Whamit!

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Title: Pro drop and the morphological structure of inflection
Time: Tuesday, September 17th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A central problem for pro drop theory is how to account for the distribution of argumental null subjects. A paradigmatic approach, in which the whole paradigm determines whether a language can have null subjects or not, undergenerates in that it does not predict the existence of partial pro drop languages. An approach in which the licensing of null subjects is determined per context overgenerates in that it is not obvious why e.g. English does not have null subjects in at least the 3rd person singular. This talk aims at repairing the overgeneration problem for contextual approaches. By contrasting the Romance pro drop languages with the Germanic languages and Standard French, we argue that only the latter express tense and agreement with the same underlying morpheme, which therefore contains features (tense) that are incompatible with the subject it would have to license: it is featurally overspecified. The question is then what determines the choice between a bi- or monomorphemic expression of tense and agreement, and we will argue that reasonable assumptions about the acquisition of morphological systems makes the right cut.

Speaker: Wenkai Tay (UCL)
Title: Compound vs phrasal resultatives: the view from Mandarin Chinese
Time: Wednesday, September 18th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this talk, I will argue against a uniform syntactic analysis of V-V compound resultatives and V-de phrasal resultatives in Mandarin Chinese. I propose instead that V-V resultatives are built in morphology while V-deresultatives are built in syntax. My proposal predicts that V-V and V-de resultatives will exhibit distinct behaviour with respect to a number of processes. (i) V-de resultatives are accessible to syntactic operations while V-V resultatives are not. (ii) Since obligatory arguments must be projected in a syntactic structure, V1 must project its arguments in V-de resultatives but not in V-V resultatives. Furthermore, it seems that these differences in argument structure between compound and phrasal resultatives are observed in languages other than Mandarin. These differences cannot be captured within a theoretical framework that makes no reference to the notion of a “word”. Therefore, to the extent that it is on the right track, my proposal provides evidence for an architecture of the grammar in which morphology and syntax are distinct subsystems.

Speaker: Runqi Tan (MIT)
Title: Direction of Coarticulation in Retroflex Fricative – a case study from Mandarin
Time: Monday, September 16th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Abstract: In many Australian and Dravidian languages, retroflex and apical alveolar stops only contrast after vowels (e.g. Steriade 1995, 2001). This is because the primary cues to the contrast between retroflex and apical alveolar stops are located in the VC transitions (Anderson 1997), thus this contrast preferentially appears after a vowel, where the sounds are more perceptually distinguishable (Steriade 1995, 2001). The fact that the primary cues are realized on the preceding vowel follows from the fact that the retroflex stop has a stronger coarticulatory effect on the preceding vowel than the following vowel (Steriade 1995, 2001, Hamann 2003, Tabain et al. 2020). However, it is the following high front vowel that assimilates to retroflex sounds in Mandarin, a language with retroflex fricatives and affricates (Li & Zhang 2017), suggesting a stronger coarticulatory effect on the following vowel than the preceding vowel. In articulation, the characteristic flapping-out movement of retroflex stops does not happen to retroflex fricatives (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996), which makes it possible for retroflex fricatives to have coarticulation on the following vowel. These observations lead to the hypothesis that the direction of coarticulation in retroflex fricatives differs from retroflex stops. This study conducted a phonetic experiment to test this hypothesis. The experiment explored F3 transitions in a pair of Mandarin fricative /s/ and /ʂ/. The lowering effect of F3 by /ʂ/ is the primary cue to the contrast between retroflex and alveolar sounds (Hamann 2003). Ten native Mandarin speakers (age from 20 to 30, 5 male speakers and 5 female speakers) were asked to read 15 VCV minimal pairs in a carrier sentence “wo du __ gei ni tiŋ” (I read __ for you to hear), where the C was /s/ or /ʂ/, and the two vowels in VCV were identical. Due to Mandarin CV syllable structure, in VCV structures, VC is necessarily between syllables and CV is within syllables. The stop study also allows C to be onset, which means that VCV also comes from two syllables, which is comparable to fricative study. F3 was measured in four positions in each VCV stimuli: midpoint of the first vowel (V1F3), endpoint of the first vowel (C1F3), beginning of the second vowel (C2F3) and midpoint of the second vowel (V2F3). The effect of place of articulation on F3 on left and right side of the consonant was calculated and compared by fitting a linear mixed effect model with consonant F3 as dependent variable, vowel F3 as independent variable, C as a fixed effect, and a random slope for sibilant place. The lowering effect of F3 is found on both sides of the retroflex fricative and does not differ significantly between the left and right side. This result confirms that the direction of coarticulation in Mandarin retroflex fricative /ʂ/ differs from that in retroflex stops. This difference leads to the prediction that retroflexion contrast in fricatives should not follow the same typology as retroflexion contrast in stops, as a result, different rankings of the markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints are expected for the two types of retroflex consonants. Keywords: retroflex fricative, coarticulation, phonetic cue.

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)
Title: Presupposing practice
Time: Thursday, September 19th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: I will discuss reformulations of the notions of presupposition and accommodation, themselves based on a non-standard model of meaning, as developed in The Politics of Language (Beaver & Stanley, Princeton University Press, 2023). The goal is to develop a general model of transmission and change of ideology, including language practices, a model that can help explain how terrifying or divisive practices can be innocuously normalized, reinforced, and spread.

Building on work of Lynne Tirrell and others, the background to the theoretical developments includes cases of people, or entire peoples, referred to as if they were monsters, snakes, cockroaches, lice, parasites, or even, in the case of a concentration camp warden Victor Klemperer reported on, industrial raw materials. Standard tools of semantic theory were not designed with such issues in mind. I argue that a generalization of the notions of presupposition and accommodation can carry some of the weight.

The reformulation of presupposition hinges on three definitions:

1. Associative resonance: p(feature| instantiation of practice) − p(feature)
2. Effect probability: The probability that a certain feature of the context is an effect of an action instantiating a practice, p(instantiation of practice caused feature).
3. Presuppositional resonance: Associative resonance − Effect probability

The main goal of the LingLunch talk will be to discuss these definitions, their relationship to prior work on presupposition (and formal semantic theory more generally), and their application to difficult issues like presuppositions of divisive practices.

A secondary goal of the talk is to discuss an extension of accommodation that complements the changes in the notion of presupposition. Hearers accommodate not merely propositions, but practices, developing an increased tendency to behave in line with the practice. For example, if politicians and bureaucrats discussing a public health problem focus on the costs of alternative technologies that would potentially remediate the problem, their marginalization of human suffering carries a presupposition that it is reasonable to frame the issue in purely technocratic terms. What is accommodated is a tendency to treat a human life as a commodity. In response to sexist jokes, one may accommodate tendencies to discriminate based on gender.

In standard accounts of accommodation, the driving force is a driving desire to create common ground in the face of ignorance of a speaker’s assumptions. In the model I will discuss, however, accommodation is driven by a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance and find harmony, and these are in turn largely driven by a need to fit in with in-groups, and to mark oneself as distinct from out-groups.

MIT Linguistics research affiliate and alumn Hadas Kotek (PhD ‘14) is organizing a careers workshop series for linguists. The careers workshop will meet every other Tuesday at 5pm in room 32-D831, starting this Tuesday. All are welcome. Currently planned topics are below; Spring topics will include: resumes, networking, applying and interviewing, immigration considerations. Additional topics may be added based on audience request.

MIT alumn Pritty Patel-Grosz’s (PhD ‘12) work on dance in Gibbons has been accepted for publishing in the biology journal Primates. Pritty’s co-authored work offers a linguistically informed view of Gibbons’ dance behavior, showing it forms groupings based on isochronous rhythm.

The pre-print version can be found here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.29.610299v1.full

The New York Times also offered a piece based on the work, found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/science/gibbons-dancing-apes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Kk4.dsYX.XXFLiwNd-UiD&smid=url-share

Congratulations to Pritty and her collaborators!

In the series organized by Michel DeGraff entitled Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel, earlier announced here:

Speaker: David Beaver (University of Texas at Austin)
Title: “Neutrality helps the oppressor”: how accommodation can become complicity with a radical agenda
Time: September 18, noon-2pm
Location: Room E51-095

Abstract:

In this election season, amid bloody global conflicts and the existential threat of climate change, we are all called upon to take sides. Let us say that public discourse is polarized if large subsets of society are unable to recognize the legitimacy of the perspectives embodied by other people’s speech. Then today we find ourselves in an extreme situation. We are witness both to polarization, in which groups diverge from each other, and to asymmetric polarization, in which one group (say a group centered on conspiracy theories) diverges rapidly from prior norms. And despite that chaos, we find some who claim, self-righteously, not to have taken sides, to be, in some sense, above the fray. I think here not only of Fox News’ preposterous claim to be “fair and balanced”, but also of the NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s recent assertion that he, and hence his newspaper, has “no interest in wading into politics.”

Elie Wiesel began his Nobel prize address, from which my title quotation is drawn, imagining a conversation with the child he had been, a child sucked into the bewildering terror of the holocaust. Here is a little more of the famous quote:

And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Wiesel can be read as suggesting that neutrality is not merely ill-advised, but impossible: everything we say reflects affinities and disaffinities with the groups who surround us, and even the silent implicitly take sides. Building on my recent book “The Politics of Language”, with Jason Stanley, I will explore the idea that there can be no true neutrality. The thought here is that language, far from being neutral, inevitably reflects social affinities and associated ideologies. On this view, supposing one’s speech to be neutral is not evidence of objectivity, but of failure to recognize the legitimacy of other perspectives. The archetype here is not national media, for which few people take the claim of neutrality seriously, but bureaucratic language, supposedly neutral speech which can be the ultimate tool of an autocratic oppressor, or of any large organization that has no direct interest in the well-being of those it interacts with. I will consider the processes that lead to extremes of speech and ideology, whether extremes to the left, extremes to the right, or, incongruously oxymoronic though the phrase may seem, extremes of neutrality.