
This meeting will be focused on the Language Acquisition Lab. In this meeting we will introduce our new Lab space and our new Lab people, and we will discuss some of the ongoing language acquisition projects we have going on in the Lab right now.
Please contact Leo Rosenstein if you have any questions.
Norvin spent June 5-7 in Singapore at a workshop on Approaches to wh-Intervention at National University of Singapore, organized by mitcho Erlewine ‘14 and Kenyon Branan ‘18. Other participants included Jessica Coon ‘10 and Hadas Kotek ‘14.
Program and abstracts are found here.
Norvin spent May 24-26 at 26th meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, at the University of Western Ontario, where he gave a talk on “Association with lang ‘only’ in Tagalog”. Other speakers included TC Chen ‘18, Mitcho Erlewine ‘14, and Lisa Travis ‘84. The program can be found here.
The 27th Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm) was held in Manchester, England, from May 23th to May 25th. Two members from MIT participated this year.
Several alums were also present, including Juliet Stanton, Ezer Rasin, Steven Lulich (SHBT), Eulàlia Bonet, and Joan Mascaró.
All abstracts are found here.
You must be logged in to post an event.
The 55th meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society happened from May 16th to 18th. Some of our students presented:
Shigeru Miyagawa’s 2017 LI monograph, Agreement Beyond Phi, is now available under Open Access. It can be downloaded for free from the MIT Press website.
Stanislao Zompi (2nd year), together with Christos Christopoulos (UConn/Harvard), gave a talk at the “Connecting roots and allomorphy” (CRAFF) workshop in Brno (Czech Republic). Their talk was titled “How to avoid disjunctions in describing Indo-European stem-allomorphy”.
The 19th conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory happened at UCLA from May 17th to May 19th. The following members of our community presented:
Norvin Richards spent May 17-18th at the Parameters Workshop in Honour of Lisa Travis at McGill University, where he spoke about how to detect Contiguity-prominence in his talk titled Contiguity-prominence: a prosodic parameter with syntactic consequences.
Whamit! will be on hiatus during the summer. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall 2019.
Much thanks to the editors, all readers, and contributors. See you all in the Fall!
The 42nd GLOW conference (GLOW = “Generative Linguistics in the Old World”) took place at the University of Oslo from May 7th to May 9th. Rafael Abramovitz (4th year) presented at the workshop on “Anaphora at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface in endangered and understudied languages”. The title of his talk was What can agreeing anaphors tell us about the Anaphor Agreement Effect?.
Gregor Williamson (University College London), a current visitor at MIT, also prented at the main session (Adverbial Adjunct Clauses and their LFs). Recent alumni Benjamin Storme and Coppe van Urk also presented.
Two presenters at LFRG this week: Gregor Williamson (UCL/MIT) and Jacopo Romoli (Ulster University, joint work with Lyn Tieu and Cory Bill). The details of their presentations are below.
Speaker: Gregor Williamson (UCL/MIT)
Title: Conditional Antecedents as Polar Free Relatives
Time: Wednesday, May 15th, 1-2PM
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Kratzer (1986, 2012), building on Lewis (1975), develops one of the most successful accounts of conditionals to date: the if-clause-as-restrictor account. It maintains that if contributes no meaning to a conditional construction. Rather, the antecedent of a conditional simply denotes a proposition, which may act as a restrictor for a (covert) modal operator in the consequent. A popular alternative to this account, the if-clause-as-a-definite-description-of-worlds account (Schlenker, 2001), has been argued by Bhatt & Pancheva (2006) to be supported by syntactic facts which suggest that if-clauses are free relatives which denote a definite description of worlds. We propose a syntax-semantics for if-clauses which treats them as free relatives formed via a polar question operator (see also Arsenijević, 2009). We show that such an account provides a more transparent syntax-semantics mapping than that of Bhatt & Pancheva. The proposed account maintains a Kratzerian semantics, while nonetheless capturing the well-established syntactic behavior of if-clauses.
…and:
Speaker: Jacopo Romoli (Ulster, joint work with Lyn Tieu and Cory Bill)
Title: Homogeneity or implicature: An experimental study of free choice
Abstract:
A sentence containing disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal, such as (1a), gives rise to the free choice inference in (1b). This inference presents a well-known puzzle in light of standard treatments of modals and disjunction (Kamp 1974 and much subsequent work). To complicate things further, free choice tends to disappear under negation: (2a) doesn’t merely convey the negation of (1a), but rather the stronger dual prohibition reading in (2b). There are two main approaches to the free choice-dual prohibition pattern in the literature, based on implicature and homogeneity. We present experimental findings that favour the homogeneity approach, and further discuss how the implicature approach could be developed to account for the results.
(1) a. Sue is allowed to buy the boat or the car. b.Sue is allowed to buy the boat and is allowed to buy the car
(2) a. Sue is not allowed to buy the boat or the car. b. Sue is not allowed to buy the boat and is not allowed to buy the car
Speaker: Boer Fu (MIT)
Title: Contrast Preservation in Mandarin R-suffixation
Time: Wednesday (5/15), 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: The low vowel /a/ has three surface forms in Mandarin, a front [a] when followed by an alveolar nasal, a back [ɑ] before a velar nasal, and a central [ɑ̟] in an open syllable. This variation is called the rhyme harmony. My project looks into how these three stem forms change, respectively, in r-suffixation, where a diminutive suffix /-r/ is attached to the stem. In the two vowel-nasal forms, the nasal stop is dropped before the /-r/ coda. However, the back [ɑ] retains its nasalization, while the front [a] is loses its nasalization. Zhang (2000) suggests that this is to maximize the contrast in degree of nasalization that is already in place in the stem forms. He also argues against a contrast preservation account because the front [a] and central [ɑ̟] are neutralized, now that the nasalization on [a] has disappeared. This is indeed true in the Beijing dialect, which the standard Mandarin is closest to. However, I have found that in the Liaoning dialect, such a neutralization does not happen. And [a] and [ɑ̟] are still distinguished from each other by the difference in the quality of the /-r/ coda. I argue that this is contrast preservation, and can be analyzed using MinDist constraints.
Speaker: Ethan Wilcox (Harvard University)
Title: Neural Network Language Models as Psycholinguistic Subjects: The Case of Filler—Gap Dependencies
Time: Thursday, 5/13, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are one type of neural model that has been able to achieve state-of-the-art scores on a variety of natural language tasks, including translation and language modeling (which is used in, for example, text prediction). However, the nature of the representations that these ‘black boxes’ learn is poorly understood, raising issues of accountability and controllability of the NLP system. In this talk, I will argue that one way to assess what these networks are learning is to treat like subjects in a psycholinguistic experiment. By feeding them hand-crafted sentences that belie the model’s underlying knowledge of language I will demonstrate that they are able to learn the filler—gap dependency, and are even sensitive to the hierarchical constraints implicated in the dependency. Next, I turn to “island effects”, or structural configurations that block the filler—-gap dependency, which have been theorized to be unlearnable. I demonstrate that RNNs are able to learn some of the “island” constraints and even recover some of their pre-island gap expectation. These experiments demonstrate that linear statistical models are able to learn some fine-grained syntactic rules, however their behavior remains un-humanlike in many cases.
The TripleA workshop will take place at MIT from May 31st to June 2nd. Invited speakers are Diti Bhadra (Harvard), Sandra Chung (UC Santa Cruz), Virginia Dawson (UC Berkeley) and Ken Safir (Rutgers). Registration is open until May 18 and the program can be found here: http://triplea6.mit.edu/program. Frank Stanizweski (3rd year) will be presenting his work on Wolof, with title Wolof (non) polarity sensitive item dara.
The 28th Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Languages took place at Stony Brook University from May 3rd to May 5th. Several of our students presented:
The Fourth American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM4) was also held at Stony Brook University on the same dates. Colin Davis gave a talk titled Plural suppletion in Barguzin Buryat: Case containment versus *ABA.
Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas)
Title: How to do even more things with words
Time: Friday, May 10, 3:30 - 5:00pm
Room: 32-141
Abstract:
Material drawn from:
David Beaver and Jason Stanley (to appear), “Hustle: the politics of Language”, Princeton University Press
The notion of a language as primarily a representational system is natural when you think of the words laid out on the page of an encyclopedia, or even a talk abstract. It’s less natural when you watch some guy ranting angrily in the supermarket, or at an academic talk. This leads to the Wittgensteinian and Austinian thought that language consists in the first place of things you do, not things that sit passively on the page or screen. Grammars, then are practices, and those practices consist of conventions for performing communicative actions. But how far can this program be taken, and how far should it be taken? Is there value to focusing on the actions of, say, uttering nouns and verbs and relative clauses, rather than limiting linguistic study to the corresponding classes of strings and the things they symbolize?
First things first: is it even possible to formulate a grammar in terms of actions? Yes. I will show that formulating grammars in terms of actions does not necessitate much alteration to the technical machinery of formal linguistics, albeit that the change invites further innovation. I introduce Action Grammar, a way of looking at what language is that centers on the actions that a speaker performs. While the target of the approach is ultimately an account of the place of language in social interaction, the proposed paradigm can also be seen as making formally explicit the idea in contemporary linguistic theory that grammatical representations are “instructions for the interface systems”. In Action Grammar, it is not merely combinatorial operations like “merge” that are actions, but the merged objects themselves.
As regards semantics, Action Grammar conservatively maintains insights of modern post-Montagovian compositional grammar, while providing a new way of cutting up semantic/pragmatic space that might be thought of as a precisification of the Relevance Theoretic distinction between conceptual and procedural aspects of meaning. Crucially, although it appears mysterious how one expression can simultaneously mean multiple things, there is no mystery at all in the fact that a speaker can use an expression to do several things (of which describing the world is just one). I will sketch how the approach offers the possibility of simplifying aspects of grammatical composition and the semantics-pragmatics interface, and suggest that it offers insights into both sentence level markers of speech acts, such as performatives, and subsentential speech acts, which may include uses of expressives, politeness markers, and parentheticals. Among other things, I will argue not merely that modern analyses of “conventional implicature” are in error, but that the term itself is a misnomer.
Noam Chomsky gave two lectures on April 10th and 12th. You can watch the first lecture here and the second lecture here.
Speakers: Neil Banerjee (MIT)
Title: Negative allomorphy in Bengali
Time: Monday, May 6th, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Bengali (Eastern Indic) has two morphemes for sentential negation: ni is used to negate finite perfect verbs, while na is used for all other constructions. In this project, I investigate the distribution of these two morphemes, present new data from the antecedents of conditionals and from TP ellipsis, and propose a morphological analysis with implications for the mechanism of ellipsis.
In both antecedents and with ellipsis, perfect verbs occur with the ‘wrong’ negation, namely na. I argue that this strongly supports a morphological account of the distribution, rather than the semantic account proposed in Ramchand (2004). I present a morphological account of the facts based on Trommer’s (1999) proposal for portmanteau and a modification of Adger et al’s (2003) proposal for a labelling algorithm. I demonstrate that within a Distributed Morphology framework, inward sensitivity to morphosyntactic features is required for this account to succeed. Issues of locality of triggers and directionality of allomorphy will be discussed. Finally, based on the new evidence from ellipsis bleeding allomorphy, I argue that at least in Bengali, ellipsis must be realised as featural obliteration prior to vocabulary insertion.
Speaker: Filipe Kobayashi (MIT) on Keine 2018
Title: Keine (2018) Selective Opacity
Time: Tuesday, May 7, 1pm-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract
(Keine 2018) This article develops a general theory of selective opacity effects, configurations in which the same constituent is opaque for some operations but transparent for others. Classical observations of selective opacity lie in the realm of movement. Finite clauses, for instance, are opaque for A-movement but transparent for Ā-extraction, a pattern that generalizes beyond the A/Ā distinction. Using novel evidence from movement-agreement interactions in Hindi-Urdu, I argue that selective opacity also encompasses ϕ-agreement and I propose that the underlying constraint applies, not to movement itself, but to Agree. I develop the novel concept of horizons, which delimit search spaces in probe specific ways by terminating search. They thereby prevent particular probes from searching into them, inducing selective opacity. The horizons account derives an otherwise surprising property of selective opacity effects noted previously: the higher the structural position of a probe in the clausal spine, the more structures are transparent to it. The analysis proposed here unifies improper movement and related selective opacity restrictions, mismatches in the locality of movement and agreement, and intricate interactions between movement types and agreement.
Speaker: Tanya Bondarenko (MIT)
Title: From think to remember: the case of Buryat’s verb hanaxa
Time: Wednesday, May 8th, 1-2PM
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Barguzin Buryat has an attitude verb hanaxa, which is naturally translated as “think” when it takes CP clauses and as “remember” when it takes nominalized clauses. I show that this difference in translation correlates with a presence of a factive presupposition, (1)-(2), and argue that this factivity alternation arises not due to lexical ambiguity or nominal/definite status of the complement, but rather due to the interaction between the argument structure of the verb and different ways of it composing with CPs and with NPs.
Speaker: Aleksei Nazarov (University of Toronto)
Title: Connecting opacity and exceptionality: “alphabet features” in constraints
Time: Wednesday (5/8), 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract
Some analyses of phonological opacity in OT maintain that opaque generalizations are encoded in the lexicon (e.g., Mielke et al. 2003, Sanders 2006), or result from language-specific constraints (Pater 2014). Developing these ideas, I propose that systematic opaque generalizations may arise from rankings of lexically indexed constraints (Kraska-Szlenk 1995, Pater 2000). This perspective has consequences for models of phonological learning, since it allows us to view both exceptionality and opacity as part of the same hidden structure learning problem.
In order to allow constraint indexation to be relevant to opacity, indexation must be binary (cf. Becker 2009) and local to particular segments (cf. Temkin-Martínez 2010, Rubach 2013, 2016, Round 2017) – ideas that had been proposed separately, but not brought together within OT, although SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968) did originally propose local and binary indices in the form of “alphabet features” (see also Zonneveld 1978). Given such indices, different rankings of indexed markedness constraints allow for exceptionless or exceptionful opaque interactions, which will be illustrated with an analysis of Canadian Raising (Chambers 1973, Bermúdez-Otero 2003).
Congratulations to second-year student Boer Fu, who has won the graduate student division of MIT’s Obermayer Prize for Writing for the Public, with an essay about the building of the first underground transit systems in London (1863) and Boston (1897)! Our linguistics students have talents above and beyond!!
We are delighted to report that our alum Amanda Swenson (PhD 2017) has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University where she will be teaching linguistics. Amanda wrote her dissertation on “The morphosemantics and morphosyntax of the Malayalam verb”, and has been a lecturer at Gordon College.
Speakers: Hagen Blix (NYU)
Title: (Dis)continuous Bleeding: Cyclicity and Spans
Time: Monday, April 29th, 12:30-2pm (note the unusual time)
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Modern Standard Arabic verbal agreement shows two properties that I argue to have important implications for the theory of interpretative/post-syntactic morphology. Firstly, it shows affixes whose distribution cannot be described as natural classes in the SPE-style subset principle of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). In example (1), we see that the prefixal y/tencodes a gender contrast in the third person singular of the subjunctive.
(1) a. 3m.sg: y-aktub-a
b. 3f.sg: t-aktub-a
While this clearly suggests that at least one of the affixes spells out gender, both affixes occur in both genders if we look beyond the third person singular. In the third person plural, both genders occur with y (2), whereas the second person plural shows both genders with t (3), with both forms marking the gender distinction at the suffixal position.
(2) a. 3m.pl: y-aktub-uu
b. 3f.pl: y-aktub-na
(3) a. 2m.pl: t-aktub-uu
b. 2f.pl: t-aktub-na
This rules out an analysis of the initial contrast in (1) in terms of the subset principle alone. Halle (2000) offers an analysis in terms of impoverishment, with t as an elsewhere marker and neither affix spelling out gender, but these impoverishment rules violate otherwise established markedness constraints (Noyer 1992, Nevins 2011). In particular, Noyer (1992) argued that in case of a “feature clash”, only the feature lower on the hierarchy in (4) can be impoverished:
(4) Person > Number > Gender
Secondly, various affixes, including the aforementioned t occur either as prefixes or as suffixes on the verb, depending on the Tense/Aspect configuration (5-7). Puzzlingly, while the prefixal forms of 2m.sg and 3f.sg are identical (6a), (7a), their suffixal counterparts in the perfect are distinguished not by different affixes, but rather by the order in which they occur (6b), (7b).
(5) a. 1pl.sbjv: n-aktub-a
b. 1pl.perf: katab-n-aa(6) a. 2m.sg.sbjv: t-aktub-ab. 2m.sg.perf: katab-t-a(7) 3f.sg.sbjv: t-aktub-a3f.sg.perf: katab-a-t
This is unexpected from the perspective of any theory that argues that prefixhood and suffixhood are part of the vocabulary item/rule itself (Halle & Marantz 1993, Noyer 1992, Halle 2000).
In this talk, I will argue that the hierarchy Noyer (1992) described as governing Impoverishment actually describes an inverse of the f-seq of Arabic agreement, and that spellout operating on spans, regulated by a superset principle (Starke 2009), can capture the distribution of these affixes without recourse to Impoverishment. I then show that a movement-based, antisymmetry approach to linear order can derive the positional effects at PF (Kayne 1994, Kayne 2017, Koopman 2018, Julien 2002, Blix under review) in a way that characterizes the affixes that may appear in prefixal position as a uniform set (as opposed to an arbitrary collection of affixes, as in previous work), and allows us to connect their paradigmatic distribution with their linear one.
Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: Revisiting the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH)
Time: Tuesday, April 30, 1pm-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this week’s syntax square, I will lead an informal discussion about the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (henceforth RAH). RAH is an early approach to V to T movement, which argues that rich subject agreement on the finite verb conditions V to T movement in a language (Kosmeijer 1986, Pollock 1989, Platzack & Holmberg 1989, Holmberg & Platzack 1991, 1995, Roberts 1993, Rohrbacher 1994, Vikner 1995, 1997, Bobaljik 1995, Bobaljik & Thráinsson 1998, Koeneman 2000, Koeneman & Zeijlstra 2014, and others). I plan to discuss 1) how RAH has influenced theories of head movement (featuring Bobaljik & Thráinsson most prominently), 2) empirical claims about which languages have head movement and which do not, and 3) what value can be derived from this enterprise and what questions we should reformulate moving forward. One of the recalcitrant problems for RAH is the English auxiliary system, so we will (time permitting) touch on how to include English into the picture as well.
Speaker: Shumian Ye (MIT/Peking University)
Title: Negated disjunctions in Mandarin revisited
Time: Wednesday, May 1st, 1-2PM
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk, I will argue that OR in Mandarin is neither an NPI nor a PPI, contra Crain (2012). First, when embedded by negations, certain disjunctions obligatorily take the narrow scope, while Hurford disjunctions obligatorily take the wide scope. Compare (1) with (2).
(1) ta mei quguo Beijing huo qita chengshi.
she NEG have.been Beijing OR other cities
Unique reading: She hasn’t been to Beijing or any other cities. (¬ > ∨)
(2) zhe ping jiu de jiage bu chaoguo shi kuai huo ershi kuai.
this CL wine DE price NEG exceed ten dollars OR twenty dollars
Unique reading: The price of this wine doesn’t exceed $10, or doesn’t exceed $20. (∨ > ¬)
Second, most negated disjunctions are ambiguous in Mandarin. Which reading is salient seems to depend on the higher modals and the contexts. Compare (3) with (4).
(3) ta kending mei quguo Beijing huo Shanghai.
she definitely NEG have.been Beijing OR Shanghai
Salient reading: She definitely hasn’t been to Beijing, nor to Shanghai. (¬ > ∨)
(4) ta keneng mei quguo Beijing huo Shanghai.
she maybe NEG have.been Beijing OR Shanghai
Salient reading: She maybe hasn’t been to Beijing, or hasn’t been to Shanghai. (∨ > ¬)
More crucially, the disjunctions can still take wide scope when the negated disjunctions are in the scope of a downward entailing operator, that is, OR in Mandarin cannot be rescued as a PPI (Szabolcsi 2004). After going through these arguments, I will take other modals into consideration and give a preliminary explanation for the contrast between (3) and (4), which mainly relies on two factors: 1) Interaction between different modals and ignorance/uncertainty inferences, 2) Competition between OR and AND.
Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: Phonetic Correlates of the Stop Voicing Contrast in Javanese
Time: Wednesday (5/1), 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
Previous studies of the Javanese [±voice] distinction find that in word-initial position the contrast is realized not in virtue of stop closure voicing or VOT but rather in the quality and pitch of the following vowel. Correlates include differences in the first and second formants as well as fundamental frequency and voice quality. In this study we extend this line of research by looking at the realization of the voicing contrast in a wider variety of contexts (word-initial, medial, and final) and tests of statistical significance of the data. The implications of our findings for the phonology of the language are also considered.
Speaker: Kyongjoon Kwon (Sungkyunkwan University)
Title: A phonologically null verb give in the Russian threat dative construction
Time: Thursday, 5/2, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
The central goal of this talk is to argue that the so-called Russian threat dative construction contains a phonologically null verb give. In the proposed ditransitive structure, the theme is an event denoted by a pronominalized verb that anaphorically refers to the verb phrase in the immediately previous speech. The pronominalized verb stem is phonologically realized through the incorporation of the null verb after a series of head movements. Under this proposal, the seemingly unmotivated or stipulated at the least dative case marked pronoun is well accounted for, i.e., as a recipient in the predication denoted by the ApplP. And the sentential meaning “I will give you/him/her/them back X ”, where X repeats a part of the previous speech, gives rise by implication to the threat effect. Finally, I propose that the posited null verb give, alongside overt forms, should be termed as “retortative” give, which expresses the idea of paying the interlocutor back with a similar response by retaliation.
Speaker: Keny Chatain (MIT)
Title: What is wrong with doubles?
Time: Wednesday, April 24th, 1-2PM
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk, I show that for a sizeable class of adjectival operators (including comparatives, superlatives, excessives, same, different),
standard and otherwise perfectly adequate denotations and LFs deliver
problematic truth-conditions in sentences where two such operators
occur, e.g. (1-2). This happens even though speakers recognize such
sentences as well-formed and have consistent intuitions about their
truth-conditions. These problems have been partially tackled in the
literature (von Stechow (1984) under the label multihead comparatives, Meier (2000) for degree result clauses, and refs therein), but a one-size-fits-all solution, if it exists, remains to be found.
(1) Amelia carried the biggest elephant over the longest distance (relative reading)
(2) Every suspect read the same book at the same time.
After presenting the problem, I will explore three solutions: 1) an extension of von Stechow (1984), 2) a solution exploiting polyadic quantification inspired in spirit by Fox & Johnson (2016), 3) a postsuppositional account following Brasoveanu (2012). I will show that the challenges faced by all three solutions are daunting, if not insurmountable. I will suggest a revision of 1) but will mainly leave the puzzle open for the audience’s insights to express themselves freely.
Speaker: Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard University), joint work with David Koester (University of Alaska Fairbanks), Chikako Ono (Chiba University), and G. D. Zaporotskij
Title: Text setting in an Itelmen khodila (song)
Time: Wednesday (4/24), 5:30pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
available here
Speaker: Tatiana Bondarenko & Stanislao Zompí (MIT)
Title: Leftover Agreement in Kartvelian
Time: Thursday, 4/25, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
In this talk we argue that some instances of agreement result from probes interacting with unspelled-out features of lower agreement probes. We call such agreement Leftover Agreement, and show how it can account for the observed variation in number agreement across the four Kartvelian languages.
(1) a. Georgian
gv-naxa
1PL-see.AOR.3SG
‘She/he saw us.’
(Aronson 1990: 172)
b. Svan
n-ädgari
1PL.IN-kill.PRS
‘She/he is killing us.’
(Testelets 1989: 9) (2)
a. Laz
m-dziom-an
1-see.PRS-PL
‘She/he sees us.’
(Lacroix 2009: 294)
b. Megrelian
m-tʃ’argn-a(n)
1-write.PRS-PL
‘She/he writes us.’
(Kipshidze 1914: 076)
In Georgian and Svan, (1), the lower probe (the prefix) spells out both first-person and plural features of the object, so the higher probe (the suffix) does not find anything left over to agree with. In Laz and Megrelian, (2), however, the lower probe has spelled out only the person, but not the number feature of the object. This leftover feature is being agreed with and spelled out by a higher probe (the suffix -an / -a(n)).
In our talk, we will spell out our assumptions about the Kartvelian agreement system and discuss our implementation of Leftover Agreement, compare our proposal to other approaches (Halle & Marantz 1993, Harley & Lomashvili 2011, Blix 2016, Foley 2017, Thivierge 2018, a.o.), and show how it can be extended to the “inverse” agreement alignment with minimal changes.
Last Saturday evening, over 200 MIT Linguistics alums, colleagues, and friends gathered to celebrate Noam Chomsky’s spectacular 90th year. Here he is, blowing out his candles (not 90 of them, however):
Itai Bassi (4th year) presented his work on Fake Indexicals in the workshop on Dependency in Syntactic Co-variance that took place last week in Leipzig University. His handout can be found here.
Speaker: Aynat Rubinstein (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Desire in motion
Time: Friday, April 26, 3:30-5:00pm
Room: 32-141
Abstract:
Motion verbs are famous for their tendency to undergo language change. Across languages, verbs meaning ‘come’ and ‘go’ become future markers, aspectual markers, modals expressing necessity, and more. Tracing the development of ‘come’ in Hebrew during its revival, this talk highlights yet another diachronic pathway that stems from motion: the pathway from motion to desire. Using goal-orientation as the essential meaning component of directed motion, I offer an analysis of the internally-motivated changes in the verb’s meaning, as well as changes instigated by language contact. The investigation supports the idea that meaning change is driven not by conventionalization of pragmatic inferences but by re-distribution of semantic content in possibly innovative syntactic configurations (Beck 2012, Beck & Gergel 2015, Condoravdi & Deo 2014).
Speaker: Qi Hao (Harvard/Peking University)
Title: The Syntax/Semantics of Numeral Classifiers in Mandarin Chinese and Numeral Mapping Parameter
Time: Wednesday, April 17th, 1-2PM
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
It is a well-known fact that classifiers are needed for grammatical counting in classifier languages such as Mandarin Chinese.
(1) a. yi ge xiaohai
one CLGENERAL child
b. san ben shu
three CLVOLUME book
c. liang ping shui
two CLBOTTLE water
There are three basic and related questions we want to ask about the Num-Cl-N Construction:
A. What is the internal constituency, [Num-Cl]-N or Num-[Cl-N]?
B. What is the function/semantics of classifiers?
C. How to account for the presence/absence of the classifier system among languages?
The mainstream analysis in generative framework is that classifiers are functional morphemes on the extended projection of nominals, functioning as divider heads (Borer 2005), type shifters from kinds to predicates (Chierchia 1998, Jiang 2012) or the syntactic counterpart of COUNT operation (Rothstein 2010, X.P. Li 2013) to make mass/kind-denoting nouns countable with numerals. That is to say, classifiers take nouns as complements and Cl-Ns further combine with numerals, structured as [Num-[Cl-N]]. And the presence of a classifier system is correlated with the absence of plural morphology as well as the absence of articles (see Chierchia 1998). However, analyses within this tradition will face difficulties when it comes to languages like Old Chinese. Old Chinese lacks both plural morphology and articles, but classifiers do not show up, as in (2).
(2) san ren xing, bi you wo shi yan. (The Analects)
three person walk must have my teacher at-there
‘If three people walk together, there must be a teacher of mine among them.’
Furthermore, it would be very hard to explain the fact for the former treatments that numerals can stand alone in predicate and argument positions in English (as in (3)) as well as in Old Chinese (as in (5)), but not in Modern Mandarin (as in (4)).
(3) a. Apples on the table are three.
b. As for apples, I bought three.
(4) a. Zhuozi-shang de pingguo shi *san/san-ge.
Table-LOCTOP MOD apple COP three/three-CLGEN. (same intended meaning as in 3a)
b. Pingguo ma, wo mai-le *san/san-ge
Apple PART, I buy-ASPT three/three-CLGEN. (same intended meaning as in 3b)
(5) a. Shi you bu ke zhi zhe san. (Records of the Grand Historian)
Thing have not can know NOM three
‘Things which cannot be known are three.’
b. Zheng yue, zuo san jun, san fen gongshi er ge you qi yi. (Zuo Zhuan)
First month, form three army, three divide country CONJ each have its one
“In the first month, (Jiwuzi) formed three armies, and divided the country into three parts and then each (of the three people) had one of them.”
Following the spirit of Semantic Parameter in Chierchia (1998), I propose that a parameter for different semantics of numerals is required to account for above facts, which can be called “Numeral Mapping Parameter”. It can be represented as follows:
(6) a. Numerals map to type in non-classifier languages such as English and Old Chinese.
b. Numerals map to type n (numbers/cardinals) in classifier languages such as Chinese.
Precisely, we should say that numerals in all languages start as individual expressions of type n denoting numbers. And the et-type use is derived from the number expression by following processes (Landman 2004, Rothstein 2009):
(7) a. three: 3 (type n)
b. IDENT(three): λn. n = 3 (raised to a predicate by IDENT)
c. function composition: λn. n = 3 °| | (composed with cardinality function)
= λx. |x| = 3The derivation in (7) is a lexical rule in English, and numerals are type-et as syntactic primitives. However, Mandarin lacks such a rule in the lexicon, and hence numerals are type n when they come into syntax. Such semantic deficiency of numerals is the genuine reason why we see classifiers in Mandarin. Classifiers are of type which turns n-type numerals into et-type numerals. The semantics for classifiers can be represented as follows:
(8) a. [[Cl]] = λP λn λx [PUNIT(x) & |x|P = n] if PUNIT(x) is defined, else
[[Cl]] = λP λn λx [|x|P = n] (the case for kilos, liters)
(P stands for classifier roots)
b. [[san-Cl-ben]] = λx BENUNIT (x) & |x|BEN = 3
(paraphrase: x comes in the naturals units of volumes and the cardinality of x is three measured by the units of volumes)
Then we can say the “classifier” is a built-in semantics of English numerals (with very abstract meaning as ‘object unit’), while such a category must be independently encoded in Mandarin syntax due to Numeral Mapping Parameter. And the internal structure of the Num-Cl-N sequence is [Num-Cl]-N, contrary to most of the former treatments. Further evidence will be given to support this.
We will also make a reply to the structural ambiguity analysis for individuating readings and measuring readings of classifier construction by X.P. Li (2013) and argue that we can get the two different readings from a unified syntax. And we will make a preliminary attempt to answer the question whether the mass-count distinction really exists in classifier languages such as Mandarin.
In this week’s meeting of Phonology Circle, Anton Kukhto (MIT) will lead a discussion of Shih & Zuraw’s 2017 paper: Phonological conditions on variable adjective and noun word order in Tagalog. You can download the paper here.
Discussion leader: Anton Kukhto (MIT)
Paper: Shih, S. S., & Zuraw, K. (2017). Phonological conditions on variable adjective and noun word order in Tagalog. Language, 93(4), 317-352 (available here).
Time: Wednesday (4/17), 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologically conditioned surface forms, -ng and na. This article presents a large-scale corpus study of adjective/ noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show that word-order variation in adjective/noun pairs optimizes for phonological structure, abiding by phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. The results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word-order choice.
Speaker: Conor McDonough Quinn (University of Southern Maine)
Title: Animacy, obviation, inverse, and delightful phonological subtleties: a call to look more at Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqew(Maliseet) and relatives, and helps for formal theory from endangered language pedagogy
Time: Thursday, 4/18, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Starting with core discussions of three traditionally thorny phenomena Algonquian morphosyntax:
We then briefly note three other features in desperate need of in-depth research: (a) head-marking for oblique (spatial, manner, temporal, etc.) arguments; (b) nominal tense; (c) standalone Secondary Objects (= morphosyntactically same as ditransitive Themes, but with no overt/interpreted Goal argument). Also briefly sketched are three under-researched phonetic-phonological phenomena: (a) iambic weak/strong-schwa alternations + related rich initial/final consonant clusters; (b) contrastive pitch-accent + final vowel deletion alternations; (c) preaspiration and gemination in a voicing-noncontrasting phonational system. Finally, we observe how being “reduced to” minimalist, non-technical, and pragmatic-communicatively-grounded presentations of these kinds of unfamiliar linguistic phenomena—namely, doing what it takes to teach them genuinely effectively to adult learners—creates fertile ground for innovative rethinking.
A longer version of the abstract can be found here.
Speaker: Tal Linzen (Johns Hopkins University)
Title: Linguistics in the age of deep learning
Time: Thursday, 4/18, 5-6pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract:
Deep learning systems with minimal or no explicit linguistic structure have recently proved to be surprisingly successful in language technologies. What, then, is the role of linguistics in language technologies in the deep learning age? I will argue that the widespread use of these “black box” models provides an opportunity for a new type of contribution: characterizing the desired behavior of the system along interpretable axes of generalization from the training set, and identifying the areas in which the system falls short of that standard.
I will illustrate this approach in word prediction (language models) and natural language inference. I will show that recurrent neural network language models are able to process many syntactic dependencies in typical sentences with considerable success, but when evaluated on carefully controlled materials, their error rate increases sharply. Perhaps more strikingly, neural inference systems (including ones based on the widely popular BERT model), which appear to be quite accurate according to the standard evaluation criteria used in the NLP community, perform very poorly in controlled experiments; for example, they universally infer from “the judge chastised the lawyer” that “the lawyer chastised the judge”. Finally, if time permits, I will show how neural network models can be used to address classic questions in linguistics, in particular by providing a platform for testing for the necessity and sufficiency of explicit structural biases in the acquisition of syntactic transformations.
Speaker: Dan Lassiter (Stanford University)
Title: Mathematical Counterfactuals
Time and Place: Friday, April 19, 3:30-5:00pm, room 32-141
Abstract:
Counterfactual reasoning about mathematical truths (“If 7 + 5 were 11, I’d have gotten a perfect score on the math test”) presents an important challenge to standard accounts of the semantics of conditionals. I describe a semantics based on Pearl-style interventions on generative models and show that it provides a simple account of mathematical counterfactuals that also coheres well with research on mathematical cognition. The approach is related to the possible worlds theory in that the models are recipes for generating descriptions of possible worlds, but their procedural character is crucial in supporting interventions and the kind of partiality that I argue we need to render mathematical counterfactuals meaningful.
_______________________________________________
Speaker: Danfeng Wu (MIT)
Title: Prefer the less specified form: Evidence from Lebanese Arabic
Time: Tuesday, 4/9, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
For languages with resumptive pronouns (RPs), an Economy principle has been proposed that prefers gap realization whenever possible (e.g. Shlonsky 1992, Pesetsky 1998, McDaniel and Cowart 1999, Sichel 2014, and Rasin 2016). In Hebrew, for instance, the A’-trace in a raising relative clause is realized as a gap, unless an island blocks the movement, in which case an RP is inserted in the trace position. Because an RP has more internal structure than a gap, this Economy principle can then be stated either as a preference for the leastspecified form or the preference for the less specified form.
In this preliminary and informal discussion I argue that the latter formulation of the Economy principle is correct. I present evidence from Lebanese Arabic, which has a richer resumption strategy than Hebrew and can use an independent morpheme (“strong” pronouns), a clitic (“weak” pronoun), or an epithet in resumption (Aoun et al. 2001). The strong pronoun and the epithet have more morphological complexity than the weak pronoun. When coindexed with a quantificational antecedent (a wh-phrase or a quantifier), the strong pronoun and the epithet have the same distribution on the one hand, while the weak pronoun and the gap pattern together and have a wider distribution on the other hand. Strikingly, a weak pronoun alternates with a wh-gap in non-island contexts, and the wh-antecedent can be reconstructed to the position of the weak pronoun (Aoun and Benmamoun 1998). Based on these facts I argue that the Economy principle is a comparative one rather than a superlative one, preferring the less specified form whenever possible. In the case of Lebanese Arabic, it prefers a gap and a weak pronoun rather than a strong pronoun and an epithet.
Speaker: Christopher Baron (MIT)
Title: Entailments, implicatures, and absolute adjectives
Time: Wednesday, April 10th, 1-2PM
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Absolute adjectives like straight and bent give rise to interesting entailments and implicatures when they occur in degree constructions; the [a] and [b] examples below are comparatives, and the [c] examples are degree achievements.
(1a) and (1c) entail that Bar A wasn’t completely straight before; (1b) entail that Bar B isn’t completely straight. However, (1a) and (1b) seem to imply that Bar A isn’t completely straight, whereas (1c) seems to imply that it is completely straight (now). The examples in (2) are similar. All three entail that Bar C is bent (now). (2a) seems to imply that Bar C was already bent, and (2b) seems to imply that Bar B is also bent. However, (2c) seems to imply that Bar C wasn’t bent before.
I’ll argue that this implied content really is implicature, rather than entailment or presupposition, and explore and expand on accounts of some (but not all) of these implicatures (e.g. Kennedy 2007). Furthermore, I’ll explore various possibilities for the apparent reversal in implicature with degree achievements, and argue that none of the obvious solutions are quite appealing. I leave open for now, however, a positive account of these data.
Speaker: Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard University), joint work with David Koester (University of Alaska Fairbanks), Chikako Ono (Chiba University), and G. D. Zaporotskij
Title: Text setting in an Itelmen khodila (song)
Time: Wednesday 10th, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: available here
Presenter: Yadav Gowda (MIT Linguistics)
Paper to read: Tanenhaus et. al (1995)
Time: Thursday, 4/11, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Details:
Tanenhaus et. al 1995 is an influential paper arguing that language processing is (a) incremental and (b) provides us with an argument against the modularity of syntax. I will review their arguments and explore related questions, including, but not limited to: What defines a module? Why should/shouldn’t cognitive scientists propose modules? What should we take to be neurological/psychological evidence of a module?
Noam Chomsky will be giving two lectures at MIT this week.
Location : 37-212
Times : Wednesday 10th of April & Friday 12th of April
Hoping to see you there!
Our alum Newell Lewey has accepted a position of adjunct instructor at the University of Maine at Machias, where he will teach Intro to Passamaquoddy and Public Speaking. Congratulations, Newell! Kuli-kiseht!
Norvin Richards spent April 5-6 at the Princeton Symposium on Syntactic Theory (PSST), as did recent alumna Michelle Yuan. The theme of this year’s meeting was “counterexamples”. Norvin reports the following feeling:
“[I’m] trying not too think too hard about the fact that, when the organizers tried to think of people whose theories have lots of counterexamples, they apparently thought of [me] right away.”
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018), who received her PhD from our department last summer, has accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at San Diego. Also joining UCSD faculty is Emily Clem, who is currently finishing at Berkeley and was a visitor at MIT in Spring 2018. Congratulations to both!
Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz and Itai Bassi (MIT)
Title: Relativized Anaphor Agreement Effect: Evidence from Koryak
Time: Tuesday, 4/2, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
In this talk, we discuss the Anaphor Agreement Effect (AAE), an observation first proposed in Rizzi (1990) to the effect that anaphors do not trigger phi-agreement. We report on novel data from Koryak, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language of the Russian Far East, which we claim constitutes a particularly revealing partial counterexample to previous formulations of the AAE. Specifically, we show that the Koryak anaphor uvik triggers obligatory number agreement consistent with its binder, but never triggers person agreement consistent with it. We therefore propose that the AAE is limited to preventing anaphors from triggering covarying person agreement, but that it does not block number (or gender) agreement. Our account of this combines arguments from recent work by Omer Preminger on the AAE, as well converging evidence about the syntax of phi-features from Moskal (2015), Harbour (2016), and van Urk (2018). Following Preminger (2019), we take the AAE to be the result of the way that anaphors are structured: they contain a head Anaph that blocks agreement into its complement. However, to account for the Koryak facts (as well as other partial counterexamples to the AAE discussed in Murugesan (2018)), we deviate from Preminger’s proposal by allowing languages to vary with respect to where Anaph merges along the pronominal spine. In languages like Koryak, where anaphors trigger number agreement, Anaph merges below Num, whereas in languages like Albanian, where they trigger only 3SG agreement (Woolford 1999, Run Chen p.c.), it merges above Num. Following Moskal (2015) et. seq., we take person to be the most embedded phi-feature, forcing agreement with it to be blocked by Anaph regardless of how low it merges. Finally, we propose a compositional semantics for the Anaph head that explains how its presence gives rise to co-reference between the two arguments of the relevant predicate.
We’re very happy to announce that Simon Charlow will be here this week, and will teach a mini-course Wednesday and Thursday, April 3rd and April 4th. Details are below.
Speaker: Simon Charlow (Rutgers)
Title: Extensible semantics
Time: Wednesday (4/3), 1:00-2:30pm and Thursday (4/4), 3:30-5:00pm
Place: 32-D461 on Wednesday, 37-212 on Thursday
Abstract: Since the basics were outlined by Frege, semantic theory has been enriched in various ways. Pronouns and alternative-invoking expressions motivated a souped-up interpretation function, one capable of composing assignment-sensitive and multifarious meanings (and eventually meanings that were both). Various kinds of ‘dynamic’ phenomena resulted in lexical enrichments that replaced propositions with context-change potentials. Quantification and scope gave us the Y-model. Type-shifting has appeared from time to time.
This mini-course will show how to recast all these enrichments in a uniform way with basic, well-studied tools used by programmers to introduce so-called ‘side-effects’ into functional programs: (applicative) functors and monads. We’ll see concrete examples of how to abstract these tools out of existing semantic theories, and compositionally combine them to build new super-tools (in more ways than one). We’ll study how this flexible, modular approach to composition solves various empirical problems and dissolves some recalcitrant technical issues. And we’ll apply these techniques to the study of pronouns (with or without assignments), exceptionally scoping indefinites, cross-sentential and donkey anaphora, quantification and scope (with and without events), and ‘higher-order’ analogs of these phenomena (e.g., functional pronouns and higher-order questions).
Suggested readings: [1] “The scope of alternatives“ And optionally, one of the following: [2] ”A modular theory of pronouns and binding“[3] “Variable-free semantics and flexible grammars for anaphora”
Speaker: Daniel Hole (Universität Stuttgart)
Title: Arguments for a universal distributed syntax of evaluation, scalarity and basic focus quantification with ‘only’
Time: Thursday, 4/4, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk, I review the evidence that has been adduced for a multi-constituent syntax of focus particle constructions. Traditionally, those components that I model as independent morphemes with their own scope-taking properties have been analyzed as submorphemic components of focus particles. I use ‘only’ words to make this point. This work is based on Hole (2013, 2015, 2017), and it makes use of data from Chinese, Vietnamese, German and Dutch. However, many arguments carry over to English. Time allowing, I will also present novel data from the interaction of German nur with modals and the German NPI modal brauchen ‘need (+NPI)’.
This approach to focus particles stands in stark contrast to Büring & Hartmann (2001) or Coppock & Beaver (2013).
Speaker: Candace Ross (MIT CSAIL)
Title: Grounding Language Acquisition by Training Semantic Parsers using Captioned Videos
Time: Thursday, 4/4, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:
We develop a semantic parser that is trained in a grounded setting using pairs of videos captioned with sentences. This setting is both data-efficient, requiring little annotation, and similar to the experience of children where they observe their environment and listen to speakers. The semantic parser recovers the meaning of English sentences despite not having access to any annotated sentences. It does so despite the ambiguity inherent in vision where a sentence may refer to any combination of objects, object properties, relations or actions taken by any agent in a video. For this task, we collected a new dataset for grounded language acquisition. Learning a grounded semantic parser — turning sentences into logical forms using captioned videos — can significantly expand the range of data that parsers can be trained on, lower the effort of training a semantic parser, and ultimately lead to a better understanding of child language acquisition.
Speaker: Simon Charlow (Rutgers)
Title: Local contexts in ellipsis
Time: Friday, April 5th, 4pm-5:30pm
Location: 32-155
Abstract: This talk advocates a specific semantic implementation of discourse congruence (Rooth 1992, Schwarzschild 1999), which plays a central role in the licensing of ‘anaphoric’ reduction (i.e., ellipsis and deaccenting). I argue that congruence is checked compositionally, and that satisfaction of congruence is determined extensionally — that is, in a local context. I show how this leads to significant simplifications in the theory of reduction licensing, allowing us to dispense with otherwise necessary prohibitions on Meaningless Coindexing (Sag 1976, Heim 1997) and Redundancy within an assignment (cf. Schlenker 2005), and to strengthen the relationship between an elided phrase and its antecedent to one of pure identity.
I consider several consequences of my proposal for the formulation of congruence operators, arguing that it compels us to take their anaphoric character seriously, while allowing for ex post facto (i.e., post-suppositional) linking of congruence operators to their ‘antecedents’. And I explore some consequences of these moves for restrictions on antecedent-contained deletion (Kennedy 1994) and the puzzling phenomenon of focused bound pronouns (Sauerland 1998).
The 15th workshop on Altaic formal linguistics will take place at Moscow State University on September 26th to 28th. The deadline for abstract submissions is April 14th 2019.
From April 2 to April 5, Arts at MIT, in collaboration with Prof. Michel DeGraff at MIT Linguistics and the MIT-Haiti Initiative, and Prof. Nick Montfort in Comparative Media Studies, is hosting the visit from Haiti of rapper, poet and singer BIC Tizon Dife (Roosevelt Saillant) for a celebration of music, literature, linguistics, dance and community. Joining BIC at his concert on Friday, April 5, 8pm, at MIT, is the Boston-based dance company Jean Appolon Expressions (JAE). JAE will also offer a dance workshop on Friday, April 5, 1-3pm. BIC will help lead a digital story-telling workshop on Tuesday, April 2nd, 5-7pm, and he will perform at Brothers’ Kafe Kreyòl in Everett on Wednesday, April 3rd, 8pm. All events are free of charge and open to the MIT and greater Boston community. For more information on BIC’s schedule and related events, please visit https://arts.mit.edu/artists/bic/#schedule.
Second year student, Sherry Yong Chen, presented two projects at the 32nd CUNY Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing:
In other news, her co-authored chapter has just appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-experimental-semantics-and-pragmatics-9780198791768): Chapter 5 “Event (de)composition”, Sherry Yong Chen and E. Matthew Husband.
Congratulations to our alum Ted Levin (PhD 2015) on his new job at Facebook in Seattle! Here’s what he writes to us about his new position:
“I’ve been working as a Linguist at Facebook Reality Labs for the past month or so. I’ve found the work to be challenging with lots of new things to learn, and am enjoying it despite it being quite different than my academic work. Broadly speaking, the team of ~20 linguists that I’m a part of sits at the very beginning of a pipeline to make Facebook apps better at understanding user intentions through voice or text.
“Narrowly, my job is to identify ways in which users might want to interact with Facebook apps (e.g. send messages, get recommendations, set reminders), collect data to exemplify the utterances that satisfy requests within these domains, and oversee the annotation of this data so that it can be utilized to train machine learning algorithms farther down the pipeline.”
News has reached us from our recent alum Wataru Uegaki (PhD 2015) that he has accepted a position as a Lecturer in Semantics (≅ Assistant Professor) in the Linguistics department of the University of Edinburgh. Wataru is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. Congratulations, Wataru!!
Third-year student Yadav Gowda spoke on “Movement within and without a clause” at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL9) this weekend at Reed College.
Speaker: Itai Bassi (MIT)
Title: Principle C effects with plural antecedents (joint work with Paul Marty)
Time: Monday, March 18th, 1-2 pm
Abstract:In the literature on Principle C, it has been claimed on the basis of examples like (1) that an R-expression cannot overlap in reference with a c-commanding plural antecedent (a.o., Lasnik 1989, Schlenker 2003). Yet we add to (1) the datapoint in (2), and observe that this claim only holds on a distributive interpretation of the relevant antecedent: as (2) shows, things get better on a collective interpretation (cf. Reinhart and Reuland for a parallel observation for principle B configurations).
(1) They think that Oscar should be the band leader (* if Oscar is part of the reference of “they”)
(2) They (jointly) decided that Oscar will be the band leader (ok if Oscar is part of the reference of “they”)
Our idea to understand this contrast is this: the distributive LF, but not the collective one, has an embedded constituent of the form ‘x thinks that Oscar…’, where ‘x’ is an atomic variable quantified over by a distributive operator. When `x’ takes Oscar as one of its values, a (classical) Principle C violation obtains. We propose to derive these “embedded principle C” effects by extending Reinhart’s competition theory of principle C (aka ‘Rule I’) to make it operative at embedded levels. We then argue that on this refinement, Rule I can be eliminated as a primitive of the grammar and be subsumed by the independently motivated principle, Maximize Presupposition!, which has also been argued to regulate competition between LF representations at embedded levels (Singh, 2011).
Speakers: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: Mismatched suppletion in Azeri as morphology/phonology competition
Time: Monday, March 18th, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: (longer PDF version available at http://tinyurl.com/colin-morphun)
In this paper, I examine a puzzle about suppletion in the northern dialect of Azeri/Azerbaijani (Turkic). I focus on suppletion of the perfect (PRF) / evidential (EVID) morpheme, whose default form is -miʃ. My fieldwork work has found, in agreement with Oztopcu (2003), that this morpheme has an allomorph -Ib that is typically only used with 2nd and 3rd person subjects:
(1) a. o gatʃ-mɨʃ/ɨb
1SG run-PRF-3SG
’He/she/it has run’
b. biz dʒal-miʃ/*ib-ij
1PL come-PRF-1PL
‘We have come’
However, I have found that in contexts where multiple adjacent instances of -miʃ would surface, one of those instances is realized as -Ib, even when the subject is 1st person:
(2) a. biz gatʃ-ɨb-mɨʃ-1ɣ 1PL run-PRF-EVID-1PL
’Apparently we had run’
b. man je-maj je-ib-miʃ-am
1SG eat-NMLZ eat-EVID-PRF-1SG
‘Apparently I ate food’
Since -Ib suppletion typically requires a 2nd/3rd person subject, we would have expected the 1st person subjects in (2) to make -Ib unavailable. Why did -Ib suppletion in (2) succeed? I argue that this over-application of suppletion in (2) occurs due to a phonological constraint against forms with adjacent identical morphemes (Menn & MacWhinney 1984, Plag 1998, Yip 1998, a.o.). This phonologically-forced morphological mismatch provides new evidence that morpheme insertion interacts and competes with phonological constraints (Wolf 2008, 2009, Pertsova 2015).
Speaker: Cater Chen
Title: Split Partitivity in Mandarin
Time: Tuesday, March 19, 1pm-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In Mandarin (Chinese), a numeral classifier (henceforth NCL) fragment can be interpreted as a partitive expression relative to a definite DP antecedent in various constructions, a phenomenon I refer to as split partitivity (henceforth SP). In the first part of this talk, I will argue for a stranding approach to SP. That is, the NCL fragment is analyzed as a stranded element in the course of movement of its nominal associate, therefore, it can be used to identify a movement trace of its nominal associate.
In Mandarin (Chinese), a numeral classifier (henceforth NCL) fragment can be interpreted as a partitive expression relative to a definite DP antecedent in various constructions, a phenomenon I refer to as split partitivity (henceforth SP). In the first part of this talk, I will argue for a stranding approach to SP. That is, the NCL fragment is analyzed as a stranded element in the course of movement of its nominal associate, therefore, it can be used to identify a movement trace of its nominal associate.
(1) NCL fragment identifies A-traces
a. [Na-liu-ge xuesheng]i [WollP hui you [vP [NCLP san-ge ti] lianxi Zhangsan]].
Dem-6-CL student will exist 3-CL contact Zhangsan
Lit. ‘Those six students will three (of them) contact Zhangsan.’
b. Na-liu-ge xuesheng [VP lai-le san-ge].
Dem-6-CL student come-Perf 3-CL
‘Three of those six students came.’
Lit. ‘Those six students came three (of them).’
(2) NCL fragment identifies Ā-traces
a. [Na-liu-ge xuesheng]i (a), you [NCLP san-ge ti] renshi Zhangsan.
Dem-6-CL student Top exist 3-CL know Zhangsan
‘Those six students, three (of them) know Zhangsan.’
b. [Na-liu-ge xuesheng]i (a), Zhangsan renshi [NCLP san-ge ti].
Dem-6-CL student Top Zhangsan know 3-CL
‘Those six students, Zhangsan knows three (of them).’
In the second part of this talk, I will show that, having justified a stranding approach to SP, we can use SP as a tool to study various constructions in Mandarin that involve argument-gap dependencies. In particular, passive constructions in Mandarin have been analyzed as involving raising, control or null operator movement and predication. I propose that SP can shed light on the right analysis, because different patterns of SP can diagnose different types of argument-gap dependencies.
Speaker: Adam Albright (MIT), joint work with Vighnesh Subramaniam (Millard North High School, Omaha NE)
Title: Modeling typological frequency with a grammatical learner
Time: Wednesday (3/20), 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: available here
Speaker: Philip Shushurin (NYU)
Title: A uniform account of possessives and applicatives: evidence from external possession in Russian
Time: Thursday, 3/21, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Much of the work on external, or raised, possessors in Russian (Paykin and van Peteghem (2003), Grashchenkov and Markman (2009)), as well as in other languages with the similar phenomenon (Landau (1999), Deal (2016)), has recognized the dual nature of such arguments: on one hand, they are interpreted as possessors, on the other hand, they show many similarities with other types of arguments, most frequently, applicatives and topics. I consider two external possession constructions in Russian and propose that they are merged in a DP-external functional projection (ApplP) and either are licensed in situ or move to a topic position for licensing. I propose that goals of ditransitives (low applicatives), external possessors and DP-internal possessors are introduced by the same functional head.
Speakers: Anya Lunden (William & Mary)
Title: Real and accidental glides
Time: Friday, March 22nd, 3:30pm-5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract:
Articulating a vowel sequence like [i.a] results in formant movements that are identical to those resulting from the articulation of a [j]. This raises questions about the status of phonological rules of glide insertion, which are often stated as the hiatus resolution strategy for such configurations. The talk explores the question of whether there are, or can be, “real” glides in such cases, and whether the “accidental” glides have any status perceptually. Evidence from production and perception studies as well as cross-linguistic behavior is presented and used to motivate an analysis where an accidental fact about articulation has consequences for the phonology.
Speaker: Paola Merlo (University of Geneva)
Title: Quantitative Computational Syntax: some case studies
Time: Thursday, 3/21, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract: In the computational study of intelligent behaviour, the domain of language is distinguished by the complexity of the representations and the sophistication of the domain theory that is available. It also has a large amount of observational data available for many languages. The main scientific challenge for computational approaches to language is the creation of theories and methods that fruitfully combine large-scale, corpus-based approaches with the linguistic depth of more theoretical methods. I report here on some recent and current work on word order universals and argument structure that exemplifies the quantitative computational syntax approach. First, we demonstrate that typological frequencies of noun phrase orderings, universal 20, are systematically correlated to abstract syntactic principles at work in structure building and movement. Then, we investigate higher level structural principles of efficiency and complexity. In a large-scale, computational study, we confirm a trend towards minimization of the distance between words, in time and across languages. In the third case study, much like the comparative method in linguistics, cross-lingual corpus investigations take advantage of any corresponding annotation or linguistic knowledge across languages. We show that corpus data and typological data involving the causative alternation exhibit interesting correlations explained by the notion of spontaneity of an event. Finally, time permitting, I will discuss current work investigating on whether the notion of similarity in the intervention theory of locality is related to current notions of similarity in word embedding space.
Bio:
Paola Merlo is faculty in the linguistics department of the University of Geneva. She is the head of the interdisciplinary research group Computational Learning and Computational Linguistics (CLCL). The group is concerned with interdisciplinary research combining linguistic modelling with machine learning techniques. The scope of her current research includes fundamental issues in the statistical nature of language, empirical evaluations of linguistic proposal about the lexical semantics of verbs and language universals of word order and statistical models of syntactic and semantic parsing. Prof. Merlo has been the editor of the journal of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, and has been member of the executive committee of the EACL and of the ACL. Prof. Merlo holds a doctorate in Computational Linguistics from the University of Maryland, USA. She has been associate research fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been visiting scholar at Rutgers, Edinburgh, and Stanford.
Title: How to find the rabbit in the big(ger) box:
Reasoning about contextual parameters for gradable adjectives under embedding (joint work with Roger Levy (MIT BCS) and Elizabeth Coppock (Boston University))
Speaker: Helena Aparicio (MIT BCS)
Time: Friday, 22nd of March 2-3pm
Abstract:Haddock (1987) noticed that the definite description ‘the rabbit in the hat’ succeeds in referring even in the presence of multiple hats, so long as only one hat contains a rabbit. These complex definites suggest that uniqueness with respect to the NP hat is not required in such embedded contexts, raising the question of what the correct formulation of the uniqueness condition for definite determines is. Generally speaking, two types of solutions have been proposed to this puzzle. The first one postulates a complex semantic representation for definite determiners, where uniqueness can be checked at different points of the semantic representation for either sets of hats or sets of rabbit-containing hats (Bumford 2017). The second type of account proposes that definite descriptions can be evaluated against a sub-portion of the maximally available context (Evans 2005; Frazier 2008; Muhlstein 2015). This pragmatic mechanism ensures that reference resolution is successful, even when the maximal context would violate the uniqueness presupposition of the definite article.
The present work seeks to tease apart these two classes of theories by investigating the interpretive preferences for similarly embedded noun phrases containing a positive or comparative adjective (e.g., ‘the rabbit in the big/ger box’). Experimental results show that embedded positive adjectives exhibit a sensitivity to contextual manipulations that embedded comparatives lack. We derive this sensitivity using a probabilistic computational model of the contextual parameters guiding the interpretation of the embedded NP, and compare it to alternative models that vary in the lexical representations assumed for definite determiners. Our simulation results show that neither of the two proposals under consideration can independently account for all of the observed experimental results. We show that the model that best matches human data is one that combines both a complex uniqueness check (à la Bumford) with pragmatic context coordination.
Speakers: Suzana Fong (MIT)
Title: Regular and athematic participles in Brazilian Portuguese
Time: Monday, March 11th, 5-6:30 pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
In Brazilian Portuguese, the regular participial (PTC) form of the verb can be parsed as follows:
(1) com-i-d-as
eat-TH-PTC-AGR(fem.pl)
‘eaten’ [where ‘TH’ is a theme vowel]
Besides a regular form (2a), some verbs also allow for an additional short form of the PTC (2b):
(2) a. Regular participle
limp-a-d-as
clean-TH-PTC-AGR(fem.pl)
‘cleaned’
b. Short/Athematic participle
limp-as
clean-AGR(fem.pl)
‘cleaned’
Short PTC’s like (2b) lack both the participial morpheme (-d in (1) and (2a)) and a theme vowel (-a in (2a)), hence why they are referred to as athematic PTC’s.
In this presentation, I focus on the distribution of the PTC when both a regular and an athematic form is in principle available. In particular, we will look at the PTC form(s) that occur(s) in three constructions: verbal passives (3a), adjectival passives (3b), and absolute participles (3c).
(3) a. Verbal passive: regular or athematic PTC allowed
As gavetas foram limp-a-d-as / limp-as pelo João.
the drawers were cleaned(REG) / cleaned(ATHEM) by.the João
‘The drawers were cleaned by João.’
b. Adjectival passive: only athematic PTC allowedAs gavetas estão/permanecem *limp-a-d-as / limp-as.
the drawers are/remain *cleaned(REG) / cleaned(ATHEM)
‘The drawers are/remain clean.’
c.Absolute participles: only regular PTC allowed[ Limp-a-d-as / *Limp-as as gavetas ], o João pôde ir descansar.
[ cleaned(REG) / *cleaned(ATHEM) the drawers ] the João could go rest
‘The drawers having been cleaned, João could go rest.’
I propose a tentative analysis where the athematic PTC (2b) arises as a consequence of a fusion rule that targets v and the root. Whether or not that rule can be applied will depend on the size of a given PTC construction, which in turn determines how much structure is Spelled-Out. Specifically:
Speakers: Frank Staniszewski (MIT)
Title: Marty & Romoli (2019)
Time: Wednesday, March 13th, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
I will present Marty & Romoli’s new paper “Presupposed Free Choice” (which expands on material discussed in Gajewski & Sharvit (2012) and Spector & Sudo (2017)). I will also explore possible connections with some of my work in progress on ‘until’ phrases, which I hypothesize should be treated as free choice items.
Speaker: Chris Tancredi (Keio University)
Title: De dicto, de re and de qualitate unified
Time: Thursday, 3/14, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Past approaches to the semantics of belief statements have argued for a multiplicity of distinct interpretations, including de dicto, de re, de qualitate and de translato. The need for ambiguity in attitude statements is clear from the potential truth of sentences like Ralph believes Ortcutt is a spy, but he doesn’t believe ORTCUTT is a spy. However, I argue that the only ambiguity specific to attitude statements is the de translato/non-de translato distinction. In particular, I show how to reduce de dicto/de re/de qualitate interpretations to a single form. The key to the reduction is to analyze the embedded clause of an attitude statement as denoting a proposition inferable from an underlying belief of the subject rather than denoting the subject’s underlying belief itself. I show that the semantics developed can account for attitudes toward necessary as well as impossible propositions, and that it further can account for the range of entailments felt to hold among multiple attitude statements.
Speaker: Danfeng Wu (MIT Linguistics)
Title: Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction Chapters 9.3-9.9 by Sag, Wasow and Bender (2003)
Location: 46-5165
Time: Thursday, 3/14, 5-6pm
Abstract:
What is the role of psycholinguistic evidence (specifically evidence from language processing) in the study of language? What is the relation between knowledge of language and use of language? We hope to explore these questions through a discussion of an HPSG textbook chapter. HPSG (Head-driven phrase structure grammar) is a different syntactic framework from generative transformational grammar, and is surface-oriented, constraint-based and strongly lexicalist. This textbook chapter argues that HPSG is more compatible than transformational grammar with observed facts about language processing. For instance, language processing is incremental and rapid (e.g. Tanenhaus et al. 1995 & 1996, Arnold et al. 2002). The order of presentation of the words largely determines the order of the listener’s mental operations in comprehending them. And lexical choices have a substantial influence on processing (MacDonald et al. 1994). For these reasons, such psycholinguistic evidence supports an HPSG type of grammar, and poses difficulty to transformational grammar.
Speakers: Paula Fenger (University of Connecticut/Harvard University)
Title: Words within words: The internal syntax of verbs
Time: Monday, March 4th, 5-6:30 pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Superficially, languages differ in how grammatical categories like tense and aspect are expressed on the verb; e.g. in English, both [progressive] and [past] cannot be suffixes on the verb (*stay-ing-ed) and require a periphrastic realization (was stay-ing), whereas in Turkish both [progressive] and [past] appear as agglutinating suffixes on the verb (kal-ıy’or-dı, stay-prog-past). Moreover, a language like Turkish is not uniformly agglutinating and can have periphrastic constructions in other environments, which makes it seem like the existence of periphrasis is contextually defined within a language. In this talk I explore the idea that Turkish-type languages and English-type languages are underlyingly the same. By looking at stress assignment patterns and behavior under coordination, it is revealed that the agglutinative pattern is only superficial. That is, syntax-phonology mismatches in Turkish in fact reveal a domain inside the verb and this domain is similar to the domain found for the periphrastic construction in English. Specifically, the syntactic operation that creates words (main verbs and auxiliaries) is uniform in both types of languages, the differences between them arise only at PF. This approach does not treat notions like “agglutinating” and “periphrastic” as deep properties of grammar, but as superficial differences.
Speaker: Yadav Gowda (MIT)
Title: Moving Clauses
Time: Tuesday, March 5, 1pm-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
The first part of this talk will focus on the derivation and interpretation of so-called ‘Comp-internal clauses’ in Bengali (Bhattacharya 2001). Clauses headed by the head-initial complementizer je normally appear obligatorily extraposed to the right of the (normally head-final) verb:
(1) ami bollam [je Aparṇa deri korlo] I said C Aparna late did I said that Aparna was late.
However, when an element appears in first position within the clause (henceforth the PJE, or pre-je-element), these clauses obligatorily appear to the left of the verb, in the normal object position:
(2) ami [Aparna je deri korlo] bollam. I aparna C late did saidI said that Aparna was late.
I will present previously unnoticed facts about the binding and scope behavior of Comp-internal clauses which suggest that the PJE occupies its own matrix specifier, despite the fact that it appears to move along with the rest of the clause. I will argue that this mismatch suggests that Comp-internal clauses involve clausal pied-piping driven by long scrambling of the PJE.
In the second part of this talk, I will consider facts which suggest that clausal scrambling in other languages (Basque, Bavarian German, Kannada) may also be amenable to an analysis in which this movement is driven by a clause-internal element, and discuss how this supports previous arguments on the immobility of CPs (Koster 1978, Stowell 1981, and many others).
Speaker: Laura Kalin (Princeton University)
Title: Morphological opacity in Turoyo (Neo-Aramaic): Support for cyclicity and separation
Time: Friday, March 8th, 3:30-5 pm
Location: 32-141 (please note, this is a different lecture hall than the room the colloquia are usually in)
Abstract: In this talk, I use complex verbs in the Neo-Aramaic language Turoyo (Jastrow 1993) as a window into theoretical issues at the syntax/morphology and morphology/phonology interfaces, including cyclicity, derivational timing, and constraints on allomorphy.
I will first show, using converging cross-modular data from allomorphy on the one hand and agreement restrictions on the other, that the suffixes to the verb base in Turoyo appear in the opposite linear order from what is expected given their underlying syntactic hierarchy: the innermost suffix is the syntactically highest, and the outermost is the lowest. (This is reminiscent of the findings of Speas 1991 and Rice 2000 for Athapaskan languages.)
Once I have motivated a basic structure for the verb word in Turoyo, I turn to a case of counterbleeding in the verbal complex. The past tense morpheme, *-wa*, has a variable linear position in the verbal complex, and interacts very differently with phonological processes as compared to morphological processes; more specifically, *-wa* is visible in its surface position to phonology, but is invisible in this position to allomorphy. I propose that *-wa* is an infix, and show how this analysis—coupled with a cyclic derivation that separates morphology from phonology—straightforwardly accounts for *-wa*’s puzzling behavior, along with the other morphological quirks of Turoyo verbs.
The analysis I put forward has several consequences for the architecture of the grammar, in particular, in arguing against incorporating allomorph choice and infixation into the phonology (contra, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1993, Kager 1996, Wolf 2008), and in supporting cyclic, serial, realizational models that both separate syntax from exponent choice, and separate exponent choice from phonology (along the lines of Paster 2006, Embick 2010, and Bye & Svenonius 2012).
We are happy to announce that Laura Kalin will be visiting the department this week and will teach two mini courses (details below). Laura has asked that attendees read section 4 of McCarthy & Prince 1993 Generalized alignment (with the rest being optional) and chapter 3 up until the end of section 3.2 of Yu 2007 A Natural History of Infixation (the rest being optional) in preparation for the course.
Speaker: Laura Kalin (Princeton University)
Title: Theoretical approaches to infixation
Time: Wednesday, 1:00-2:30 and Thursday, 12:30-2:00
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: This mini-course will discuss a number of different theoretical approaches to infixation, and bring data from a variety of languages to bear on these approaches. More specifically, we will differentiate approaches to infixation along the following two dimensions:
(i) Is morphology (in particular, exponent choice/suppletive allomorphy) evaluated alongside phonology, or does morphology precede phonology?
(ii) Does an infix linearly concatenate with the stem it combines with (i.e., as following or preceding the stem) before taking its surface (infixed) position inside the stem, or does an infix slot directly into its infixed position without a preliminary step of linear concatenation?
Crossing these two dimensions gives us four logically-possible types of approaches to infixation, three of which are well-attested in the literature. On the one hand are accounts that take morphology to be simultaneous with phonology, all of which also lack a step of linear concatenation prior to infixation (e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1993, Hyman & Inkelas 1997, Wolf 2008, Samuels 2009), though these accounts do differ with respect to whether/how infixes are specified as (wanting to be) prefixes/suffixes. On the other hand are accounts that separate morphology from phonology; some such accounts take infixes to slot directly into their surface position (e.g., Yu 2007), while others include a step of linear concatenation prior to infixation (e.g., Bye & Svenonius 2012, Embick 2010).
Using novel typological data that catalogues interactions between allomorphy and infixation, I will argue that only this last approach to infixation makes the right empirical predictions, and further, that this data supports a cyclic, serial, realizational morphological grammar.
The 3rd Crete Summer School of Linguistics will be taking place from July 13 to July 26, 2019, at the University of Crete in beautiful Rethymnon.
Current MIT faculty Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, and Sabine Iatridou will be teaching classes at CreteLing, along with alumni Heidi Harley, Paul Kiparsky, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Douglas Pulleyblank, Philippe Schlenker, William Snyder, and Zoltán Szabó , as well as colleagues from around the world.
Full information (including details on the student application due April 6th), can be found on the school website (https://www.phl.uoc.gr/cssl19/).
Speaker: Ljiljana Progovac (Wayne State University)
Title: Syntax in the shadow of evolution: Stepping stones into hierarchy, Move, recursion, and coordination
Time: Tuesday, Feb. 26, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
It is often stated that the nature of human language cannot be fully understood without reference to its evolution. Here I consider how one such (theoretically grounded) reconstruction of syntax may lead to a deeper understanding of attested syntactic phenomena, both those well-supported in syntactic theory (e.g. the small clause foundation of sentences), and those which remain largely unresolved (e.g. islandhood). The reconstruction leads to a proto-syntax characterized as flat, symmetric, intransitive, and static (without Move). Arguably, these rigid but robust beginnings still pervade the fabric of modern syntax, intertwined and interspersed with more modern forms, producing some intricate effects and echoes of the past, including islandhood. I will consider a variety of approximations of such proto-syntactic structures in modern languages, as well as intermediate/ambivalent forms, with the focus on the parataxis-coordination-subordination dimension (the intransitive-middle-transitive dimension was discussed in last semester’s Syntax Square talk). Both of these continuums/progressions are of relevance to the gradual emergence of the hallmarks of modern syntax, and each is characterized by ambivalent and overlapping intermediate forms. The postulated approximations of proto-syntax not only exhibit different syntactic behaviors relative to their (more) hierarchical counterparts, but they also rely on different processing strategies when investigated in neurolinguistic experiments.
This is a practice talk for one of the three lectures to be given in Tokyo and Kyoto, Spring School in EvoLinguistics, March 2019.
Speakers: Maša Močnik & Rafael Abramovitz (MIT)
Title: Building Attitudes in Koryak
Time: Wednesday, February 27th, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: In this talk we explore the attitude verb ivyk from Koryak, a highly endangered Chukotko-Kamchatkan language of the Russian Far East. Ivyk looks like a variable-force variable-flavour attitude verb: it can be translated by (at least) say, tell/order, think, allow for the possibility, hope, fear, and wish (though not, for example, imagine). We will focus primarily on the division of labour between the doxastic readings (think, allow for the possibility) and the desiderative readings (hope, fear, wish) and argue, following Bogal-Allbritten (2016), against a lexical ambiguity or an underspecification analysis of the various readings.
Speaker: Kevin Ryan (Harvard University)
Title: Superheavy avoidance in meter
Time: Wednesday (2/27), 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
Superheavies are known to be marked, as demonstrated by processes such as closed syllable shortening. Additionally, metrists have reported that poets disprefer locating superheavies in cadences, that is, in line endings, where the meter is strictest (e.g. Hoenigswald 1989 on Vedic and 1991 on Homeric). I verify this finding using broader and better controlled statistical tests and extend it to certain other languages. I add that superheavy avoidance, though strongest in the cadence, is evident throughout the line. Moreover, it is gradient; for instance, ultraheavies are even more strongly avoided relative to their baseline incidence.
To analyze superheavy avoidance, one could simply index *Superheavy to the relevant constituents (e.g. *Superheavy_cadence) and call it a day, as I have previously. This is unsatisfactory in a few ways. First, as such, it doesn’t capture gradient weight, though it could easily be augmented by stringent or scalar mapping to fix that (cf. Ryan 2011). Second, in general, marked structure is not avoided in cadences. For example, in Vedic, codas, retroflexes, and vowel hiatus are all marked, but none is avoided in cadences. Thus, we shouldn’t open the door to constraints like NoCoda_cadence and Onset_cadence; rather, we should explain why specifically overweight is a problem. Third, not all quantitative traditions exhibit superheavy avoidance, so we should explain its confinement to certain languages/meters. I attempt to address all of these questions through an analysis in terms of phonetic lapse (Stanton 2019).
Congratulations to fourth-year student Suzana Fong, on the publication in Glossa of her article entitled “Proper movement through Spec-CP: An argument from hyperraising in Mongolian”! Glossa is an open-access journal, so you can read the abstract and download the paper at https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.667/.
Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT Linguistics)
Title: Why extraposition is rightward
Time: Thursday, 2/28, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
In this work in progress, I’ll offer an approach to some word order puzzles about extraposition. Fox & Nissenbaum (1999) proposed that extraposition is derived by covert movement to the right, followed by late merge (Lebeaux 1999, a.o.) to that covert rightward position. Even if we accept that string-vacuous movement can in some sense have linear direction, this account does not straightforwardly apply to extraposition from phrases that undergo overt leftward movement. One of my central concerns will be this issue. I’ll argue that we can derive the possibility of extraposition from overtly moved phrases as well as covertly moved ones, without stipulating a linear direction to covert movement, through the interaction of the following concepts. #1: Spellout linearizes entire phases at once, and must not generate ordering contradictions (Fox & Pesetsky 2005, a.o.). #2: Late merge can only apply to the linear edge of a phase (NIssenbaum 2000). #3. Late merge can apply even to embedded phases (Fox 2017). Removing the hypothesis that covert movement is ordered provides insight into why extraposition fails when its source DP is deleted by ellipsis (Takahashi & Ohtaka 2017). This account leads to difficulty in deriving William’s Generalization (=the height of an extraposed phrase determines the scope of its “source”), without a more constrained notion of how extraposition is ordered, which I won’t have time to tackle here.
Speaker: Julien Musolino (Rutgers University)
Title: Studying Language Acquisition during the Preschool years: Do we need a new paradigm?
Time: Friday, 3/1, 2-3pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
The preschool years have been a particularly fruitful developmental period for research on language acquisition for two main reasons. The first is that preschoolers are sophisticated language users and can therefore be tested on a range of complex linguistic phenomena of interest to linguists and psycholinguists. The second is that in spite of their linguistic savvy, preschoolers have often been found to differ systematically from adults in their linguistic behavior. Over the past several decades, these observations have led to the emergence of a dominant framework to study language acquisition during the preschool period, accompanied by a wealth of empirical findings. Its historical significance and usefulness notwithstanding, there are strong signs today that this framework needs to be fundamentally revised. In this presentation, I will introduce the standard framework, showcase some of its main applications, and discuss its limitations and the need for a new paradigm.
NYU hosted the 4th edition of the Tu+ workshop on February 16-17. Two current MIT graduate students presented talks:
Speaker: Stan Zompí
Title: discussion on Daniel Harbour’s 2016 book Impossible Persons
Time: Tuesday 02/19, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
In this week’s meeting of Phonology Circle, we will discuss Zuraw & Hayes’s 2017 paper: “Intersecting constraint families: an argument for Harmonic Grammar”. Erin Olson will lead the discussion. The details follow:
Discussion leader: Erin Olson (MIT)
Paper: Zuraw, K., & Hayes, B. (2017). Intersecting constraint families: an argument for Harmonic Grammar. Language, 93(3), 497-548 (available here).
Time: Wednesday 02/20, 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
In the analysis of free variation in phonology, we often encounter the effects of intersecting constraint families: there are two independent families of constraints, each of which has a quantifiable effect on the outcome. A challenge for theories is to account for the patterns that emerge from such intersection. We address three cases: Tagalog nasal substitution, French liaison/élision, and Hungarian vowel harmony, using corpus data. We analyze the data patterns created by intersecting families using several formal frameworks, and find that an accurate account is best based on Harmonic Grammar (in one of its two primary quantitative implementations). Our work also suggests that that certain lexical distinctions treated as discrete by classical phonological theory (e.g., “h aspiré” vs. ordinary vowel-initial words of French) are in fact gradient and require quantitative treatment.
Speaker: Beste Kamali (Universität Bielefeld)
Time: Thursday 02/21, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Evidential bias found in certain polar questions is not well understood. I delineate a structural account based on parallel propositional alternatives, propositional alternatives to p that do not include not-p, but rather q, r etc. The evidence will come from Turkish, where evidentially biased PQs are differentiated from non-biased ones by the locus of clitic placement, and there are clearly testable intuitions of parallel propositional alternatives whenever the evidentially biased placement is used.
Speaker: Sherry Yong Chen (MIT Linguistics)
Title: The linguistics of one, two, three
Time: Thursday 02/21, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:
The interpretation of number words in context is of interest not only to linguists, but also logicians, psychologists, and computer scientists. In this talk, we will discuss some theoretical and developmental questions related to the linguistics of English numerals.
Bare numerals (e.g. two, three) present an interesting puzzle to semantic and pragmatic theories, as they seem to vary between several different interpretations: ‘at least n’, ‘exactly n’, and sometimes even ‘at most n’. We will examine how the availability of a particular interpretation seems to depend on the interaction between linguistic structure and contextual factors, and discuss three approaches that try to capture the relationship between these interpretations.
Turning to the acquisition of bare numerals, developmental research suggests that preschoolers by the age of 5 are able to access ’non-exactly’ interpretations of a bare numeral in contexts where these interpretations are licensed, just like adult speakers. A natural hypothesis for this is that the knowledge of the full range of interpretations may come through a prior understanding of the meaning of explicit expressions such as ‘at least/at most’ in English. This turns out to be questionable, however, since it is also shown that 5-year-olds haven’t yet acquired the meaning of the expressions at least and at most yet. Time permitting, we will end with a discussion about what all this means for the development of numerical concept and/or language development in general.
Michel DeGraff wrote the foreword to a recently published volume edited by Donaldo Macedo Decolonizing Foreign Language Education: The Misteaching of English and Other Colonial Languages. The foreword is entitled “Against apartheid in education and in linguistics: The case of Haitian Creole in neo-colonial Haiti “
More information about this volume can be found on Amazon and Google Play.
The materials and video recordings of the course “Creole languages and Carribean identities”, taught by Michel DeGraff in spring 2017, have been made available publicly at MIT OpenCourseWare. You can find them here.
Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: Davis (2019) vs. Bošković (2018)
Date and Time: Tuesday, Feb. 12, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
In this presentation I’ll compare a paper of mine about stranding with another by Bošković about movement from moved elements, which has some overlap. A reviewer wants me to find some advantages, but it’s a bit complicated. I have some thoughts, but I hope that the audience will help. This will be an informal presentation with interruption encouraged.
Speaker: Danfeng Wu (MIT)
Title: Syntax of either in either…or… sentences
Date and time: Thursday, 2/14, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Either in either…or… sentences can appear as the sister of a disjunction phrase (1), higher than the sister of a disjunction phrase (2)-(4), or lower (5)-(6), assuming the disjunction phrase is rice or beans in all these examples (based on observations by Larson (1985), Schwarz (1999), Han and Romero (2004), den Dikken (2006), a.o.).
(1) John will eat either rice or beans.
(2) John will either eat rice or beans.
(3) John either will eat rice or beans.
(4) Either John will eat rice or beans.
(5) John will either eat rice or he will eat beans.
(6) John either will eat rice or he will eat beans.
I propose an analysis of either that accounts for its distribution in these three types of sentences. I argue that there are two copies of either in an either … or … sentence. Either originates inside the disjunction phrase, and later moves (overtly or covertly) to be the sister of the disjunction phrase. In the meantime, ellipsis may delete material in the second disjunct that is identical to its counterpart in the first disjunct.
These independent ingredients of the proposal, namely the movement of either and ellipsis, may interact with each other and create complicated empirical results. In particular, I will discuss four empirical generalizations about either that the current proposal account for successfully while alternative proposals fall short.
I speculate, based on similarities between this analysis of either and previous analyses of focus-sensitive operators (e.g. Cable (2007) and Hirsch (2017)), that all focus-sensitive operators have what I call bipartite syntax: there are two instances of the operator in a sentence, one structurally higher than the other. The lower copy is semantically inert, and must c-command the focus from a local position. The higher copy agrees with a probe and/or marks semantic scope.
CompLang will resume this Spring semester. The group will be meeting on Thursdays at 5pm, in MIT room 32-370. There is something new this semester: in addition to the regular invited talks, the group will be hosting discussions on foundational topics in the language sciences. Each of these new meetings is centered around a reading, selected as a springboard for fruitful interdisciplinary discussion and debate. You can find the talk and reading schedule for this semester online on the CompLang website.
This week, the group will read and discuss “Structures, not strings: linguistics as part of the cognitive sciences”. Details follow below.
Paper to read: Structures, not strings: linguistics as part of the cognitive sciences by Everaert et al. (2015)
Presenter: Peng Qian (MIT BCS)
Date and time: Thursday, 2/14, 5-6pm
Location: 32-370
Details: This
review paper views human language as a computational system in the
mind, primarily
for the expression of thoughts. With several examples from semantics,
syntax, morphology, and phonology, this paper illustrates the central
role of hierarchical structures, not linear properties of strings, in
formulating an explanatory and theoretical characterization
of linguistic knowledge.
We would like to invite you to join us in thinking and discussing the
insights and critical aspects of the arguments outlined in this review
paper, and how different perspectives, alternative approaches, and
interdisciplinary methodologies could enrich our
inquiry and understanding of human language.
The East Coast Syntax Workshop (ECO5) took place at the University of Maryland this year on Saturday (February 9th). Suzana Fong (4th year) was there to represent MIT ; she gave a a talk entitled “CONCORD vs. INDEX number in Wolof bare nominals ”. She reports: “Not only did I get useful feedback on research in progress, I was also happy to see again fellow linguists from past editions of the workshop and meet UMD students and faculty.”
Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Spring 2019! After our winter hiatus, Whamit! is back to regular weekly editions during the semester.
Whamit! is the MIT Linguistics newsletter, published every Monday (Tuesday if Monday is a holiday). The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, David Pesetsky, Keny Chatain, Tracy Kelley, Elise Newman, HyunJi Yoo.
To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.
Best wishes for the new year!
Visiting Scholar
Chen Zhao (Huazhong University of Science and Technology)
I’m currently teaching French and introductory courses of linguistics to undergraduates majored in French at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China). My research is grounded in formal syntax, with a special interest in labeling theory, Linearization, object shift, Syntax of Chinese and typological studies of different languages under the generative framework. My favorite part of the research is to be able to shed new lights on a linguistic phenomenon that has already been thoroughly studied by the scholars. I am currently involved in an investigation of the symmetry in the syntax and different strategies that grammars resort to in order to label the symmetric structures.
Visiting Student
Gregor Williamson (University College London)
I’m from London, UK. I did an undergraduate degree in English Language teaching. I did an MA in theoretical linguistics at UCL, where I am currently doing a PhD. The majority of my research is concerned with the syntax-semantics of the clausal spine (VP, TP, CP). I am particularly interested in various types of clausal embedding (non-finite clauses, adverbial clauses, attitude reports). My interests outside of linguistics include: playing the piano and climbing.
Speaker: Geoffrey Schwarz (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Title: There is no such thing as [voice] - evidence from Polish and Polish-accented English
Date/Time: Wednesday (2/6), 5:00pm-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: available here
Speaker: laksdjl
Title:
Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: joshed
Speaker: ftjftuf
Title: utffut
Time: , 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: ftutut