Whamit!

Speaker: Frank Staniszewski (MIT)
Title: Deriving the properties of until phrases
Date and time: Wednesday, November, 13, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:      

     The well-known paradigm in (1-2) presents a challenge for a semantic analysis of until phrases.

(1)      a. He was angry until the end of the conference
           b. He wasn’t available until the end of the conference.
(2)      a. *The bomb exploded until yesterday.
           b. The bomb didn’t explode until yesterday.
          Condoravdi (2008)

Stative/progressive predicates can appear with until phrases with or without negation, as in (1a-b). Perfective predicates, however, can appear with until phrases only under negation, as shown in (2a-b).
Most analyses of this paradigm fall into two basic camps. One proposes that there is only one until, which selects for “durative” predicates. This means that without negation, it can combine only with stative/progressive predicates, thus explaining the badness of (2a) (Klima (1964), Mittwoch (1977), a.o.). In this system, the acceptability of (2b) is a consequence of the assumption that negation is a predicate modifier that can create a durative predicate.
      The other camp proposes that until is lexically ambiguous between two untils. One is a “durative” until that combines only with statives/progressives, and another is a “punctual” until that combines with perfectives, and is additionally assumed to be an NPI (Horn (1970, 1972, Karttunen (1974), Condoravdi (2008), a.o.). Here, the NPI property of “punctual” until derives the ungrammaticality of (2a).
      In this presentation of work in progress, I explore another possible approach. I propose that there is only one until, with a basic meaning similar to before, that is compatible with both stative/progressive as well as perfective predicates. I then hypothesize that this basic meaning of until is obligatorily strengthened in positive environments to its “durative” interpretation by exhaustification, adopting a mechanism similar to ones that have been proposed for obligatory strengthening of other quantificational elements (Bar-Lev & Margulis (2014), Bowler (2014) a.o.). Given this strengthening, until phrases will be incompatible with perfective predicates in upward-entailing environments, thus deriving the badness of (2a).
      I will discuss some arguments for the various approaches, and then develop an analysis that builds on a presuppositional entry for until (Karttunen (1974), Condoravdi (2008)), which in turn interacts with an exhaust operator as proposed in Bar-Lev & Fox (2017) in an attempt to derive the attested empirical patterns.

Presenter: Iris Berent (Northeastern University) 
Title: Amodal Phonology
Date/Time: Wednesday, November 14, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

This talk evaluates the hypothesis that the phonological grammar is algebraic and amodal. The first part of the talk examines the computational properties of the phonological grammar. Using the restrictions on doubling as a case study, I show that doubling restrictions generalize across the board. Such generalizations are evident in both spoken and signed language phonology, and they require algebraic rules.

In the second part of the talk, I turn to show that the restrictions on doubling are demonstrably dissociable from the phonetic system. I first show that a single linguistic stimulus (e.g. panana) elicits conflicting responses (preference vs. aversion), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). I next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of their spoken language. Together, these findings demonstrate that (i) a single, invariant phonetic form can elicit conflicting linguistic parses; whereas (ii) a linguistic parse can remain invariant when the phonetic substance is radically altered – from speech to signs.

These results suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a single set of linguistic principles that are amodal, algebraic and abstract.

Speaker: Hao Tang (MIT CSAIL)

Title: Automatic speech recognition without linguistic knowledge?

Date and time: Thursday, 11/15, 5-6pm

Location: 46-5165

Abstract:

Building state-of-the-art speech recognizers, besides a large corpus of transcribed speech, require several additional ingredients, such as a phoneme inventory, a lexicon, and a language model.  These ingredients carry linguistic constraints to make training more feasible and more sample efficient. Recently, there has been a push towards building a speech recognizer end to end, i.e., using few or even none of the aforementioned ingredients.  This raises a fundamental question: is it possible to train a speech recognizer without any linguistic constraint?

  How much data do we need to make it possible?  What linguistic constraints are necessary for building a speech recognizer?  In this talk, I will review the inner workings of conventional and end-to-end speech recognizers, and to help answer some of those questions, I will present empirical results in training end-to-end speech recognizers without any linguistic constraints.

Speaker: Sherry Yong  Chen (MIT)

Title: Resolving scope ambiguity under (negative) degree questions

Date and time: Friday, 11/16, 2-3pm

Location: 32-D831

Abstract:

This talk presents work-in-progress that provides evidence for facilitation effects of certain types of Question under Discussion (QUD) on scope ambiguity resolution. Specifically, when an ambiguous sentence involves a negation and a comparative quantifier (CQP), a negative QUD facilitates access to the inverse scope reading, but only when the non-negated question nucleus is expected to hold in a given context. We discuss our results with references to the ignorance inference of comparative numerals, maximal informativeness, question answer congruence.

Maša Močnik and Keny Chatain will be presenting a paper by Cable on a new choice-function-based approach to De Re/De Dicto. The meeting will take place on Monday 5th in the 8th floor seminar room.

Title : A Choice Functional Semantics for De Re Attitudes.

Author(s) : Seth Cable

Abstract :

In this paper, I present a relatively simple syntax and semantics for de re attitude reports, one that builds heavily upon the approaches developed by Percus & Sauerland (2003), Charlow & Sharvit (2014), and Sauerland (2014). The principle innovation of this account is that such readings involve quantification over choice-functions, rather than direct quantification over accessibility relations (Cresswell & von Stechow 1982), concept generators (Percus & Sauerland 2003, Charlow & Sharvit 2014), or counterpart functions (Sauerland 2014). I show that the proposed system accounts for the same range of complex data and judgments as prior approaches, particularly (i) the behavior of bound de re pronouns (Charlow & Sharvit 2014), (ii) interactions between de re readings and non-upward monotone operators (Charlow & Sharvit 2014), (iii) constraints on de re readings of complex DPs (Sauerland 2014), and (iv) the inability for DPs to be construed de re when they contain opaquely interpreted NPs (Charlow & Sharvit 2014). Despite this equivalent empirical coverage, the proposed system offers a relatively simple compositional semantics for de re attitude reports, one where (i) the object-language quantification at play is of a type independently observed in natural language, (ii) attitude verbs do not require a ‘type-flexible’ denotation, (iii) the intensional argument of an attitude verb is simply a proposition (or property of entities), (iv) there is no lexical ambiguity between ‘existential’ and ‘universal’ readings of such verbs. I show that the facts which motivated the complexities found in prior accounts – particularly the interactions between de re readings and quantificational DPs – can follow from independently known properties of choice-functional quantification. [[Author’s Note (9/7/2018): The general approach presented in this paper was independently suggested in earlier, unpublished work by Orin Percus and Simon Charlow: Percus (2013) “Res-Marking in Belief Reports”, Charlow (2014) “Locality in the Syntax and Semantics of Attitude Ascriptions.”]]

Speaker: Ray Jackendoff (Tufts/MIT) and Jenny Audring (Leiden)
Title: The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology in the Parallel Architecture
Date and time: Monday 11/5, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Speaker: Kai von Fintel (MIT)
Title: Conditional desires
Date and time: Wednesday, November 7th, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:      

Sentences with an *if*-clause and a desire predicate have a “restricted” reading that claims that among the worlds described by the *if*-clause, the attitude holder prefers certain worlds. Deriving this reading compositionally reveals hidden properties of conditionals and attitude predicates. There are intriguing connections to puzzles in the analysis of deontic conditionals (*if p, ought q*) and conditional imperatives (*if p, do q!*).

Presenter: Gaja Jarosz (UMass Amherst) & Aleksei Nazarov (University of Toronto) 
Title: Domain-general learning of stress parameters: A typological investigation
Date/Time: Wednesday, November 7, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Existing learners for stress in OT (e.g., Tesar and Smolensky 2000, Boersma and Pater 2013/2016, Jarosz 2013, 2015) are all so-called domain-general learners (need not be specified in UG). However, Pearl (2007, 2011) argues that Principles & Parameters models of stress (e.g., Dresher and Kaye 1990) do necessitate domain-specific learning mechanisms (specified in UG). Nazarov and Jarosz (2017) proposed a domain-general learning with more inference power than Yang’s (2002) learner (which Pearl 2011 showed didn’t work for stress parameters), arguing that domain-general learners may be sufficient for both OT and parametric models.

However, Nazarov and Jarosz (2017) only tested their learner on a small set of stress systems with a subset of Dresher and Kaye’s parameters. To validate these initial results, we have now tested our learner, in addition to 3 versions of Yang’s (2002) learner, on all 280 stress systems that are possible in Dresher and Kaye’s (1990) framework. Similarly to Nazarov and Jarosz (2017), it is found that the proposed learner converges on the correct stress system about 95% of the time, while Yang’s learner does so no more than 10% of the time. To further compare the learners, we have extracted a few statistics on the stress systems themselves that predict their performance under each learner. Finally, we found that the stress systems never learned by Nazarov and Jarosz’s learner are unattested (save for two cases that warrant further investigation), suggesting that the only function of domain-specific learning mechanisms might be to enable the learning of unattested languages.

Itai Bassi will be presenting a paper by Uli Sauerland. This paper uses Lewis counterpart theory to obtain a more constrained and empirically adequate view of the De Re/De Dicto phenomenon. The meeting will take place on Monday 29th in the 8th floor seminar room.

Title :
Counterparts block some “De Re” readings

Author(s) : Uli Sauerland

Abstract :

Speaker: Carolyn Spadine (MIT) & Gunnar Lund (Harvard)
Title: Complementizers in matrix contexts: Reporting attitudes without attitude verbs
Date and time: Wednesday, October 31st, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Using evidence from attitude-report constructions lacking attitude verbs, we argue against the received view of attitude-reports, which locates the central component of attitude-reports, quantification over sets of accessible worlds, in the attitude verb. Instead, we follow recent proposals (Kratzer 2006, a.o.) placing intensional quantification in the complementizer, while providing an analysis for a class of under-researched attitude reports involving matrix complementizers.

Presenter: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (MIT)
Title: A Maximum Entropy Model of Phonotactics and Phonotactic Learning (Hayes & Wilson 2008)
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 31, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

“The study of phonotactics is a central topic in phonology. We propose a theory of phonotactic grammars and a learning algorithm that constructs such grammars from positive evidence. Our grammars consist of constraints that are assigned numerical weights according to the principle of maximum entropy. The grammars assess possible words on the basis of the weighted sum of their constraint violations. The learning algorithm yields grammars that can capture both categorical and gradient phonotactic patterns. The algorithm is not provided with constraints in advance, but uses its own resources to form constraints and weight them. A baseline model, in which Universal Grammar is reduced to a feature set and an SPE-style constraint format, suffices to learn many phonotactic phenomena. In order for the model to learn non-local phenomena such as stress and vowel harmony, it must be augmented with autosegmental tiers and metrical grids. Our results thus offer novel, learning-theoretic support for such representations. We apply the model in a variety of learning simulations, showing that the learned grammars capture the distributional generalizations of these languages and accurately predict the findings of a phonotactic experiment.”

We are happy to announce an extended visit with Lisa Matthewson, joint between MIT and Harvard. Lisa will teach a mini-course at Harvard this Thursday 11/1, details below.

Speaker: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)
Title: Finding semantic building blocks: Tense, aspect and evidentials 
Time: Thursday, November 1, 12-1:30pm
Location: 2, Arrow Street - Room 420
Description:

This week’s Comp-Lang meeting features our very own Keny Chatain! everyone is welcome to join. Pizza will be served.

Speaker: Keny Chatain (MIT)
Title: Is logic useful in the study of meaning? Pronouns can tell
Date and time: Thursday, 11/1, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Pronouns, like he, she, or it, are among the items with highest frequency in English and other languages that use overt pronouns. Within the same language, they have a variety of uses that do not form an obvious natural class. They can for instance be used to refer to a previously mentioned name (the anaphoric use), but also as variables in quantified statements (the bound use, e.g. ‘every athlete thinks he will win’). More intriguingly, it seems, in broad strokes, that no language distinguishes these uses by employing different forms, suggesting an underlying connection between them.

In this talk, I will show how this connection has been used to shed light on the system that underlies meaning. I will start off by showing that standard predicate logic provides a remarkably adequate understanding of the behavior of pronouns. I will then present the famous case of so-called donkey sentences that translations to predicate logic seem unable to capture. These cases are taken to argue in favor of new take on the meaning of sentences, called Dynamic Semantics ; the meaning of sentences, it is claimed, is more appropriately understood as the effect that sentences have on the context. I will show how this approach can capture donkey sentences, and other pronoun-related phenomena. Time allowing, I will discuss alternatives.

Speaker: Lisa Matthewson (UBC)
Title: Micro-variation in discourse particles: From St’át’imcets to German (joint work with Henry Davis)
Time: Friday, November 2nd, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract:

Discourse particles convey information about the discourse status of propositions and the belief states of interlocutors. They are cross-linguistically understudied, and there is little understanding of what makes a possible vs. impossible particle meaning.

Investigating micro-variation offers a route towards eventually answering the big-picture questions. In this talk we examine the St’át’imcets (Salish) ‘frustrative’ particle, and compare it to similar elements in Tohono O’odham, Kimaragang and German. We argue that the particles micro-vary in properties including whether the prejacent is entailed, (lack of) reference to the common ground, (lack of) reference to a salient proposition, and (a)symmetry of contrast entailments. 

Michel DeGraff, along with Enoch Aboh, Viviane Déprez, Salikoko Mufwene and Anne Zribi-Hertz, were plenary speakers at a conference in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, October 18–19, 2018, celebrating the 40-year anniversary of the Applied Linguistics Faculty of the State University of Haiti.  The conference was also in honor of the memory of two giants of linguistics in Haiti: Prof. Yves Dejean and Prof. Pierre Vernet.  Michel’s slides for his plenary lecture are available on his Facebook page at:
https://www.facebook.com/michel.degraff/posts/10156836065143872

The conference agenda, with abstracts, is at: http://langse.ueh.edu.ht/resumes-du-colloque/ 

MIT was the very proud host of the 14th Workshop of Altaic Formal Linguistics, which took place from Friday October 19th to Sunday 21st. This year’s edition celebrated the career of Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa, co-founder of WAFL (with Jaklin Kornflit). In his honour, a workshop was held on the day before the conference, featuring talks by friends, estimated colleagues, and former students.

MIT presenters at WAFL:

• Dmitry Privoznov (4th year), Causality of passives and paradigmatic gaps
• Colin Davis (4th year), Crossing and Stranding at vP in Altaic and beyond
• Tatiana Bondarenko (2nd year), Combining CPs by Restrict: evidence from Buryat
• Ömer Demirok (5th year) & Despina Oikonomou (alumna), Difficult Imperatives in Turkish

One of our recent alumni, İsa Kerem Bayırlı, was an invited speaker. He gave a talk on Concord in Altaic languages. Suyeon Yun, another alumna, was presenting.

Prof. Miyagawa’s speech at the dinner organized in his honour

Tanya Bondarenko presenting her poster

Musicians at the WAFL dinner: (left to right) Mongolian singer, Japanese shamisen player, traditional Turkish music band

Vincent Rouillard will be continuing the De Re/De Dicto saga on the linguistic side with the influential Percus and Sauerland (2003). The meeting will take place on Monday 22nd in the 8th floor seminar room, i.e. the usual time & place.

Title : On the LFs of attitude reports

Author(s) : Orin Percus and Uli Sauerland

Abstract :

Speaker: Christos Christopoulos (UConn/Harvard)
Title: Outward-sensitive allomorphy
Date and time: Monday 10/22, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Speaker: Shumian Ye (Peking University/MIT)
Title: Question bias, monopolarity, and presupposition
Date and time: Wednesday, October 24th, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

Mandarin Chinese features diverse types of polar questions (A-not-A questions, ma-questions, ba-questions, intonation questions, etc.), and some polarity words (e.g. dui, meicuo, shide) exclusively used to answer biased questions. By using these polarity answers as a test for question bias, I will make the generalization that the monopolarity of IP domain is necessary for biased polar questions, whereas the bipolarity of IP domain is sufficient for neutral polar questions. Biased A-not-A questions, such as shi-bu-shi questions shown by (1), are argued to be C-neg-C questions in line with our generalization. (cf. Schaffar & Chen 2001)

(1)        Q: Ni    shi-bu-shi            xihuan   yuyongxue?                    A: dui./meicuo./shide.
                you   SHI-not-SHI        like        pragmatics                            right
                ‘You like pragmatics, right?’                                                  ‘Yes, you are right.’

I will derive the epistemic bias of shi-bu-shi questions by adopting Krifka’s (2017) analysis of outer/high negative polar questions in English. I propose that shi is an affirmative operator presupposing that the addressee believes the prejacent proposition is true, and bu is interpreted as a denial operator (~) instead of a negator (¬). That is, shi-bu-shi questions present two equal answer options – affirming φ and denying φ – both answers presuppose the addressee’s (i.e. the questioner’s) belief that φ is true.

Beyond shi-bu-shi questions, I will also discuss biased ma-questions like (2), to see whether we can derive the bias in such case by conveniently analyzing the question particle ma as a denial operator.

(2)        Q: Ni    zhi          xihuan   yuyongxue         ma?                  A: dui./meicuo./shide.
                you    ONLY    like        pragmatics         Q                            right
               ‘You only like pragmatics, right?’                                         ‘Yes, you are right.’

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: The Phonology and Phonetics of Chukchi Vowel Harmony
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 24, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Chukchi has a dominant-recessive vowel harmony system that divides its full vowels into two disjoint sets: dominant {a,o} vs. recessive {i,u,e}. The presence of a dominant vowel anywhere in the word (stem, prefix, suffix) causes the recessive vowels to shift: i>e, u>o, e>a. The schwa vowel is compatible with both harmony sets.  The {a,o} vs {i,u,e} distinction does not constitute a natural division given the customary [high], [low] and [back] features. Based on typological and fragmentary internal evidence, Kenstowicz (1979) proposed [ATR] as the feature distinguishing the two groups: {a,o} [-ATR] vs. {i,u,e} [+ATR]. In this presentation (based on collaboration with Tokusu Kurebito), a phonetic analysis of a corpus of 40 words elicited from five Chukchi speakers is presented in an effort to determine if there is evidence supporting the ATR analysis. Our tentative conclusion is largely negative raising anew the question of basis for the Chukchi harmony and the analytic challenges it presents.

Harrison Smith-Jaoudi will be presenting a paper by Kaplan reacting to the paper by Quine studied at LPRG two weeks ago. The meeting will take place on Monday 10/15 at 1pm in the 8th floor seminar room, i.e. the usual time & place.

Title : Opacity

Author(s) : Kaplan

Speaker: Stan Zompi (MIT)
Title: Stan presents Collins 2018 and De Clercq & Vanden Wyngaerd 2017
Date and time: Monday 10/15, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

“The discussion will revolve around two recent attempts to rethink contextual allomorphy. Collins (2018) outlines an approach to allomorphy that eschews reference to competition or blocking, and attempts to model allomorph distribution simply in terms of classic c-selection. De Clercq & Vanden Wyngaerd (2017), on the other hand, suggest that contextual allomorphy may just not exist: what are normally thought to be alternative allomorphs of one and the same morpheme actually are always portmanteau realizations of slightly different chunks of structure. We will compare both of these novel approaches to the standard treatment of contextual allomorphy in DM.”

Speaker: Tatiana Bondarenko (MIT)
Title: Argument structure of thinking: a view from Buryat
Date and time: Wednesday, October 17, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

Speaker: Lena Borise (Harvard University)
Title: Word stress and phrasal intonation in Georgian
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 17, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Speaker: Reuben Harry Cohn-Gordon (Stanford University)
Title: Bayesian Pragmatic Models for Natural Language
Date and time: Thursday, 10/18, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract: The Rational Speech Acts model (RSA) formalizes Gricean reasoning through nested models of speakers and listeners. While this paradigm offers an elegant way to simulate pragmatic behavior in NLP tasks such as image captioning and translation, scaling from simple models to natural language presents several challenges. In particular, I discuss the problem of choosing alternative utterances among an unbounded set of sentences, including work on image captioning and on-going work on translation.

This year, NELS took place at Cornell University, from October 5th to 7th. MIT was well represented with talks and posters by currents students and faculty:

• Danfeng Wu (3rd year), A copy-based approach to either in either … or … sentences
• Frank Staniszewski (3rd year), Wanting, acquiescing and neg-raising
• Carolyn Spadine (5th year), Control in illocutionary adjuncts as a diagnostic for discourse arguments
• Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Vincent Rouillard (2nd year), Number inflection, Spanish bare interrogatives and higher-order quantification
• Norvin Richards (faculty), Detecting contiguity-prominence
• Maša Močnik (4th year), Existential belief and embedded epistemic modals
• Suzana Fong (4th year), Spec-CP as an A-position: an argument from Mongolian
• Naomi Francis (5th year), Imperatives under even
• Ömer Demirok (5th year), Deniz Ozyildiz and Balkiz Ozturk, Complementizers in Laz are attitude-sensitive
• Colin Davis (4th year), Possessor extraction in English
• Keny Chatain (3rd year), Wide-scope distributivity
• Tanya Bondarenko (2nd year) and Colin Davis (4th year), Parasitic gaps diagnose concealed pied-piping in Russian
• Itai Bassi (4th year), Fake Indexicals are not so fake: on the grammar of variable binding
• Rafael Abramovitz (4th year), Successive-cyclic wh-movement feeds dependent case competition

Recent and less recent alums were also presenting papers and posters: Michelle Yuan (UChicago), Ezer Rasin (Leipzig University), Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware), Julie Legate (UPenn), Karlos Arregi (UChicago), Hadas Kotek (Yale).

_{MIT participants couldn’t be taken a proper picture of (credit: Rajesh Bhatt)}

An article in Nature on opening up access to STEM education world wide, especially for economic development in the Global South, mentions the MIT-Haiti Initiative led by MIT Linguistics professor Michel DeGraff, along with fellow MIT colleagues Vijay Kumar (MIT Open Learning) and Haynes Miller (MIT Mathematics). Read the article here.

The 6th installment of the Annual Meeting on Phonology, AMP 2018, took place at UCSD from October 5th to 7th. Presentations by current MIT students and faculty included:

• Erin Olson (5th year): Pitch and vowel duration make schwa invisible to Passamaquoddy stress
• Adam Albright (faculty): English vowel reduction is conditioned by duration, not stress
• Edward Flemming (faculty): Systemic markedness in sibilant inventories

Several recent alums also presented: Gillian Gallagher (NYU), Sam Zukoff (Princeton University), and Feng-fan Hsieh (Chang National Tsing Hua University).

Congratulations to fourth-year student Colin Davis, whose abstract for the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting “English Possessor Extraction” was the second-place winner of the LSA’s award for “best abstract submitted by a student” for the conference! Read here: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/…/2019-student-abstract-w…

I have proposed that human languages reconstruct back to an intransitive absolutive-like grammar, which provides the foundation and common denominator for crosslinguistic variation in the expression of transitivity (e.g. Progovac 2015, 2016). The proposal is based both on an internal reconstruction using syntactic theory (in particular, Chomsky’s 1995 Minimalism), and on comparative typological considerations, in an attempt to directly bring together formal, typological, and evolutionary considerations.

The internal reconstruction is achieved by peeling off, from the top, the syntactic layers postulated to form the basic skeleton of the modern sentence/clause (CP>TP > vP > VP/SC), leading to reconstructing the initial, ancestral grammar as intransitive, featuring only the VP/SC layer with one single argument. Approximations of such one-argument grammars are arguably found in the absolutive and middle constructions across a variety of languages, as well as in certain verb-noun compounds, both of which will be illustrated and discussed. Rather than staying with general, vague claims, I will use specific data and detail in an attempt to make this proposal testable, and will report the results of an fMRI experiment designed to test some predictions of this proposal (Progovac et al. 2018: doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00278).

I will furthermore introduce The Five Problems/Challenges routinely encountered in language evolution research (Progovac, In Press), and will use the proposal above as a test case to demonstrate how these challenges can begin to be addressed.

1. Identification of the initial stage(s) of language (The Decomposition Problem)
2. The genetic basis for language, i.e. how genetic basis for language came to be (The Selection Problem)
3. The language-brain-genes linkage (The Loop Problem)
4. Compatibility with the parameters of language variation and change (The Variation Problem)
5. Grounding in linguistic theory and analysis (The Theoretical Grounding Problem)

Speakers: Yadav Gowda and Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: Polarity Sensitivity of Even in Early Child Grammar
Date and Time: Friday, 10/12 2-3pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: 

This study explores non-adult-like behavior in children’s comprehension of the scalar focus particle even, which triggers a polarity-sensitive likelihood inference (“least-likely presupposition” in positive sentences, “most-likely presupposition” in negative sentences; Karttunen&Peters’79):

We probe children’s comprehension of even with a forced choice task. Children are shown stories about 3 characters of different sizes (not identified by name) attempting to do some task, which scales in difficulty by their size. The story ends when all the characters either succeed or fail, and the experimenter says, “Even X was(n’t) able to [do the task]!”. Participants are then asked to identify X and provide a justification for their answer. 

We observe a polarity effect: children exhibit more adult-like interpretations in negative environments than in positive environments. This asymmetry interacts with age: younger children (3-4ya) exhibit a more pronounced asymmetry than older children (5-6ya), struggling more to understand even in positive contexts, and often choosing the middle character (i.e. neither least- nor most-likely). Additionally, their justifications show that they use scalar reasoning when choosing extrema characters but not when choosing middle characters.

Child performance on this task and their justifications for their answers suggest two things: 1) they treat even as an NPI at some stage of development (Rooth 1985, Tieu 2010), and 2) they use scalar reasoning to evaluate even before they have learned the adult interpretation. This suggests an expansion of the hypothesis space for scalar focus particles.

GALANA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America) was hosted at Indiana University in Bloomington this past weekend. MIT 3rd year students Yadav Gowda and Elise Newman presented their joint work with Leo Rosenstein and Martin Hackl on the acquisition of scalar focus particles; Polarity Sensitivity to Even in Early Child Grammar.

Harrison Smith-Jaoudi will kick off LPRG’s de re/de dicto/de se series with the pioneering Quine (1956) on “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes”. The meeting will take place on Monday October 1st in the 8th floor seminar room, i.e. the usual time & place.

Title : Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes

Author :  Willard Van Orman Quine

Speaker: Vincent Rouillard (MIT)
Title: Vincent presents Zukoff 2016 
Date and time: Monday 10/1, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

We’re glad to announce our next MorPhun meeting, which will take place on Monday 10/01 at 5pm. Vincent Rouillard will lead our discussion about Sam Zukoff’s (2016) paper The Mirror Alignment Principle: Morpheme ordering at the morphosyntax–phonology interface (link here: http://web.mit.edu/szukoff/www/pdfs/MITWPL.pdf ).
Sam’s paper (which originated in one of his GPs) a new proposal regarding the nature of morpheme ordering, based on the operation of the Mirror Alignment Principle (MAP) at the morphology phonology interface. The MAP is an algorithm that translates hierarchical structural relations (asymmetric c-command) between morphosyntactic terminals into ranking domination relations between ALIGNMENT constraints on the exponents of those morphosyntactic terminals in the phonological component of the grammar (namely in CON). This algorithm provides a principled means of capturing so-called Mirror Principle effects (Baker 1985, 1988), whereby the order of morphemes in a complex word mirrors the order of syntactic derivation and hierarchical morphosyntactic structure.

Speaker: Todor Koev (Universität Konstanz/MIT)
Title: Strong Beliefs, Weak Commitments
Date and time: Wednesday, October 1st, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

This week we will have two meeting of Phonology Circle: Monday (10/1) and Wednesday (10/3). The meeting on Wednesday in the usual time slot (5pm-6:30pm) and location (8^th floor seminar room). The meeting on Monday will be held at 12:30pm-2pm in the 4^th floor seminar room. Details are below.

Monday meeting - two poster presentations:
Poster 1: Edward Flemming. Title: Systemic markedness in sibilant inventories (click here for abstract)
Poster 2: Adam Albright. Title: English vowel reduction is conditioned by duration, not stress (click here for abstract)
Date/Time: Monday, October 1, 12:30-2pm
Location: 32-D461 (4th floor seminar room)

Wednesday meeting - discussion of a paper:
Leader of discussion: Filipe Hisao de Salles Kobayashi (MIT)
Title: Hayes and Wilson’s (2008) A Maximum Entropy Model of Phonotactics and Phonotactic Learning
Date/Time: Wednesday, October 3, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

The study of phonotactics is a central topic in phonology. We propose a theory of phonotactic grammars and a learning algorithm that constructs such grammars from positive evidence. Our grammars consist of constraints that are assigned numerical weights according to the principle of maximum entropy. The grammars assess possible words on the basis of the weighted sum of their constraint violations. The learning algorithm yields grammars that can capture both categorical and gradient phonotactic patterns. The algorithm is not provided with constraints in advance, but uses its own resources to form constraints and weight them. A baseline model, in which Universal Grammar is reduced to a feature set and an SPE-style constraint format, suffices to learn many phonotactic phenomena. In order for the model to learn nonlocal phenomena such as stress and vowel harmony, it must be augmented with autosegmental tiers and metrical grids. Our results thus offer novel, learning-theoretic support for such representations. We apply the model in a variety of learning simulations, showing that the learned grammars capture the distributional generalizations of these languages and accurately predict the findings of a phonotactic experiment.

CompLang is kicking off the semester this Thursday. CompLang is an interdisciplinary language discussion group organized by the Brain and Cognitive Center (BCS) at MIT and composed of linguists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists. It is an informal group intended to foster communication among a broad and diverse group of people interested in language. Currently we are still looking for presenters for this semester. While presentation of research is certainly welcome, even introductory materials for people with little background in linguistics would be fine - people outside of linguistics are curious what kinds of questions we are thinking about! The presentation does not have to be related to computation either. If you are interested in getting feedback from a diverse audience and want to practice communicating linguistic concepts in simple and accessible terms, please get in touch with Danfeng! And click here if you want to be added to the comp-lang mailing list.

Speaker: Meilin Zhan (MIT BCS)
Title:  Comparing theories of speaker choice using classifier production in Mandarin Chinese  
Date and time: Thursday, October 4, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165 (BCS)
Abstract: 

Speakers often have more than one way to express the same meaning. What general principles govern speaker choice in the face of optionality when near semantically invariant alternation exists? Studies have shown that optional reduction in language is sensitive to contextual predictability, where the more predictable a linguistic unit is, the more likely it gets reduced. Yet it is unclear whether speaker choice is geared toward audience design, or toward facilitating production. Here we argue that for a different optionality phenomenon, namely classifier choice in Mandarin Chinese, Uniform Information Density and at least one plausible variant of availability-based production make opposite predictions regarding the relationship between the predictability of the upcoming material and speaker choices. In a corpus analysis of Mandarin Chinese, we show that the distribution of speaker choices supports the availability-based production account, and not Uniform Information Density. 

Our congratulations to Snejana Iovtcheva, who defended her dissertation last Wednesday, entitled The Datives in Bulgarian! Here’s Snejana’s one-sentence description of her dissertation work: “I offer a detailed syntactic study of the constructions that involve a dative clitic in Bulgarian and I propose that these constructions represent one uniform structural frame that involves a high peripheral applicative head.”

Nathaniel Schwartz will be presenting a very recent paper by Rothschild and Spectre (2016) on knowing conditionals. The meeting will take place on Monday 24th  in the 8th floor seminar room, i.e. the usual time & place.

Title : A Puzzle about Knowing Conditionals

Authors : Daniel Rothschild and Levi Spectre

Abstract :

We present a puzzle about knowledge, probability and conditionals. We show that in certain cases some basic and plausible principles governing our reasoning come into conflict. In particular, we show that there is a simple argument that a person may be in a position to know a conditional the consequent of which has a low probability conditional on its antecedent, contra Adams’ thesis. We suggest that the puzzle motivates a very strong restriction on the inference of a conditional from a disjunction.

Speaker: Boer Fu (MIT)
Title: Sagart & Baxter’s book on Old Chinese
Date and time: Monday 9/24, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Speaker: Erin Olson (MIT)
Title: Pitch and vowel duration make schwa invisible to Passamaquoddy stress
Date/Time: Wednesday, September 26, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

This is a practice presentation for a poster to be presented at AMP.

Speaker: Pavel Caha (Masaryk University)
Title: Phrasal spellout, multiple exponence and bracketing paradoxes
Date and time: Friday 9/28, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-155 
Abstract:

The LPRG (Linguistics and Philosophy Reading Group) will hold its first meeting for the fall 2018/spring 2019 terms on September 24 from 1-2pm in the 8th floor seminar room. Everyone interested in either linguistics and philosophy is invited to attend. This year sees the introduction of a new format: unlike previous year, this year’s readings are themed ; this semester in particular will focus on the De Re, De Se, De Dicto distinction. To see a tentative reading list, please consult the LPRG website. If you wish to be informed of the upcoming LPRG events through the LPRG mailing list, get in touch with one of the organizers: Keny Chatain, Maša Močnik, Vincent Rouillard, Nathaniel Schwartz, Harrison Smith-Jaoudi.

Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: The morphophonology of case in Buryat 
Date and time: Monday 9/17, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Speaker: Christopher Baron (MIT)
Title: Measure of Change
Date and time: Wednesday, September 19, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

In this presentation, I’ll discuss Kennedy & Levin’s (2007) paper, “Measure of Change.” The paper discusses so-called Degree Achievements (DAs) like (to) cool,widen, and darken, which describe some kind of change an object undergoes, and which seem to have variable telicity. Kennedy & Levin present and motivate a scalar semantics for DAs, wherein the underlying meaning is a special kind of measure function, systematically related to the measure functions that the adjectival roots of DAs denote, called `measures of change.’ The variable telicity is accounted for on the basis of the structure of the scales that the underlying adjectives make reference to. I’ll discuss some objections and issues for Kennedy & Levin’s analysis as well, in particular some that Piñón (2007) and Križ (2011) raise.

Speaker: Chris Yang (MIT)
Title: Presenting Serial Markedness Reduction (Jarosz 2014)
Date/Time: Wednesday, September 19, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

A growing body of research provides evidence supporting Harmonic Serialism (HS; McCarthy 2000, 2008a, 2010; Elfner to appear; Pruitt 2010), a serial version of Optimality Theory in which a single ranking of constraints is used iteratively to construct a derivation. This work has led to new insights into several outstanding problems in phonology and has highlighted problematic over-predictions of parallel OT, showing that HS predicts a more restricted range of interactions that better reflects typology. Although HS makes it possible to capture certain generalizations stated at intermediate levels of representation, it does not provide a general solution to phonological opacity. For this reason McCarthy developed a significant elaboration of HS, OT with Candidate Chains (OT-CC; McCarthy 2007), which evaluates complete HS-like derivations in parallel. This paper proposes a novel extension of HS, Serial Markedness Reduction (SMR), which combines advantages of HS and OT-CC. Like OT-CC, SMR includes a family of constraints that enables the modeling of both counterfeeding and counterbleeding opacity. However, SMR significantly streamlines the machinery necessary to model opacity as compared to OT-CC, relying on the gradual optimization inherent to HS to construct a single optimal derivation. The formal and empirical differences between OT-CC and SMR are discussed.

We encourage those attending to read the paper (linked in the title), but by no means is it required!

The Fieldwork Reading Group (FWRG) is being revived this semester! This is a chance for all who are interested in gathering linguistic data via fieldwork to discuss/present/share their work, raw data, elicitation techniques etc.; it also features invited talks by MIT colloquium speakers who do fieldwork.  It will be held on Thursdays 5-6pm in 32-D831. If you want to reserve a date to talk about various aspects of your experience in the field, or present fieldwork data, please get in touch with one of the organizers: Tanya Bondarenko (tbond@mit.edu), Colin Davis (colind@mit.edu), Cora Lesure (lesure@mit.edu), and Mitya Privoznov (dpriv@mit.edu).

Our happiest congratulations to this summer’s impressive group of doctoral dissertators! The department celebrated the excellent defenses with champagne and some doctoral level baking, including cat-themed cake decorations and vegan Oreo-cheesecake.

• Athulya Aravind - Presuppositions in Context
• Kenyon Branan - Relationship Preservation
• Tingchun (TC) Chen - Multiple Case Assignment: An Amis Case Study
• Michelle Fullwood - Biases in Segmenting Non-concatenative Morphology
• Ishani Guha - Distributivity across domains: A study of the distributive numerals in Bangla
• Sophie Moracchini - Morphosemantics of degree constructions and the grammar of evaluativity
• Takashi Morita - Unsupervised Learning of Lexical Subclasses from Phonotactics
• Ezer Rasin - Modular interactions in phonology
• Milena Sisovics - Embedded Jussives as Instances of Control: The Case of Mongolian and Korean
• Michelle Yuan - Dimensions of Ergativity in Inuit: Theory and Microvariation

Speaker: Filipe Kobayashi (MIT)
Title: Stump 1993 “On rules of referral”
Date and time: Monday 9/10, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

In this presentation, I will lead the discussion on Stump’s 1993 classic paper “On Rules of Referral.” As the title indicates, the paper is concerned with rules of referral, a type of rule proposed by Zwicky (1985) to account for certain types of syncretism within the general framework of Word and Paradigm morphology. Stump investigates the properties of such rules and proposes a formal theory of them within the context of his Paradigm Function Morphology. In the discussion, I will mainly focus on the former part of the paper.

Welcome to the first edition of Whamit! for Fall 2018! After our summer 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, Itai Bassi, Elise Newman, Keny Chatain and Frank Staniszewski.

To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6pm.

Welcome to the students who are joining our graduate program!

Agnes Bi

Ruyue Bi, who also goes by Agnes, grew up in a small city along the Yangtze River in Mainland China. I received my B.A. in Linguistics and Math from UC Berkeley. My main areas of interest, in general, are syntax, semantics and their interface. My current research focuses on pronoun ellipsis in Mandarin, which hopefully provides a little insight into the broader, cross-linguistic picture. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy traveling and trying new food.

Enrico Flor

I was born and grew up in a tiny alpine village in northern Italy, but I received all my higher education in Austria (I got my MA in General Linguistics in Vienna). Semantics (with a focus on focus, quantification and plurals) has been my primary interest during my studies and work in Vienna. Coming to MIT, I obviously look forward to widening and deepening my knowledge of the field. Outside of Linguistics, I am interested in philosophy (of language and meta-ethics in particular), history, literature and politics - I never get tired of debating! Listening to and singing old music is my main hobby, but when I can I like to spend time in theater. Good typography and Free Software are things of beauty for me.

Peter Grishin

I was born and grew up in Dallas and got my BA in linguistics at the University of Cambridge. My main interests lie in syntax, especially in cases of unexpected agreement and/or movement (or lack thereof), and I have worked a bit on agreement with argument CPs in Zulu and VP fronting in English. I also like to dabble in phonetics, and am especially interested in the question of “how much” phonetics we should encode in the phonology, as well as interactions between prosody and syntax. Outside of linguistics, I’m an avid violinist, cat lover, board gamer, tabletop RPGer, and YouTube cooking video watcher and aspiring home cook.

Tracy Kelley

Wunee Keesuq! I was born and raised in the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe located in Mashpee, Massachusetts. I’m a very proud mother of one son. I received my BA in English and Journalism from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, where I was also engaged in student life, youth mentoring, and civil rights advocacy. I am passionate about revitalizing my native language, in which I have been growing with since the language project’s inception in 1993, as an apprentice, instructor, illustrator, and author. Some of my personal interests include gaming with my son, teaching language, cooking, swimming, and listening to NPR—oh and coffee!

Anton Kukhto

I’m a Muscovite; I received a BA and an MA in linguistics at Moscow State University. My main interest lies in phonetics and phonology, particularly lexical stress in Irish, Russian, and beyond. I’ve also done some fieldwork on Mordvin, Mari, and Khanty. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy reading, watching films, going to art galleries, taking pictures, singing, learning to play the harp, drinking tea, skiing, and obviously being a bore. But above all, I want to thank all of you who have been ever so ready to lend me a helping hand over the past year (and before). Even eleventy-one years would be far too short a time to spend among you.

Patrick Niedzielski

I grew up in Massachusetts, and did my undergrad at Cornell University, where I majored in Linguistics and Computer Science. After graduating, I took some time away from academia to work in software development.  My research interests are mainly in historical linguistics and the syntax-morphology interface, especially focusing on analyzing data from ancient, highly-synthetic languages that have not received much treatment within the generative tradition—-my undergrad thesis was on clausal structure and polysynthesis in Sumerian, one such language.  I’ve also done work in computer science at the intersection of systems programming and programming language theory.  Otherwise, I spend too much time listening to comedy podcasts, and not enough time playing jazz harmonica.  I also like good espresso, Jethro Tull, and conlanging.

Roger Paul

Katie Van Luven

I’m from Kingston, Ontario in Canada. I received a B.A. in Linguistics and an M.Cog.Sc., both from Carleton University in Ottawa. I am primarily interested in syntax, semantics and their interfaces. In my master’s thesis I looked at various issues surrounding the focal properties of pseudocleft constructions. I’ve also worked on the argumenthood/event structure of directional PPs, as well as locality and low-level effects in phonetics/phonology. Outside of linguistics, I like reading, hiking, re-watching old X Files episodes and getting tattooed.

Hyun Ji Yoo

I was born in Korea, not far from Seoul, and moved to Los Angeles when I was nine. I never really got out of the city since then, and received my B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology and M.A. in Linguistics at UCLA. I am currently working on finding predictability of medial tones in Seoul Korean Accentual phrases, but also am interested in paradigm effects, loanword phonology, and Harmonic Grammar. In my free time, I like to eat good food, watch Korean TV shows and play board games—all the better with coffee and/or ice cream.

This semester also witnesses the arrival of a contingent of warmly welcomed visitors.

Visiting Professor

Luka Crnic (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) : I work on semantics and syntax. Some of the topics that I have pursued recently are exceptives and approximatives, degree constructions, and exhaustification.

Visiting Scholars

Sascha Alexeyenko (University of Göttingen) : My work lies at the interface of syntax and semantics of natural languages, and I am also interested in linguistic typology. Somewhat more specifically, the domains I have worked on include event semantics, categorial status of adjectives and adverbs, constraints on linearization, semantics of gradability, genericity, morphosyntax and semantics of nominalizations. My current semantic work concerns quantification in event semantics, looked at from the perspective of habituality. And at the syntactic front, I am currently involved in a cross-linguistic investigation of the Head Final Filter, a constraint on linearization which prohibits intervening material between prenominal modifiers and the nouns they modify.

James Fidelholtz (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)

Juan Gao (Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics)

Todor Koev (Universität Konstanz) : My research program is grounded in formal semantics and pragmatics, and is informed by my interests in experimental linguistics, dynamic semantics, formal syntax, and Slavic and Germanic linguistics. Broadly speaking, I am interested in how grammar and discourse structure parameters constrain linguistic meaning and I have worked on topics such as parentheticality, evidentiality, modality, indefiniteness, at-issueness, projection, and adverbial modification. The methodologies I use to gain insights into these topics include traditional and experimental techniques of data collection as well as formal tools from logic and probabilistic reasoning. My far-reaching goal is to establish a reliable and predictive theory of the various factors (operator scope, projectivity, evidence source, information status, etc.) that anchor semantic content, thus refining our understanding of how seemingly independent meaning dimensions are integrated into a coherent whole. 

Ljiljana Progovac (Wayne State University)

Sergei Tatevosov (Moscow State University)

Visiting Students

Zohra Fatima (National University of Modern Languages) : My research interests include synatx-semantics interface and experimental approaches to Syntax and Semantics. I am a graduate student from National University of Modern Languages (NUML) Pakistan. I am currently working on the Semantics of temporal reference in Urdu Syntax. I will be staying at MIT for two semesters and working with Prof. Sabine Iatridou.

Julian Lysvik (University of Oslo) : I am a visiting student from the University of Oslo. I am currently investigating phonological biases using Artificial Grammar Learning. In particular I am looking at the bias against word-final voicing. Otherwise I am generally interested in AGL methodologies and acquisition biases.

Shumian Ye (Peking University) : My research centers on syntax-semantics interface, using formal and typological approaches to investigate linguistic universals. I currently work on the meaning and structure of biased polar questions in Chinese, and I’m also interested in negatives and comparatives.

We have some summer news to share with you:

• The CreteLing Summer School took place in July at the University of Crete in Rethymnon, and several MIT faculty (and alumni) taught courses:
  
  • Adam Albright - Advanced Morphology: Syncretism and Paradigm Structure
  • Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou - The Linguistics of Desire
  • Sabine Iatridou - Introduction to Syntax
  • Shigeru Miyagawa - Language and Animal Communication in Evolution
  • Donca Steriade - Introduction to Phonology

The summer school was attended by many MIT students as well: Rafael Abramovitz (4th year), Daniel Asherov (2nd year), Tanya Bondarenko (2nd year), Colin Davis (4th year), Ömer Demirok (5th year), Verena Hehl (4th year), Maša Močnik (4th year), Elise Newman (3rd year), Frank Staniszewski (3rd year) and Stan Zompi (2nd year). Rafael, Daniel, Tanya and Ömer also served as course TAs. Check out nice photos from the event, such as this one below, on the summer school’s Facebook page.

• Justin Colley (4th year), Verena Hehl, Anton Kukhto (1st year) and Mitya Privoznov (4th year) went into the heart of Siberia for a fieldwork expedition in the village of Kazym, Central Khanty. Mitya reports: “We had a lot of fun, suffered from mosquitoes and hopefully gathered some useful data as well :).”

• In August, Tanya Bondarenko and Colin Davis participated in a joint fieldtrip with a group of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University to study Barguzin Buryat in Baraghan village, the Republic of Buryatia, Russia.

• Conference presentations:
  • Neil Banerjee (3rd year) presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association (May 30-June 1) on CARP in Kinyarwanda, and at CHRONOS 13 (June 4-June 6) on the temporal orientation of necessity modals.
  • In early June, Elise Newman (3rd year) went to the University of Olomouc, Czech Republic and presented work on the English auxiliary system at OLINCO. Elise: “Several MIT alumni were there; Joe Emonds co-organized the conference and I found out that he and I are both Cubs fans!”.
  • Filipe Kobayashi (2nd year) and Sherry Chen (2nd year) presented joint work on distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese at the student session of the North American Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), held at CMU in late June. Maša Močnik also attended the summer school. 
  • On August 4, Danfeng Wu (3rd year), Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty), Masatoshi Koizumi (PhD ’95, now at Tohoku University) and Mamoru Saito (PhD ’85, now at Nanzan University) gave talks at the Workshop on Case Theory and Labeling of Structures at the University of Tokyo. Prior to that on July 28, Danfeng presented a poster co-authored with Shigeru and Masatoshi at MAPLL × TCP × TL × TaLK (MT3) at Keio University. After that, she also attended and presented at the Summer Seminar on Frontiers of Language and Cognition Research.
  • Norvin Richards (faculty) gave a series of talks on Contiguity Theory at SICOGG 20 in Seoul, held on August 8-10, and then another talk at Kyungpook National University in Daegu. 
  • Just a few days ago, Verena Hehl gave a presentation at SLE in Tallinn on Bildungsplan Baden Württeberg 2016: Promoting Grammar as Science from the bottom up – a case study.

• Education:
  • Neil Banerjee, Cora Lesure (3rd year) and Dóra Takács (2nd year) taught a 7-week introductory linguistics course for middle and high school students as part of HSSP, from June till August. Their course, entitled `How language works’, covered topics ranged from sound production and the IPA over cross-linguistic variation and case to NPIs and implicatures. Dóra writes: “About 35 students participated in the class, which was hopefully a lot of fun and definitely an interesting and valuable experience for everyone.”
  • Naomi Francis (5th year), Verena Hehl and Maša Močnik graduated from the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program (KTCP) in June. The participants report: “Graduates of the KTCP attend 8 sessions on a wide range of topics in teaching and learning and are exposed to current research on pedagogical methodology through assigned readings and in-class discussions. We also had the opportunity to create and receive feedback on teaching philosophy statements for academic job applications.”
  • In May, Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), an MIT initiative to support global education, announced a grant funding to MITILI  student Newell Lewey and to prof. Norvin Richards for the project Skicinuwi-npisun: A Community-Centered Project for Documentation and Teaching of the Passamaquoddy Language. The project supports language teaching and curriculum development to help preserve the severely endangered Passamaquoddy language of Northern Maine. The grant includes funding for Newell’s language classes, and for a group of graduate students from the department to travel with Norvin to Passamaquoddy country to work with elders. Here you can read a little more about the project. Congratulations Newell and Norvin!
• Alumni news:
  • Our distinguished alum Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), now at  the University of Arizona, has been elected a 2019 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Heidi’s colleagues as LSA Fellows include 38 other MIT alums and members of our faculty who have been elected in previous years — more than a quarter of the (now) 138 Fellows of the Society. Congratulations Heidi (and our warmest congratulations to the other newly elected Fellows as well)!
  • Another one of our distinguished alums, John McCarthy (PhD 1979) - a pioneer in the development of phonological theory for over four decades - has been named Provost and more at UMass Amherst, where he has taught since 1985. Very exciting news — congratulations John! 

This semester we are blessed with an abundance of (old and new) reading groups. 

• LPRG is the Linguistics and Philosophy Reading Group, held Mondays from 1:00 to 2:00pm in 32-D769. Linguists and philosophers join forces to understand language and linguistics. We read and discuss old and new papers in the field (especially in formal semantics and philosophy of language). For more information visit the website or contact the organizers Christopher Baron or Maša Močnik.
• Morphun is a new reading group that centers on topics in morphology. The group will meet from 5 to 6:30 pm on Mondays (the old Phonology Circle slot) in room 32-D831, a.k.a the 8th floor conference room, hopefully on a weekly basis. We encourage discussion of old and new readings in morphology (including recently snatched conference handouts) and informal data sessions. Since this is aimed to be an informal group, we will give priority to these kinds of proposals as opposed to fully-fleshed-out original research ideas. We also wish to emphasize that you can propose a reading without committing to present it yourself, so that someone else can get interested and hopefully take up the task - add your reading idea to the Google document we created. If you want to reserve one or more dates for presentation, please write your request and your reading proposal to either Stan or Filipe. 
• Syntax Square exists to facilitate the presentation or discussion of anything relating to syntax. Syntax square will be meeting this semester on Tuesdays from 1-2pm in room 32-D461 (the 4th floor seminar room). As always, we welcome works in progress, presentation of papers on topics of interest, practice talks, etc. There are still plenty of available slots (including next week!): 9/11, 9/18, 10/2, 11/6, 11/13, 11/27, 12/4, 12/11, 12/18. Please contact Colin Davis (colind@mit.edu) and/or Mitya Privoznov (dpriv@mit.edu) if you would like to reserve any of them.
• LF Reading Group (LFRG) is an informal, weekly semantics and semantics/syntax interface group. LFRG will be meeting as usual on Wednesdays 1-2pm, room 32-D461 (the 4th floor seminar room). We welcome work in progress at any stage, practice talks, presentations on papers on topics of interest etc. In order to bring back the traditional reading group idea behind LFRG and not completely treat it as a formal platform for presentation of original research, this semester we reserve the first three meetings for presentations of papers on topics of interest. Note that you can also suggest a paper for one of these meetings even if you do not want to present it yourself. There is currently one slot available: 9/26. Please let Tanya or Dóra know if you would like to present then.
• Phonology Circle will be meeting on Wednesdays (notice the day change!), from 5:00–6:30pm, in 32-D831 (the 8th floor conference room). Phonology Circle is the weekly phonology meeting group. It is an informal group, so we welcome presentations on all kinds of topics: work in progress at any stage, presentation of new puzzles you’d like to discuss, tutorials about particular research tools, as well as practice talks. We also encourage you to consider volunteering to lead a discussion of a paper (we will take care of announcing the suggested reading in advance). Following are the available dates for presentations:  9/5, 9/12, 9/19/9/26, 10/3,10/10, 10/17,10/24, 10/31, 11/7, 11/14, 11/21, 11/28, 12/5, 12,12. Please contact Daniel and Chris if you would like to reserve a spot.
• Ling-Lunch is a series of weekly talks, held on Thursdays from 12:30 to 1:50pm in room 32-D461 (the 4th floor seminar room). Talks can be on any topic in linguistics and everybody is welcome to present their work, though preference is given to members of the MIT Linguistics Department. There are still available dates to present in Ling-Lunch: 10/11, 10/25, 11/8 (and maybe 12/13 if there’s ample interest). Contact Cora and Boer to reserve a slot. There’s Ling-Lunch this week! see separate post below.

Course announcements in this post:

• 24.943 Syntax of a Language Family (Algonquian)
• 24.949J Language Acquisition
• 24.967 Topics in Experimental Phonology
• 24.979 Topics in Semantics

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24.943 Syntax of a Language Family (Algonquian)

• Instructor: Richards
• Schedule: R9:30-12:30
• Room: 32-D461

In 24.943 this year we will be learning about the syntax of the Algonquian languages.  We will pay particular attention to the Eastern Algonquian languages, which include Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Wampanoag, but will read literature concentrating on languages outside this group as well.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

24.949J Language Acquisition

• Instructor: Hackl
• Schedule: T2-5
• Room: 32-D461

24.949/9.601J is a graduate level class on language acquisition, focussing on (typical) first language acquisition. The course provides A) a forum for discussion of foundational questions in language acquisition based on a review of the state of the art in selected topics in the areas of syntax, semantics and pragmatics and B) an opportunity for students to develop an experimental or corpus-based research project which, by the end of the semester, will consist in a well-defined (set of interrelated) question(s), a research plan (description of concrete hypotheses, data acquisition method(s), and data analysis strategies), and (ideally) pilot data. Potential topics include: 

- Early clause structure, OI, correlations between inflectional morphology and functional syntax

- A-movement, passives, raising, unaccusative syntax, …

- Argument structure

- Binding Theory

- Quantification, quantifier scope, determiners, …

- Comparatives, adjectives, number

- Prepositions, spatial syntax and semantics

- Modals, modality, evidentials, tense, …

- NPIs, negation

- Acquisition of Presupposition

- Scalar Implicatures

- Learning models, statistical approaches to L1-acquisition, learnability theory

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24.967 Topics in Experimental Phonology

• Instructor: Flemming
• Schedule: TR2-3:30
• Room: 32-D769/TBA

In the past decade, the field of phonology has increasingly looked to experimental results to confirm and extend its understanding of phonological patterns. In this course, we will examine some of the issues involved in deriving experimentally testable predictions from a theory, designing and running an experiment, and interpreting the results.

The class has several goals:

• Consider the relation between linguistic theory, empirical predictions, and experimental results
• Gain practical knowledge in designing and carrying out experiments in the lab and on-line, and performing data analysis using R
• Gain familiarity with some commonly used experimental paradigms, comparing what they can tell us about the linguistic system

The emphasis this year will be on statistical analysis. The course will be organized around the statistical models that are most applicable to linguistic experiments (in all areas of linguistics):

• Linear models and linear mixed-effects models
• Generalized linear (mixed) models: logistic/probit regression, ordinal logistic regression, log-linear models

The application of these models will be illustrated through case studies selected based on the interests of the participants. Candidate topics include: Perceptual similarity, the P-Map Hypothesis, Universal Grammar/learning biases, phonetic underspecification, and parallel vs. serial sentence processing. Experimental paradigms examined are likely to include production, perceptual identification and discrimination, artificial language learning, phonological and syntactic acceptability judgments.

Note: Please let me know if you plan to attend this class - we’re still trying to arrange a room, and it would be useful to know how many people we need space for.

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24.979 Topics in Semantics

• Instructor: Crnic
• Schedule: R2-5
• Room: 32-D461

In this course, we will study Negative Polarity Items. While raising familiar foundational questions for linguistic theory, Negative Polarity Items enter into complex and often revealing interactions with a host of other phenomena in grammar. We will investigate several such interactions, with the goal of advancing our understanding of not only Negative Polarity Items but also these other phenomena. This investigation will help us address the overarching question of the course: Is the classic insight that the distribution of Negative Polarity Items should be described and explained by recourse to a notion of entailment tenable, and if so, how should it be cashed out? Some of the topics that we will touch on during the course are focus, presupposition, exhaustification, quantification, (in)definiteness, modals and attitudes, comparison and superlatives, and questions. Although our main focus will be on Negative Polarity Items in English, we will also attend to some cross-linguistic variation in this domain.

Speaker: Richard Faure (Université Côte d’Azur, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, CNRS and Harvard University)
Title:Wh-fronting is not wh-movement in colloquial French
Date and time: Thursday, 9/6, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:  

French is said to be one of those languages that have the option to form wh-questions with in-situ (1a) or ex-situ whPs (1c). It is also assumed to have optional subject-verb inversion (1d). Moreover, wh-in-situ structures come actually in two guises, with or without a prosodic break before the whP (1a vs. 1b), a fact little addressed in the literature.

Speaker: Jessica Coon (McGill)
Title:  Feature Gluttony and the Syntax of Hierarchy Effects   (joint work with Stefan Keine, USC)
Date/Time: Thursday, August 23, 1:00pm-2:30pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk offers a new take on a family of hierarchy effect-inducing configurations, with a focus on Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects (Anagnostopoulou 2005, Nevins 2007) copular constructions (Coon, Keine, and Wagner 2017), and dative-nominative configurations (Sigurdsson & Holmberg 2008, Rezac 2008). Following previous work, we take these effects to arise in contexts in which two accessible DPs are found in the same domain as a single agreeing probe (Béjar & Rezac 2003; Anagnostopoulou 2005). We draw on Cyclic Agree in the sense of Béjar & Rezac (2009), according to which an articulated probe continues probing if at least some features are left unvalued after an Agree relation.

Béjar & Rezac (2003) and many related accounts seek to derive hierarchy effects from an underapplication of Agree and concomitant failures of nominal licensing, formalized as a Person Licensing Condition (see also Béjar & Rezac 2009, Baker 2011, Preminger to appear). By contrast, we argue that hierarchy effects are the result of an overapplication of Agree. We propose that in hierarchy effect-inducing structures, a probe participates in more than one valuation relation, effectively “biting off more than it can chew”, a configuration we refer to as feature gluttony. Feature gluttony––i.e., the coexistence of multiple values on a single probe––can then create conflicting requirements for subsequent operations, leading to a crash.

Our account captures commonalities and differences across hierarchy constructions, both in terms of the types and specifications of the features involved, as well as in the result of hierarchy violations and their possible repairs. In the case of PCC configurations, a probe which interacts with more than one DP creates an intervention problem for clitic-doubling. In violations involving agreement, gluttony in features may result in a configuration with no available morphological output. Important motivation for our account comes from the fact that hierarchy effects commonly disappear in the absence of agreement. This is unexpected on a standard licensing account, but it receives a principled explanation in terms of gluttony: because the probe that otherwise creates the conflict is absent, the conflict disappears.

By tradition, the headship of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy rotates between the Linguistics and Philosophy sections.  From July 1, the department head will be our Philosophy colleague Alex Byrne, who has served as section head of Philosophy for the past five years.  He succeeds linguist David Pesetsky, who is concluding his five-year term as department head.  The new section head for Linguistics will be Kai von Fintel — but Adam Albright will serve as interim section Head during Kai’s well-earned sabbatical this Fall.  Thank you all!

The annual Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) conference took place last weekend (5/18-20) at MIT.  A number of current and recent members of our department, in addition to quite a few less-recent ones, gave talks and presented posters. Those include:

Current members - 

• Sophie Moracchini (5th-year): “Evaluativity and structural competition”
• Naomi Francis (4th-year): “presupposition-denying uses of even”
• Keny Chatain (2nd-year): “Gaps in the interpretation of pronouns”
• Moshe E. Bar-Lev (visiting student): “An implicature account of homogeneity and non-maximality”

Recent alumni - 

• Aron Hirsch (2017) and Luis Alonso-Ovalle: “keep only strong”
• Paul Marty (2017): “Towards an Implicature-Based Account of Disjoint Reference”
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (2014) and Keely New: “The expression of exhaustivity and scalarity in Burmese”
• Wataru Uegaki (2015): “The problem of presupposition projection in question-embedding”
• Wataru Uegaki and Floris Roelofsen: “Do modals take propositions or questions? Evidence from Japanese”

The conference was a great success, not only because of the high quality of presented work, but also due to the wonderful organizing team headed by Kai von Fintel.  Thank you Kai and everyone else!

Speaker: Koichi Tateishi (Kobe College/MIT)
Title: Trimoraicity and Monomoraicity: Cases in Japanese
Date/Time: Monday, May 14, 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

This presentation is about Japanese syllables, which appear to be one of the best-studied areas in phonology, starting from McCawley (1968) and traditional Japanese linguistics papers preceding it. I will point out that /N/, a moraic nasal, which is never a nuclear component of a syllable and hence can never be accented according to McCawley and later works, actually stands out as an independent syllabic nucleus at some morphological peripheries. This syllabic /N/ can be accent-bearing and can undergo Initial Lowering, another signatory tonal phenomenon that is typically observed only with a syllabic nucleus. The presentation also points out that the syllabic /N/ is only for the borrowings and mimetics, while we find an independent phenomenon in the Yamato (native Japanese) stratum that derives a string that appears to derive a syllabic /Q/, moraic obstruent, and that this constitutes a counterargument to Ito and Mester’s (1995) strata-dependent reranking hypothesis.

After five years, David Pesetsky is stepping down as department head this summer. In his honour, a party was held to celebrate his contributions and achievements as head. Delicious food and drinks were followed by a seemingly endless supply of cake. Danny Fox and Alex Byrne spoke about David’s commitment to his work, to students, and to the department. 

Entertainment for the event was a student-led song-and-dance performance featuring (left to right): Danfeng Wu (tap), Milena Sisovics (violin), Verena Hehl (viola), Frank Staniszewski and Mitya Privoznov (piano) and Elise Newman (vocals). To thank him for his service, David received gifts including a book of Russian poetry (one of the first editions of Akhmatova) and some fancy port, which he is unboxing below.

David will be taking a well-deserved sabbatical in the Fall. Thank you for all your hard work as department head, David!

Thanks to Sze-Wing Tang for the photos.

Speaker: Suzana Fong (MIT)
Title: Bare nominals in Wolof
Date and time: Tuesday May 13, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Even though Wolof is a language with overt determiners, it also allows for nominals to occur without any determiner at all.

(1) Awa defar na oto bi/yi/Ø.
Awa fix NA.3sg car the.SG/the.PL/Ø
‘Awa fixed the car/the cars/a car.’

In this research in progress, I try to explore the syntax and semantics of these bare nominals. The properties considered so far are the following:

(2) Syntactic properties

• Bare nominals can the be the subject of transitive and intransitive verbs.
• They can also be the object of transitive verbs.
• When in subject position, bare nominals are compatible with singular or plural verbal agreement.
• They are also compatible with a singular or plural genitive suffix.
• They are compatible with singular or plural relative clauses.
• They can be referred back to by a singular or plural clitic.

(3) Semantic properties

• Bare nominals cannot be followed up with the question How many? when they are the subject of a singular verb, though this is possible when the verb is plural. Something along these lines holds of bare nominals in object position too.
• They can be the antecedent of a singular reflexive, though not of a plural one.
• They cannot be the argument (subject or object) of a collective predicate.
• They can occur in the existential construction Am na… (‘there is…’), which displays definiteness effects.
• They can scope above or below intensional predicates and an iterative verbal affix.

In order to account for these properties, I tentatively draw a distinction between syntactic and semantic number that is loosely based on Landau (2001)’s analysis of partial control. Specifically, I try to explain the semantic properties in (3) by suggesting that bare nominals in Wolof are semantically singular. However, they would have no syntactic number feature. Coupled with a fallible (Preminger 2014) version of feature checking (Chomsky 1995), this proposal could be consistent with the syntactic properties in (2).

Speaker: Sophie Moracchini (MIT)
Title: Evaluativity and structural competition
Date and time: Wednesday, May 16, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk, I investigate the morpho-semantics of the degree constructions in (1). Some of these constructions are known to give rise to presuppositions of evaluativity that do not follow from the traditional semantics assumed for degree constructions: when such presuppositions arise, the adjective’s interpretation seems to depend on a standard of comparison, whose value is fixed by the context of utterance (Rett 2008, 2014 and Breakstone 2013).

(1) a. Jane is taller than Tom is.
b. Jane is less tall than Tom is.
c. Jane is less short than Tom is. (Presupposition: Jane/Tom count as `short’ in the context.)
d. Jane is more short than Tom is. (Presupposition: Jane/Tom count as `short’ in the context.)

I will argue with Rett (2008, 2014) that evaluativity is contributed by an independent and optional morpheme `EVAL’, and that it is sometimes obligatory because of a semantic competition.

My goal is to state precisely what the competition is based on. I will show that a decompositional approach of degree expressions (that follows from Heim’s 2001,2008 and Büring’s 2007 Syntactic Negation Theory of Antonymy) introduces the right metric for competition: structural complexity. I will then formulate an LF-Economy Principle (adapted from Meyer 2013, Marty 2017) which rules out structures whenever their logical meaning is expressible by means of a structurally simpler alternative. By this principle, in absence of EVAL, (1c.) and (1.d) are ruled out by (1.a) by virtue of being structurally redundant. I also discuss additional aspects of EVAL’s distribution that can be explained by independently motivated claims about morphology, and I show how the inclusion of EVAL is either forced by the LF-Economy principle or ruled out by a PF-filter.

Speaker: Edward Gibson (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT)
Title: Meaning explanations of two syntactic islands: Subject islands and Embedded-clause islands
Date and time: Thursday, May 17, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:  

Syntacticians have long proposed (a) that certain extractions from embedded positions are universally ungrammatical across languages and (b) that their ungrammaticality is not explainable in terms of meaning.  These two ideas together imply the existence of syntactic universals in Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (e.g., Ross, 1967; Chomsky, 1973; and many more recent studies including Sprouse et al (2012) and Sprouse et al (2016)). In this talk, I will present data from studies of two different kinds of syntactic islands that strongly suggest meaning explanations for both, without any need for syntactic universals.  First, I report collaborative work with Anne Abeillé, Barbara Hemforth and Elodie Winckel (CNRS, Paris), where we show that extractions out of subject position are actually easier to process than extractions from object position, in both English and French relative clauses, contrary to the claim of the universality of a so-called “subject island”.

The 25th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association took place May 10-12 at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.  TC Chen presented on Amis Case stacking. Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (PhD ‘14) sends us this picture of TC standing next to an antique tea chest at the conference:

Whamit! will be on semi-hiatus over the summer. We will continue to publish breaking MIT Linguistics news as it happens. Weekly posts will resume in the Fall.

Thanks to our editors, contributors, and of course all our readers! See you all in the Fall!

We are beyond delighted to announce that fifth-year student Athulya Aravind, who specializes in language acquisition, has accepted our offer of a tenure-track assistant professor position!

Speakers: Thomas Schatz and Naomi Feldman (UMD/MIT)
Title: A simple framework to study how phonological structure can emerge from the interaction of social, physical and cognitive evolutionary pressures
Date/Time: Monday, May 7, 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Nowak and Krakauer (1999) proposed a framework to study how combinatoriality in language can emerge from evolutionary pressures to communicate in the presence of noise in the communication channel. I will present this framework and discuss possible extensions that might lead to functional accounts for certain phonological phenomena. I will focus in particular on an extension of the framework that adds a pressure to limit the production costs of words in the language, for which I will present a few preliminary results.
This is very preliminary work in collaboration with Matthias Hofer and Naomi Feldman. The main object of the presentation will be to get feedback on the potential of the framework and to advertise the project to students with a formal background in phonology - which both Matthias and me lack - who might be interested in collaborating with us.

Speaker: Carolyn Spadine (MIT)
Title: Evaluating Syntactic Approaches to Interrogative Flip: Test cases from English and Malayalam
Date and time: Tuesday May 8, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

“Interrogative flip” describes a phenomena in which elements that appear to orient to the speaker in a declarative utterance shift perspective and orient to the addressee in an interrogative context — evidentials, perspective-sensitive anaphora, modals, adverbs, predicates of personal taste, and others have been reported to show this behavior. In proposing a mechanism for encoding discourse-pragmatic information in syntax, interrogative flip is one of the core phenomena that Tenny and Speas 2003 intend to address, and the same problem has been subsequently taken up in Woods 2014, Zu 2018, and many others.

This talk presents preliminary work on two constructions that display interrogative flip, and examines the ways in which existing syntactic approaches to modeling interrogative flip account for or fail to account for this data. The first is discourse participant-oriented modifiers in English, as in (1):

1. a. [As a film critic], this movie deserves an Oscar.
b. [As a film critic], does this movie deserve an Oscar?

In (1a), the preferred and perhaps only interpretation of the bracketed constituent is that the speaker is a film critic, whereas in (1b), English speakers report both speaker- and addressee-oriented interpretations for the same constituent. A similar but more constrained pattern emerges for embedded instances of these modifiers, posing a challenge for some proposals. The second comes from a reportative evidential marker ennu (glossed as REP) in Malayalam (2a), which can either scope under or over the question particle, yielding two different interpretations — either a question about a report heard by the addressee (2b), or a declarative report of a question overhead by the speaker (2c).

2. a. prime minister varunnu ennu
prime minister come.PROG REP
“I heard that the Prime Minister is coming”
b. prime minister varunnu enn-oo?
prime minister come.PROG REP-Q
“Did you hear if the Prime Minister is coming?”
c. prime minister varunn-oo ennu
prime minister come.PROG-Q REP
“I heard someone ask if the Prime Minister is coming”

In both cases, I suggest the data supports the general pattern that existing proposals intend to account for, but also raise concerns about the specific structures proposed to implement them.

Speaker: Naomi Francis (MIT)
Title: Presupposition-denying uses of even
Date and time: Wednesday, May 9, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk explores a puzzle about how even interacts with presupposition-denying discourse moves. Even can be used in declarative sentences that deny presuppositions, but only if it appears below negation (1).

(1) A: Did Kenji’s wife go to the picnic? Presupposes: Kenji has a wife, i.e. is married.
B: He isn’t even married!
B’: #He’s even unmarried!

I present a solution to this puzzle that makes crucial use of the additive presupposition of even. This presupposition requires that, in addition to the prejacent (the sentence that hosts even) being true, at least one of its focus alternatives must be true as well. I propose that the relevant focus alternatives in this context all contain the trigger (Kenji’s wife) for the presupposition that the prejacent denies, meaning that they are incompatible with it. This means that the additive presupposition of even can only be satisfied if the presupposition that Kenji has a wife is appropriately “cancelled” within the alternatives, which I argue is only possible when these alternatives contain sentential negation (1B). Drawing on data from German, Greek, Russian, and Hebrew, I show that the contrast in (1) is not unique to English and that the proposed solution makes good crosslinguistic predicitons.

Speaker: Sabine Iatridou (MIT)
Title: No commands
Date and time: Thursday, May 10, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:  

Speaker: Daniel Rothschild (University College London)
Title: What it takes to believe.
Time: Friday 5/11, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-155
Abstract: 

Much linguistic evidence supports the view that believing something only requires thinking it likely. I assess and reject a rival view, based on recent work on homogeneity in natural language, according to which belief is a more demanding attitude. I discuss the implications of the linguistic considerations about ‘believe’ for our philosophical accounts of belief. 

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 27 took place at Stanford over the weekend, and three MIT presentations were given.

• Colin Davis and Tatiana Bondarenko: Parasitic gaps and covert pied-piping in Russian LBE
• Rafael Abramovitz: Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Russian: Evidence from Unpronounced Subjects
• Maša Močnik: Where Force Matters: Embedding Epistemic Modals and Attitudes

Details about the memorial for Morris Halle, including a registration link, can be found at http://linguistics.mit.edu/hallememorialservice/.  If you are planning to attend, please register by this Wednesday if possible, so we can anticipate attendance. 

Speakers: Nabila Louriz (Hassan-II, Casablanca) and Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: On the adaptation of vowels in French loanwords into Moroccan Arabic
Date/Time: Monday, 30 April 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

 Moroccan Arabic has a simple three-vowel phonemic system /i, u, a/ plus epenthetic schwa. The vowels appear as /e, o, ɑ/ in the context of an emphatic (pharyngealized) consonant. As shown by examples such as boîte > /bwaT/ ‘tin can’ (cf. /bwiyT-a/ diminutive), French loanwords with /o, a/ (and sometimes /e/) are regularly borrowed with pharyngeal consonants—a striking example of enhancement dubbed “reverse engineering” in Kenstowicz & Louriz (2009). In this presentation we briefly review this finding and then focus on the adaptation of French nasal vowels. Three contexts are considered. Word-medial nasal vowels are adapted as oral vowel plus homorganic nasal consonant: congé [kɔʒ̃e] ‘holiday’ appears as /kuɲʒi/. Word-final nasal vowels sometimes appear with a nasal consonant and at other times as a simple vowel with no trace of nasality: Fr bouchon [buʃɔ̃] ‘bottle stopper’ > MA /buʃun/ but bâtiment [batimã] ‘building’ > MA /baTima/. Finally, word-initial vowels are often deleted: infirmier ‘nurse’ > /fərmli/. Our discussion focuses on some of the factors that may underlie the variation.