Whamit!

Speaker: Vina Tsakali (University of Crete)
Title: Desires in (child) Greek
Time: Thursday, November 14th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: The study investigates how children acquire the meaning of sentences expressing desires and wishes. In the literature desires are described as pursuable attitudes in the actual world, while wishes express unattainable desires. Crucially, wishing requires the ability to think counterfactually, similarly to counterfactual conditionals (Russel 1921; Lewis 1988; Iatridou 2000; von Fintel & Iatridou 2023), as encoded by the pluperfect morphology in the complement of the main desire-verb (1b).

(1)  a.  I want to plant a carob tree in the yard. [O-marked desire - attainable]
       b. I wish I had planted a carob tree in the yard. [PastX-marked desire - unattainable]


Languages differ with respect to how they express desires. We will show that Greek is not uniformly a transparent wish-language, behaving either similarly to English or to Spanish, depending on the desire-verb. Regarding the development of desires, we will show that children from a very young age perform adult-like on present, O-marked desires. However, younger children (mean age 6;4) perform poorly on interpreting PastX-marked desires (conveying a counterfactual meaning). The developmental pattern advances significantly after the age of 8, when children succeed at interpreting counterfactual desires at a rate of 53%, while comparable performance is observed with (counterfactual) PastX-marked conditionals. Our experimental findings provide support to previous studies claiming that children have an Actuality-bias and suggest that the development of counterfactuality is a prolonged process.

Speaker: Margaret Wang (MIT)
Title: Variable preservation of honorificity after repluralization: a diachronic typology
Time:  Wednesday, November 13th, 5pm - 6pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Given the cross-linguistically widespread recruitment of plural for politeness, repluralization is also widespread. This talk aims to address two puzzles about repluralization. First, given that there exist other proxies for politeness (person, inclusivity), why is repluralization the only historical innovation that is attested? I will argue that number is the only grammatical proxy with the relevant resources. Second, repluralization may yield either “general-purpose” plurals or “stratified” plurals. I argue that what derives these two different pathways is the variable ranking of two OT constraints that operate on morphological paradigms, Analyticity and Syncretize-in-Plural. This is a practice talk for a diachronic semantics conference, all comments are welcome.

Speaker: Jason Shaw
Title: Lecture #1: Modelling phonetic variation with the neural dynamics of movement preparation
Time: Friday, November 13th, 1-2:30pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A Dynamic Neural Field (DNF) is a formal object developed within systems neuroscience with the intention of giving a theoretical foundation to the notions of cooperation and competition between neural populations (Amari, 1977). DNFs provide the formal foundation for a general theory of movement preparation (Erlhagen & Schöner, 2002). More recently, DNFs have been applied specifically to the preparation of speech movements and the interaction of this cognitive process with phonological representations (Gafos & Kirov, 2010; Kirkham & Strycharczuk, 2024; Roon & Gafos, 2016; Stern et al., 2022; Stern & Shaw, 2023a, 2023b; Tilsen, 2019). There are now neural-based explanations for common phonetic patterns, including contrastive hyperarticulation, trace effects in speech errors, phonetic convergence/divergence to an interlocuter, and leaky prosody. Drawing on the broader framework of Dynamic Field Theory (Schöner & Spencer, 2016), this lecture will introduce the formal definition of a DNF and applications to modelling phonetic variation.

Title: Lecture #2: Revisiting the gestural parameters of prosodic modulation with a new gesture dynamics
Time: Thursday, November 14th, 4.30-6pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Fowler’s (1980) critique of extrinsic timing theories served as a launching point for the dynamical systems approach to phonological representations. Since then, there has been substantial development of theories centered on a particular dynamical system, the damped mass-spring (e.g., Browman & Goldstein, 1989; Saltzman & Munhall, 1989) and complexifications of this system (Byrd & Saltzman, 1998; Sorensen & Gafos, 2016). Early studies showed that articulatory variation across prosodic positions was difficult to capture parsimoniously with the parameters of the damped mass-spring system (e.g., Beckman et al., 1992; Cho, 2006). These shortcomings motivated theories of gesture-external modulation, which maintain the damped mass spring as the model of the gesture but conceptualize prosody as trans-gestural modulation of time (Byrd et al., 2006; Byrd & Saltzman, 2003) and/or space (Katsika et al., 2014; Saltzman et al., 2008). After presenting some new data that is problematic for these theories, I’ll revisit the gesture-intrinsic approach to prosody with an alternative proposal for gestural dynamics, developed recently by Michael Stern (Stern & Shaw, 2024).

Speaker: Jason Shaw (Yale)
Title: Is phonological grammar movement preparation?
Time: Friday, November 15th, 3.30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: In the Dynamic Field Theory of movement preparation, intentions to move are inputs to Dynamic Neural Fields (DNFs) representing the metric dimensions of the movement (Erlhagen & Schöner, 2002). Although initially developed to explain properties of eye and hand movements, this general theory has proven highly appropriate for modeling movement preparation in speech, which also involves movement targets located within continuous metric dimensions. DNFs provide a natural mechanism through which multiple influences, such as context, prosody, interlocuter, etc., all codetermine the phonetic details of speech. Moreover, the same dynamics that account for phonetic variation also derive categorical patterns that are typically the purview of phonological grammar. To exemplify this point, I’ll show how a mini-typology of laryngeal phonological patterns, consisting of intervocalic voicing, vowel devoicing, and voicing contour derive from variation in the timing and amplitude of inputs to a DNF representing glottal width. Besides these strictly categorical patterns, sound patterns which have both a categorical and continuous flavor, such as tonal downstep and incomplete neutralization, are natural consequences of the theory, as are gradient sound change and contextual de-merging of merged phonological categories. Appropriately extended to speech, there is potential for the DFT theory of movement planning to predict the attested range of sound patterns in human language, suggesting that phonology may be movement planning “all the way down”.