Whamit!

Speaker: Juan Cancel (MIT)
Title: Metrical Incoherence or Opacity: A Stratal OT Analysis of Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan
Time: Thursday, November 4th, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: The topic of Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan (Wagner-Nagy 2018) has been the subject of much discussion in the literature since it has been considered as an example of metrical incoherence (González 2003 and Vaysman 2009). In contrast to literature such as Hayes 1980 and Selkirk 1980 which argue that stress and foot-parsing are equivalent to each other, the literature on metrical incoherence argues that stress and foot-parsing should be considered as two phonological entities separate from each other since in various languages such as Nganasan, rhythmic phenomena explained by feet are seemingly independent of stress assignment. From facts such as these, Vaysman 2009 provides an analysis in terms of Optimality Theory (OT) which accounts for the Rhythmic Gradation facts in Nganasan by making stress assignment be partially independent from the foot-parsing needed to generate Rhythmic Gradation.

Nonetheless, recent literature such as Benz 2018 and Kaplan 2022 have argued that cases of metrical incoherence can be reanalyzed as instances of opacity where phonological rules apply even though the context controlling for them is no longer present. They do so in terms of Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2000), a version of OT in which there can be more than one stratum and each stratum can have different constraint rankings. Thus, the current proposal will argue that what we see in Rhythmic Gradation in Nganasan is not a case of metrical incoherence, but a case of phonological opacity involving two strata. A Stratal OT analysis is attractive not only because it can explain the same facts as Vaysman 2009, but because it can do so without having to invoke metrical incoherence. Furthermore, it sets a framework that can help explain other opaque interactions involving Rhythmic Gradation as well.

Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT)
Title: A typological argument against lexical cumulativity
Time: Wednesday, November 6, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In this talk, I develop and motivate a new implementation of an old idea about the contrast between acceptable Hurford disjunctions (HDs) like (i) and unacceptable ones like (ii) (e.g. Gazdar 1979) — the idea that (i) is good because its simpler alternative (iii) would trigger an optional ’not all’ inference that is avoided by using (i), whereas (ii) has no analogous advantage over its weaker disjunct (e.g. Gazdar 1979). A straightforward implementation of this “Manner approach” in terms of ambiguity avoidance runs into a series of problems pointed out by Meyer (2013, 2014). Meyer therefore develops an alternative account of the contrast in (i)/(ii), based on the idea that exhaustification creates a contradiction when faced with alternatives that are contextually, but not logically entailed by its prejacent.

(i) Ann did some or all of the problem sets.
(ii) #Ann went to France or to Paris.

(iii) Ann did some of the problem sets.

In this talk, I will first argue against Meyer’s logicality-based alternative to the Manner approach and then introduce an implementation of the Manner approach that avoids some (although not all) of the problems she discusses. It relies not on ambiguity avoidance, but on a trade-off between the Gricean submaxim *Be brief!* and a submaxim I call *Be precise!*, which encodes a dispreference for utterances that are ‚imprecise‘, i.e. that depend on the QUD for their truth conditions in the sense discussed by Križ & Spector (2021). To motivate *Be precise!*, I will take a short detour to the pragmatics of plurals and *all*. Returning to HDs, I will argue that it is possible to view (iii) as imprecise and (i) as a strategy to avoid imprecision, if we adopt the view that exhaustification is syntactically obligatory, but alternative pruning is restricted by the QUD in the way proposed by Bar-Lev (2020). Time permitting, I will conclude by discussing an open problem for this approach, which has to do with the status of ignorance inferences in HDs.

Speaker: Núria Bosch (University of Cambridge)
Title: Not all topics are equal: syntactic complexity and its effect on the acquisition of left-peripheral structures
Time: Tuesday, November 5, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Approaches to the acquisition of functional categories, particularly maturational approaches, havetypically focused on theorising putatively universal aspects of development, e.g., universally ‘delayed’ development of CP-structures (i.a., Radford 1990; Rizzi 1993/4; Friedmann et al. 2021). In this talk, I highlight the empirical reality and theoretical significance of systematic crosslinguistically variableacquisition orders of CP-structures. I present a two-part empirical argument against rigidly pre-wired developmental pathways, drawing in particular on bilingual and monolingual acquisition of topicalization structures.

§1. I summarise two (ongoing) corpus studies on seven Germanic-Romance bilinguals acquiring Italian-Dutch, Italian-German and Spanish-German. Study 1 examines the order of acquisition of CP-structures. Study 2 is a supplementary study on the development of cliticization that investigates its interlinking (or lack thereof) with the emergence of Clitic-Left Dislocation in Romance. The data reveals several consequential patterns: among others, CP-structures systematically emerge early, irrespective of structural height; and secondly, the acquisition of topics reveals language-specific discrepancies (Germanic topics vs Romance CLLD). These results are incompatible with bottom-up maturation, and extant approaches that could accommodate the data (continuity, inward maturation) prove insufficiently predictive on their own. I develop a neo-emergentist generative account of the patterns (Biberauer, 2011, et seq.; Biberauer & Roberts, 2015) and propose that L1-specific mismatches in the acquisition of topics systematically ‘track’ the formal, parametric complexity of the topicalization strategies in the relevant L1.

§2. Our predictions are, then, tested against data on monolingual acquisition of topics from a range of 10+ typologically-diverse languages. I show that the development of topics (early vs late) systematically varies as a function of the formal complexity of each L1’s topicalization strategies (e.g., A/A’ properties of topics, operator/non-operator topics).
These results have several ramifications for requirements on theories of functional category acquisition and for the crosslinguistic ‘flexibility’ of learning paths more broadly. Critically, I conclude that ‘late’ topics reported in some maturational work (e.g., Friedmann et al., 2021; Meira & Grolla, 2023; and references therein) are an epiphenomenon of the L1s studied, not of universal maturational constraints on the CP.

MIT folks presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP 2024) which took place November 1-3 at Rutgers University. The following talks and poster were given by our students and visitors: 

Current students and visitors:

• Alma Frischoff (1st year), Ezer Rasin (Visiting professor, PhD 2018): Unattested opaque interactions are Input Strictly Local (abstract)
• Bingzi Yu (2nd year), Shuang Zheng, Youngah Do (PhD 2013): Learners’ generalization of alternation patterns from ambiguous data (abstract)
• Eyal Marco (Visiting student), Ezer Rasin (Visiting professor, PhD 2018): Optimal Paradigms: a challenge from Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (abstract)

Alums: 

• Jian-Leat Siah, Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017), Feng-fan Hsieh (PhD 2007): Reduplicative Opacity in Malay Revisited: Preliminary Phonetic Evidence for Variable “Recopying” and BRCT (abstract)
• Klaus Baki, Anthony D. Yates, Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017): A Phonology–Morphosyntax Interface Explanation of the “Nasal Infix” in (Proto-)Indo-European (abstract)
• Antón de la Fuente, Sarang Jeong, Arto Anttila, and Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009): What do harmony-based grammars exclude? (abstract)
• Giorgio Magri (PhD 2009): Why phonologists got it right: a principled derivation of OT and HG (abstract)

It’s that time again!  In anticipation of Halloween, the department was devoted to pumpkins and the carving thereof on October 30:  our annual Linguistics pumpkin carve.

Speaker: Stanislao Zompì (Universität Potsdam) and Zhouyi Sun (MIT)
Title: *ABA and Successive Containment Reexamined, or How to Assemble Russian Dolls Properly
Time: Thursday, November 7, 5-6pm
Location: 32-D769

Abstract: The last decade has witnessed the success of vocabulary item-based approaches to morphology in accounting for the typological gap in suppletion or syncretism patterns dubbed *ABA—in some triplet of categories ⟨C₁, C₂, C₃⟩, C₁ and C₃ can never have the identical form to the exclusion of C₂ (see Caha 2009, 2013; Bobaljik 2012; Smith et al. 2019, among others). An entailment relation has been established between successive containment and *ABA, where a successive featural/structural containment relation among three categories serves as a sufficient condition for these categories to be ABA-free under both Underspecification and Overspecification.

As Caha (2017) as well as Christopoulous and Zompì (2022) have recently pointed out, featural relations other than successive containment might also lead to *ABA. It is thus unclear what the necessary condition for *ABA is regarding featural relations, which this presentation aims to derive. We show that the necessary and sufficient condition for *ABA has exactly the same form as the weak containment relation posited by Christopoulos and Zompì (2022).

Implications of this result on how successive featural containment should be more properly deduced from the empirical absence of ABA patterns among three categories will be discussed. We argue it can further demonstrate the intrinsic inadequacy of Underspecification and Overspecification without relying on any particular assumption of featural decomposition (cf. McFadden 2018; Christopoulos and Zompì 2022; Zompı̀ 2023). If time permits, a new optimization-based proposal which does not face the same problems will be sketched.