Whamit!

In this week’s installment of the Phonology Circle, Youngah Do will present on the acquisition of Korean morphophonology.

Time: Monday 10/19, 5pm, 32-D461
Speaker: Youngah Do
Title: Child Preference of Base Correspondence: the Asymmetry of the Inflection of Regular and Irregular Verbs in Korean

In this talk, I examine the distinctive ways in which children inflect Korean verbs with respect to the (ir)regularity of the verbal stem. An experiment of picture description asks children to inflect two verb forms in a coordinated sentence. The result shows that the inflectional structure of the two coordinated verbs are always identical. Interestingly, an asymmetry of the inflection is found according to the order of the appearance of regular and irregular verbs in a sentence. When the first verbal position is occupied by regular verb and irregular verb follows, children inflect both verbs in a simple way(C category stem+C category suffix), not using any extra morpheme. On the contrary, when the inflection of irregular verb is required first and regular one is following, they inflect the verbs in a complex way by using an extra morpheme (A category stem+A category suffix+ Extra morpheme +C category suffix).Adopting the hypothesis that that the A category is the base in the Korean verbal inflectional paradigm (Albright and Kang 2009), I argue that this asymmetry is due to children’s tendency for respecting base correspondence in the process of verbal inflection.

Upcoming schedule:

The October issue of the journal Theoretical Linguistics is devoted to third-year grad student Tue Trinh’s paper “A constraint on copy deletion” — followed by eight “peer commentaries”. Tue’s paper proposes a new theory of pronunciation patterns under movement that relates the choice of which position gets pronounced to its linear position within the phrase that contains it. The commentators on Tue’s paper include Enoch Aboh, who was a visiting faculty member here last Fall, MIT alums Shin Ishihara (PhD 2003) and Hubert Truckenbrodt (PhD 1995), as well as Josef Bayer, Nigel Duffield, Roland Hinterhölzl, Anders Holmberg, and Gereon Müller. Congratulations, Tue!

This coming weekend, MIT will host the 3rd annual meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology meeting. A preliminary program is below. (Actual times may shift a bit; a finalized version will be sent around later in the week.)

All are welcome to attend! If you plan on coming, it would be helpful if you could let Adam know so we have a rough nose-count.

NECPhon 3 - The Northeast Computational Phonology Circle
Date: October 24, 2009
Location: MIT, 32-D461

Join us for this week’s Ling-lunch talk:

Speaker: Andrew Nevins
Time: Thurs 10/18, 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461
Title: TBA

Shigeru Miyagawa is giving a Richauer Institute talk at Harvard, Friday, October 23, 4-5:30

“Murasaki Shikibu Meets Generative Grammar: What Can the Old Japanese Particle ‘wo’ Tell Us About Human Language?”

1730 Cambridge St, Room S250