The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics
MIT Linguistics community participated in Formal Diachronic Semantics 9 hosted by Università di Bologna on November 28-29! The following talks were presented by our current students and alumni:
MIT Linguistics mourns the passing of our colleague Jim Harris, well-known to generations of MIT students over three decades for his wisdom and insight into the morphology, phonology, and syntax of Spanish (and Catalan) — and thus into language itself. Sad news for the field and for our community. His long-time colleague Jay Keyser writes of his work —
I remember Jim most of all for being the consummate scholar. His articles were models of argumentation. They were assembled with all the precision of an Inca wall and all the beauty of a Faberge Egg. You couldn’t slip a credit card through any of its arguments, they were so superbly sculpted.
— part of a moving tribute that you can read here: https://linguistics.mit.edu/jharris/
Speaker: Oddur Snorrason (Queen Mary University of London)
Title: Subtraction in the Distribution of Auxiliaries
Time: Tuesday, November 26, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Auxiliaries are known to arise either (i) with a certain inflectional category (Additive pattern), or (ii) in the combination of such categories (Overflow pattern; Bjorkman 2011). This talk is about a little-discussed third pattern where verbal inflectional information is lost in auxiliary formation: The Subtractive pattern. Based on a small survey of languages, I argue that the subtractive pattern reflects markedness-related dissimilation effects analogous to clitic reduction and deletion in Biscayan varieties of Basque (Arregi & Nevins 2012). The account is most naturally accommodated in theories where auxiliaries arise because of a morphological well-formedness condition (Cowper 2010, Bjorkman 2011) rather than due to c-selection (e.g. Pietraszko 2023).
Speaker: Sixing Cui (Central China Normal University, Wuhan; MIT Visiting Scholar) & Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
Title: Searching for Phonetic Correlates of Velar Palatalization
Time: Monday, November 25, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Earlier research (Cui 2012, 2021) suggests that when Mandarin disyllabic adjectives of the form AB such as [dàfang] 大方’generous’ are reduplicated to AABB [dàdà-fāngfāng] 大大方方, the B syllable is placed in a stressed position. Mandarin neutral tones (T0) are banned from stressed syllables (as well as the initial syllable of a word or phrase). What tone is assigned to a T0 syllable when a disyllabic AB base with a final neutral tone is reduplicated to AABB? We present preliminary results of a study that poses this question for seven Beijing Mandarin native speakers.