Whamit!

Speaker: Runqi Tan (MIT)
Title: The role of perceptual contrast in tone inventory
Time: Monday, March 17th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract:

Theoretically, there are 2366 possible types of two- to five-tone inventories. However, a survey of 63 two- to five-tone languages reveals only 12 attested tone inventories. This discrepancy suggests that tone inventories are not formed through random selection of tones but are shaped by universal constraints. Yip (2001), based on a large-scale survey of tone languages, proposed universal rankings of markedness constraints: *RISE ≫ *FALL and *HIGH ≫ *LOW. Similarly, Chen (2000) proposed a markedness hierarchy: *RISE ≫ *HIGH ≫ *FALL ≫ *LOW. However, the markedness hierarchy alone does not account for the observed tone inventories.

This study examines the role of perceptual contrast in shaping tone inventories within the framework of Dispersion Theory. By adding a set of MINDIST constraints, which evaluate the perceptual distinctiveness of tonal contrasts, to a set of markedness constraints that evaluate the articulatory efforts of tones, the new model successfully predicted 8 of the 12 attested tone inventories while avoiding over-generation. In addition, the model captures the following generalizations: (1) the mid-level tone does not co-occur with small contour tones and only co-occurs with large contour tones when both L and H are present in the inventory; (2) a tone system that only relies on pitch and slope for tonal contrasts can have no more than three contrastive levels per dimension; (3) it is possible for a language to have only contour tones without level tones. These findings suggest that perceptual contrast plays a crucial role in shaping tone inventories.

Speaker: Nina Haslinger (ZAS Berlin, MIT)
Title: Pragmatic constraints on morphosyntactic organization: A case study on homogeneity and imprecision
Time: Thursday, March 20th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

Across unrelated languages, there is a containment asymmetry between definite plurals and all-type plural universal quantifiers (UQs) — for instance, the surface form all the books contains the plural definite the books, while the reverse asymmetric pattern—a definite-plural structure properly containing a UQ structure—is (to my knowledge) unattested. This cross-linguistic asymmetry led Matthewson (2001), Winter (2001) and others to hypothesize that UQs are associated with “bigger” structures than definite plurals. At first sight, we might try to capture this at the descriptive level by cartographic means, or alternatively by constraining the syntactic category/semantic type correspondence such that nominal quantifiers must take a type e argument (cf. Matthewson 2001).

This talk makes two main points. The first point is to argue that both cartographic and lexical-semantic approaches miss a broader generalization of which the definite/UQ asymmetry is a special case. Recent work in plural semantics (Malamud 2012, Križ 2015, Križ & Spector 2021, Bar-Lev 2020, Feinmann 2020, Guerrini & Wehbe to appear a.o.) has focused on imprecision, a form of semantic underspecification driven by implicit QUDs (cf. Lasersohn’s (1999) “pragmatic slack”), and on truth-value gap phenomena that systematically correlate with imprecision (“homogeneity effects“). I will argue that across seemingly unrelated syntactic categories and semantic types, imprecise expressions correspond to less complex structures than their precise counterparts. Thus, the phenomenon is not specific to the extended NP or to quantifiers with type e arguments.

Given the generalization that imprecision correlates with smaller structures, my second point is to suggest an account of this generalization in pragmatic terms. In the special case of contexts in which the precise and imprecise alternatives make the same truth-conditional contribution, this generalization can be viewed as the result of a trade-off between pragmatic maxims falling under the Gricean category of Manner — one expressing a preference for simpler structures (“Be brief!”) and one expressing a preference for expressions that do not depend on the QUD for their truth conditions (“Be precise!”). I formalize this idea using Katzir’s (2007) notion of structural complexity and Križ & Spector’s (2021) semantics for plural imprecision. Time permitting, I will also try to provide independent support for the proposed constraint interaction, by looking at exceptional cases in which one of the two pragmatic maxims is trivialized.

On the face of it, this kind of Manner-based neo-Gricean reasoning falls short of fully deriving the generalization, since there are many contexts in which imprecise expressions and their precise counterparts are *not* truth-conditionally equivalent, and therefore arguably not expected to be competitors for the purposes of Manner. I propose that, instead of giving up on the pragmatic approach, we should bite the bullet and consider a competition mechanism that applies as soon as two expressions become equivalent under *some values* of contextual parameters such as the QUD, even if these are not the actual values in the utterance context at hand. This would amount to a theory in which Manner-based pragmatic reasoning can sometimes apply “automatically” even if its Gricean preconditions are not met, in the same loose sense in which Quantity-based reasoning applies “automatically” on grammatical theories of implicature.

Speaker: Edward Flemming (MIT) - Joint work with Giorgio Magri (CNRS, SFL, Paris 8)
Title: Strict domination in probabilistic phonology
Time: Monday, March 10th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Labov (1969) hypothesized that rates of application of variable phonological processes obey
an intriguing generalization that we dub the Strict Domination Generalizationː Where multiple
factors affect the rate of application of a process, the factors can always be ordered in a hierarchy
such that “each [factor] in the hierarchy outweighs the effects of all [factors] below it” (cf. strict
domination between constraints in Optimality Theory).

More specifically: suppose an optional consonant deletion process is favored by the presence
of each of three factors, F1, F2, F3 (e.g. properties like presence of a following consonant, or
occurrence in an unstressed syllable). The Strict Domination Generalization implies that these
factors have to be ranked, e.g. F1 >> F2 >> F3 (borrowing the OT notation for ranking). Given
this ranking, the rate of deletion must be higher in all contexts where F1 = yes than in all
contexts where F1 = no, regardless of the values of the lower ranked factors, and within each
value of F1, the rate of deletion must be higher where F2 = yes, regardless of the value of F3,
resulting in the order of deletion rates shown below. F1 outweighs all factors below it in the
sense that contexts where only F1 favors deletion have a higher rate of deletion than contexts
where both F2 and F3 favor deletion, but F1 does not.

I will review several test cases that are consistent with this generalization. We will then see
that the generalization does not follow from any current model of probabilistic grammar
(Stochastic OT, MaxEnt, Noisy Harmonic Grammar), so if it is correct, we need a new model.

Speaker: Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley)
Title: Case sensitivity reflects case structure: agreement, extraction, and clitics
Time: Friday, March 7th, 3.30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: A variety of syntactic phenomena seem to be conditioned by morphological case (an effect known variously as ‘case discrimination’, ‘case targeting’, ‘case opacity’, or simply ‘case sensitivity’). In this talk I address three such phenomena—-phi-agreement, A’ movement, and clitic-doubling—-with the eye to two related questions: What is the representation of (marked) case on a nominal? And how are syntactic operations sensitive to this representation? In place of the relatively standard view of case as a feature on a DP, I argue that a full understanding of case sensitivity in syntactic operations calls for a view of (marked) case as a structure around DP, i.e. a KP. Treating case assignment as structure addition, and case sensitivity as structure sensitivity, I show how we can capture proposed hierarchies of case sensitivity in phi-agreement (Bobaljik 2008) and A’ movement (Otsuka 2006), as well as a novel case-hierarchy effect in the realm of clitic-doubling.

Speaker: Michela Ippolito (University of Toronto)
Title: What makes rhetorical questions rhetorical
Time: Friday 02/28 at 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract:

The question of what is special about rhetorical questions has been subject to debate for quite some time. One prominent view is that what makes rhetorical questions rhetorical is that they, unlike canonical questions, bear a special relation with the common ground: some theories propose that a rhetorical question is a question whose answer is in the common ground (e.g. Caponigro and Sprouse 2007); some theories propose that a rhetorical question presupposes that its answer is in the common ground (e.g. Biezma and Rawlins 2017); other theories propose a more intricare relation with the common ground (Farkas (2024)). In this talk I discuss some types of rhetorical questions which I argue challenge “common ground” theories of rhetorical questions and discuss how one might go about developing a different theory of rhetoricity.

Speaker: Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: Referendum on nominal licensing
Time: Tuesday, February 25th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Come one, come all to a very informal discussion about nominal licensing! When I say “nominal licensing”, I’m referring to one aspect of debates about case theory, namely whether case theory is about the distribution of nominals or just about their morphology. This is related to the “head-licensing vs. dependent case theory” debate, but not identical to it — whether heads are responsible for assigning case or not, we still need to separately figure out whether the outcome is a set of predictions about where nominals can be, or a set of predictions about what they should sound like (or both).

I’m not an expert on this topic, and you don’t need to be an expert on this topic to participate! The goal is to learn from each other and crowd source examples and literature. I will prepare some discussion points and examples, and share some details of the model of case that I tend to use (with some of its problems). Please come share yours with us and try to think of good test cases to tease the two theories apart!

Speaker: Omri Doron, Danny Fox, and Jad Wehbe (MIT)
Title: Assertion, Presupposition and Local Accommodation
Time: Thursday, February 27th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Sudo (2012) provides important evidence that trivalent (or partial) semantics is not rich enough to account for certain presupposition projection phenomena. Specifically, he observes that presuppositions triggered by different lexical items project differently in the same environment. These differences could not follow from any recipe for presupposition projection, if the input for projection is the trivalent semantic value of the relevant constituents. In fact, the differences cannot even be described. Sudo shows, however, that the facts can be described in 2-dimensional semantics by a rule that considers both the assertion and the presupposition of the relevant expressions. This argument was strengthened in later literature, with the observation that certain sentences, but not others, can be affirmed when their presupposition is known to be false (beginning with Cummins et al. 2013). It has been pointed out that the observed patterns can further support Sudo’s conclusion, as they suggest that it is sensible to ask whether the assertive component of an expression entails its presupposition – a question that is meaningful under 2d-semantics but not under Trivalence. Moreover, it has been pointed out that the assertions needed in the two domains (projection and affirmation) are the same.

We find the arguments compelling and the correlation between the two diagnostics very informative. There are, however, three important questions that we want to investigate. First, to describe the projection facts, Sudo needs to depart from predictive theories of presupposition projection (Strong Kleene, Local Context, Transparency) in favor of what seem to us to be ad hoc statements. The question is whether there is a way to modify Sudo’s proposal so that it is compatible with predictive theories of projection (Q1). The Second question, Q2, is whether the lexical stipulations that are commonly invoked to yield 2d-semantics can be eliminated in favor of a general algorithm that would allow us to keep to the more impoverished (and more predictive) trivalent semantics. And finally, there is a second correlation hinted at in the literature (Zehr and Schwarz, 2018), which we think is highly informative, namely that a presupposition can be cancelled (by Local Accommodation) only when it is entailed by the assertion (that hard triggers yield assertions and presuppositions that are logically independent, and that presuppositions are entailed by assertions in the case of soft triggers). So our third question, Q3, is whether there is a way to account for this new correlation. We, of course, hope that there could be affirmative answers to all three questions. To address Q3 affirmatively, we propose that there is no process of presupposition cancellation of the sort suggested by Heim. (Local Accommodation does not exist nor does the A operator invoked in Trivalent Semantics.) Instead there is a process of presupposition weakening, PW, that weakens the presupposition of a sentence S<p,A> (a sentence S with presupposition p and Assertion A): PW(S<p,A>) = S<a>.

It is an automatic consequence that PW leads to surface cancelation iff the assertion entails the presupposition. (Only in such a case is A → p a tautology.) We propose, moreover, to derive PW from the general theory of presupposition, on the assumption that the assertion can be parsed as a separate conjunct and evaluated “before” the presupposition (drawing on the representation in Schlenker 2008 and on the flexible view on incrementality argued for in Chemla and Schlenker 2012). This affirmative answer to Q3 turns out to provide an affirmative answer to Q1 as well. To answer Q2 we develop the algorithm proposed and rejected by Zehr and Schwarz (2018) based on a third correlation, namely that hard triggers are precisely those that can be deleted while maintaining (Strawson) equivalence. (We argue that apparent exceptions that worried Zehr and Schwarz can be accommodated with reasonable auxiliary assumptions.) Finally, if time allows for this, we will argue that the emerging perspective can make sense of otherwise puzzling conditional presuppositions, such as those identified by Schlenker for co-speech gestures.

Speaker: Idan Landau (Tel Aviv University)
Title: Detecting, Constraining and Interpreting Silent Structure: Insights from Argument Ellipsis in Hebrew”
Time: Friday, February 21st, 3.30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: In this talk I examine classical and current issues in the theory of ellipsis through the prism of Argument Ellipsis (AE) in Hebrew, a productive process that offers a rich empirical testing ground. I start with standard diagnostics for surface anaphora, distinguishing AE from pro-drop and from Null Complement Anaphora, and leading to the strongest type of argument for AE, based on subextraction. Then I turn to the question of identity in ellipsis – whether it is syntactic or semantic, what mismatches are tolerated between the antecedent and the elliptical constituent, and whether identity applies to the entire ellipsis domain or just to a subdomain within it. Evidence bearing on this question comes from force mismatch under CP ellipsis, confirming and expanding on similar results obtained in studies of sluicing. Next, I discuss a curious semantic condition on AE – only arguments denoting individuals (type <e>) can be elided. The restriction holds across a number of unrelated languages, and is helpful in pinning down the size of the elided category (DP or VP). I will also discuss very recent results from a study of resumption inside ellipsis sites and how they overcome the severe limitations of the subextraction diagnostic (insofar as resumption is not derived by movement). Finally, I go over recent proposals as to what is AE, and sketch an approach based on the “Big DP” hypothesis.

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: Large language models and human linguistic cognition
Time: Thursday, February 20, 2025: 12:30 - 2pm
Location: 32-461

Abstract: Several recent publications in cognitive science have made the suggestion that the performance of current Large Language Models (LLMs) challenges arguments that linguists use to support their theories (in particular, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus and from cross-linguistic variation). I will review this line of work, starting from proposals that take LLMs themselves to be good theories of human linguistic cognition. I will note that the architectures behind current LLMs lack the distinction between competence and performance and between correctness and probability, two fundamental distinctions of human cognition. Moreover, these architectures fail to acquire key aspects of human linguistic knowledge — in fact, they make inductive leaps that are not just non-human-like but would be surprising in any kind of rational learner. These observations make current LLMs inadequate theories of human linguistic cognition. Still, LLMs can in principle inform cognitive science by serving as proxies for theories of cognition whose representations and learning are more linguistically-neutral than those of most theories within generative linguistics. I will illustrate this proxy use of LLMs in evaluating learnability and typological arguments and show that, at present, these models provide little support for linguistically-neutral theories of cognition. 

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: Gaps, doublets, and rational learning
Time: Tuesday, February 18th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Inflectional gaps (??forgoed/??forwent) and doublets (✓dived/✓dove) can seem surprising in light of common assumptions about morphology and learning. Perhaps understandably, morphologists have troubled themselves with such cases (especially with gaps) and have offered different ways in which they can be accommodated within the morphological component of the grammar, often by making major departures from common assumptions about morphology and learning. I will suggest that these worries and the proposed remedies are premature. The worries arise from the unmotivated assumption that all gaps and doublets are necessarily derived within individual grammars. Once this assumption is abandoned, the observed properties of gaps and doublets become much less puzzling. The only new assumption that is needed is that speakers only use forms that they know (and not just believe) to be correct.

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus
Time: Friday, February 14^th, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. I will suggest that we abandon this anaphoric view. Instead of anaphoric felicity conditions, I propose that focus leads to infelicity only indirectly, when the processes that it feeds — in particular,  exhaustification and question formation —- make an inappropriate contribution to discourse. I outline such an account, incorporating insights from Büring (2019) and Fox (2019). A challenge to this account comes from cases where anaphoricity seems needed either to block deaccenting that would be licensed by a question or to allow local deaccenting that is not warranted by a question. Such cases appear to support recent anaphoric proposals such as Schwarzschild (2020) and Goodhue (2022). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that where anaphoric conditions on focus are not inert they are in fact harmful.

Speaker: Heidi Durresi (MIT)
Title: Hauser & Hughto (2020) on contextual faithfulness constraints for opacity
Time: Monday, December 9th, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: For this week’s Phonology Circle, I’ll be presenting a recent paper by Hauser and Hughto which explores the use of contextual faithfulness constraints to analyze opacity in parallel Optimality Theory and Harmonic Serialism. These are faithfulness constraints which assign violations under a context present in the input, crucially different from previously used positional faithfulness constraints (Beckman 1998, Lombardi 1999). I will be laying out the capabilities of these constraints for analyzing various kinds of opacity, as well as the typological consequences of the availability of such constraints.

Speaker: Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences & MIT)
Title: Exponence of stacked feature bundles: Evidence from Slavic numerals
Time: Tuesday, December 10, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A number of languages exhibit overt case stacking, and it has been argued that other languages also make use of case stacking, but with just one of the stacked cases overtly exponed (e.g., Richards 2013, Pesetsky 2013). Similarly, some languages exhibit overt stacking of phi features (e.g., Clem and Deal 2024), and it has been argued that, at least in Passamaquoddy, covert stacking of phi features may take place, with only the outermost phi features exponed (Grishin 2024). Building on these ideas, I will first show that adopting another exponence rule, “Expone Most Marked”, makes it possible to immediately explain the quirky homogeneous vs. heterogeneous case pattern of Slavic numeral–noun constructions (e.g., Babby 1987 a.m.o.). I will also generalize previous work on feature stacking to the idea of feature bundle stacking, where feature bundles contain both case and phi features, and I will show how this generalization makes it possible to explain the mind-boggling behavior of Russian paucal numerals. In the process, I will attempt to make the mechanisms involved more explicit and precise than in previous literature, and – if time allows – I will present some remaining puzzles.

This week continues a tradition that began in 2015: our tenth joint colloquium shared by the Linguistics and Philosophy halves of our department:

Speaker: Dorit Abusch & Mats Rooth (Cornell University)
Title: Possible worlds semantics for film and the problem of over-informative embedding
Time: Friday, December 6th, 3.30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: In the superlinguistics program, the possible worlds toolkit from the philosophy of language and linguistic semantics is applied to other informational artifacts. This talk develops this for film. While film has hardly any obvious syntax apart from the concatenation of shots, methodologically it is useful to posit an abstract syntax that is interpreted compositionally. We begin by reviewing prior work on geometric semantics, temporal progression, and indexing in pictorial narratives, and then develop them for film. The result is a possible worlds semantics for extensional passages in film. Intensional passages in film include shots describing the hallucinations, dreams, and recollections of a character. Thematically, they include stories about drug-induced hallucination, characters who see the dead, and schizophrenic characters who interact with imaginary ones. In the abstract syntax, a straightforward embedding strategy is adopted, involving an attitude predicate, and a discourse referent for an experiencer. For the semantics, we argue that there is a systematic problem of the embedded shots having detailed geometric, temporal, and (for sound film) acoustic information. This information is so strong that it is implausible that in described situations, the experiencing character should have strong enough information to entail the information in the embedded shot. This makes Hintikka semantics for embedding in film problematic. A starting point for a solution is the hypothesis that attitudinal alternatives for a hallucinating or mis-remembering character should be comparable to the attitudinal alternatives of a character who is perceiving their environment veridically, or remembering accurately. Since people do not pick up all the information in their visual and acoustic environments, the attitudinal state of a hallucinating character should not be required to entail all of the geometric, temporal, and acoustic information in an embedded film shot.

Speaker: Keely New (MIT)
Title: On the apparent lack of multiple wh-questions in Jakarta Indonesian
Time: Tuesday, December 3, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: It has been claimed that in certain languages (e.g. Italian, Irish, and Somali), it is impossible to form questions that include more than one wh-constituent. This is surprising because under prominent semantic analyses of questions, single and multiple wh-questions are derived through similar mechanisms (as noted by Dayal, 2016 and Kotek, 2019). I argue that the lack of multiple wh-questions should not be attributed to a language parameter. Focusing on Jakarta Indonesian as a case study, I will show that (i) the impossibility of multiple wh-questions is construction-specific rather than a language-wide pattern, and (ii) we can derive the impossibility of multiple wh-questions from independently observable constraints on question formation.

Speaker: Eyal Marco (Joint work with Radan Nasrallah and Ezer Rasin), Tel Aviv University.
Title: Phonological derivations are not harmonically improving: Evidence from Nazarene Arabic
Time: Monday, December 2, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: Opacity poses a well-known challenge for the classical version of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004), which applies phonological processes in a fully parallel fashion. In response to the opacity challenge, a variety of extensions to the classical model have been proposed. Our focus is on extensions that incorporate a limited kind of serialism into OT: Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2000, 2016) and Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC; McCarthy 2007). The degree of serialism permitted by these theories is restricted by a property that McCarthy has called ‘Harmonic Improvement’, according to which every derivational step induces a change that creates an output that is ‘more harmonic’ than the input of that step, i.e., every derivational step must generate a better form with respect to the constraint ranking of the language. One consequence of Harmonic Improvement is that it rules out derivations of the form /A/ → |B| → [A] (also known as Duke-of-York, see Pullum 1976, McCarthy 2003, Gleim 2019), because /A/ → |B| implies that B is more harmonic than A while |B| → [A] contradictorily implies the opposite.

We present new data regarding the distribution of stress and vowel length in Nazarene Arabic (NZA), an understudied variety of Palestinian Arabic spoken in Nazareth, Israel. We argue that this distribution is opaque and is best analyzed through a derivation of the form /A/ → |B| → [A], where the application of a vowel lengthening process is undone by a later vowel shortening process. The distribution thus poses a challenge to serial theories of phonology that obey `Harmonic Improvement’. We show this by arguing that Parallel OT, Harmonic Serialism and OT-CC have trouble generating the NZA pattern, but not rule-based phonology (Chomsky & Halle 1968) and Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999, Kiparsky 2000), which have the freedom to undo processes in the course of the derivation.

Speaker: Omri Doron (MIT)
Title: A typological argument against lexical cumulativity
Time: Wednesday, December 4, 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: Patrick Juola (Duquesne University)
Title: Forensic Linguistics: Casework and Empirical Demonstrations
Time: Thursday, December 5th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Forensic linguistics is a relatively undersubscribed subfield of forensic science, which focuses on developing legal conclusions from linguistic evidence. In this talk, we discuss the theory and practice of “authorship attribution” (aka “styometry”) and some of its applications (such as identifying the author of a ransom note). Examples are drawn from actual analyses drawn both from the literature and from the presenter’s own casework.

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.

Speaker: David Adger (Queen Mary University of London)
Title: Mereological Syntax and Island Locality
Time: Friday, November 22nd, 3.30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: The problems with Bare Phrase Structure theory are well known, especially the issues surrounding copies and labelling, both of which require supplementary theories which have their own problems. Similarly, the stipulations that need to be made to ensure that phase theory works are well known, as is the inadequacy of that theory for capturing various locality effects associated with strong islands. In this talk, I suggest replacing BPS with a novel theory of phrase structure, Mereological Syntax (MS), which replaces BPS’s set-theoretic Merge operation with an operation, Subjoin, that builds mereologicaly structured objects. I show how this provides (almost) immediate solutions to the copy and labelling issues, and that a simple geometrical relationship on MS structures opens up the way for a new theory of island locality. I exemplify this empirically in the domain of wh-islands, deriving their cross-linguistic variation, as well as a a new effect (the Wh-Island Re-emergence Effect), that emerges in certain circumstances even in even languages that lack wh-islands. Time permitting, I sketch how the approach suggests that the prospects for a fairly unified theory of islandhood is not as remote as it currently

Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger (MIT & University of Vienna)
Title: Is composite [Ā/A] probing extended A-movement?
Time: Thursday, 21 November, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In the last ten years of syntactic research, composite [A’/A] probes have been employed to account for a variety of unrelated phenomena: i) topicalization, focalization, wh-extraction, relativization with A-properties (van Urk 2015, Ostrove 2018, Scott 2021, Chen 2023), ii) passivization/raising with A’-properties (Wurmbrand 2019, Colley & Privoznov 2020, Lohninger et al. 2022, Chen 2023), iii) A’-extraction restrictions to the closest DP (Erlewine 2018, Branan & Erlewine 2020, Coon et al 2021, Branan 2022), iv) φ-agreement sensitive to information-structure (Mursell 2021, Bárány 2023). In this talk, I focus on the phenomena i)-ii) and present a comparative investigation of Dinka extraction (van Urk 2015), Mandarin Chinese BEI passives and low foci/topics (Chen 2023), Khanty passives (Colley & Privoznov 2020), and Balinese and Malagasy promotion to pivot (Erlewine, Levin & van Urk 2019, Lohninger & Katochoritis to appear). I explore whether these constructions exhibit random mixtures of A’- and A-properties or systematic distributions thereof and show that they follow a highly predictable pattern: whilst composite A’/A constructions resemble A-movement in most respects (creation of new antecedents for anaphor/variable binding, lack of reconstruction for principle C, feeding case, agreement and subsequent A-movement), they differ from classical A-chains in three aspects: i) the ability to skip intervening DPs, ii) obligatory information-structural or clause-typing effects and iii) the landing-site at a phase edge.

Based on this observation, I suggest that even though composite [A’/A] probes search for a goal conjointly, the movement chain they invoke is A-movement. I assume that standardly, [A’] probes (like [top], [foc], [rel] or [wh]) occur on phasal heads (C and v), whilst [A] probes ([D] or [φ]) appear lower (e.g. T or V). In some (rare?) cases, [A] features can end up on phasal heads together with [A’] (due to different reasons, e.g. [φ] under-inheritance, syntactic language change, formation of non-canonical passive heads, etc.), creating a composite A’/A construction. Following van Urk & Richards 2015, I assume that if [A] and [A’] occur on the same head, they search together for a fully fitting goal (for economy reasons), whereby the search can skip intervening DPs and prefers a goal that is information-structurally marked (a top, wh, foc or rel element). After [A’/A] found a goal conjointly, I propose that it is then the [A] probe alone which invokes movement, based on the idea that A-operations are timed before A’-operations (Abels 2007). If [A] and [A’] compete as movement triggers on the same head, the [A] probe gets precedence, hence [A’/A]-induced movement is an A-chain. Thereby, an [A’/A] phase head can be understood as a way of extending the time window for A-movement to the phase-edge (as opposed to the usual case where A-operations are completed before the phase head is reached).

Based on this analysis, the distribution of A’- and A-properties in composite constructions becomes predictable, which counteracts the seemingly anything-goes impression [A’/A] probes might sometimes create.

Speaker: Norvin Richards (MIT)
Title: Agreement by proxy, improper movement, and Passamaquoddy long-distance agreement
Time: Tuesday, November 19, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: A substantial literature (Butt 1993, 1995, Bhatt 2005, Legate 2005, Baker and Willie 2010…) entertains the idea that in some cases in which two heads in the clausal spine (call them X and Y) bear agreement morphology with a single DP (call it Z), what is happening is not that X and Y both Agree with Z, but rather than Y Agrees with Z, and X Agrees with Y. The relevant cases typically involve structures in which plausible conditions on the locality of Agree would ban Agree between X and Z, but would allow Agree between X and Y and between Y and Z.

Legate (2005) names this phenomenon Cyclic Agreement, but since this is uncomfortably close to Cyclic Agree (Rezac 2003, etc) I will rename it Agreement by Proxy. In the talk, I’ll suggest some other kinds of phenomena that can be explained via an appeal to Agreement by Proxy, including “phase unlocking”, improper movement, and some of the conditions on long-distance agreement in Passamaquoddy.

Speaker: Amy Li (MIT)
Title: Searching for Phonetic Correlates of Velar Palatalization
Time: Monday, November 18th, 5-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In this presentation, I will discuss a collection of experiments (completed, ongoing, and proposed) that relate to the following central question: what phonetic properties set apart a language undergoing velar palatalization from a language not undergoing the change at a particular time?. I plan to discuss the following:

1. A recent experiment I conducted comparing acoustic properties between a language that has undergone velar palatalization (Mandarin) and a language that has not (Cantonese).
2. Shao et al. (2023), which compares acoustic properties and EMA articulation trajectories within one language (Italian) across two contexts, one which involves velar palatalization and one which does not.
The leading hypothesis supported by statistical analysis so far is that closure duration or closure ratio (ratio of closure duration to total duration) of velar stops is shorter or lower in languages/contexts that palatalize than in other languages/contexts. However, the details relating closure ratio/duration to the articulation change involved in velar palatalization remain to be worked out.
3. Finally, I will propose new acoustic and articulation experiments that further explore this and other hypotheses.

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”.

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.

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.

Speaker: Kyle Johnson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Title: Presupposing Principle A
Time: Thursday, 31 October 2024, 12:30-2:00PM
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: We examine an argument that Principle A effects derive from a presupposition that is introduced when reflexives exist. We sketch a way of doing that which places the presupposition trigger at the A-probe where possible antecedents for reflexives can be found. And finally we examine the idea that Principles A and B are the result of a competition between pronouns and reflexives in expressing local covaluation.

Speaker: Nathan Sanders (University of Toronto)
Title: Effective teaching in phonetics and phonology
Time: Friday, November 1, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: In this talk, I offer some reflections from my own experience concerning how instructors can be more effective when teaching phonetics and phonology. First, I discuss ideas to consider when developing course content, such as topic organization, applications of course concepts, and inclusivity. Second, I discuss innovative methods for supplementing traditional assessment, such as creative projects and alternative grading. Finally, I illustrate some tools I designed to support student learning: various educational games and a data set generator. My hope is that these ideas, methods, and tools may be as useful to other instructors as they have been for me.

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT)
Title: Why Derive Uniqueness of Definites from Contextual Contradiction? A Case from Bengali
Time: Wednesday, October 30, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This is Part II of the two-part talk that began last week. In last week’s talk, I showed the theoretical possibility of deriving the uniqueness presupposition of definites from the contextual contradictions that arise when there’s a PEX operator inside an indefinite DP. This week, we’ll see this potentially in action in Bengali. The central observation is that, in Bengali, DPs with the numeral NP order have an indefinite reading and those with the NP numeral order have a definite reading, and the definite reading has usually been associated with a DP-internal NP movement past the numeral (Bhattacharya 1998, 1999). However, a definite reading arises nonetheless when DPs with the numeral NP order bears an extra [-i] morpheme, along with a cleft reading. When we look closely, we see that the [-i] morpheme really gives rise to cleft-like semantics in completely unrelated cases, needs to have the semantics as PEX, and the definite reading that arises from it is in complementary distribution with the definite reading that arises from the DP-internal NP movement past the numeral. This strictly ties the definite readings of numeral NP DPs with [-i] to the [-i] morpheme itself, attaching inside the DP (and thus, perhaps, fulfilling the featural needs that the DP-internal NP movement would have otherwise fulfilled.) This is exactly parallel to the hypothetical case we considered last week. Therefore, Bengali gives us empirical reasons to rethink the syntax-semantics of definites in terms of indefinites with a PEX/cleft morpheme. In other words, definites are perhaps clefts of a certain sort — those that are embedded inside indefinites.

Phonology Circle on Monday, October 28, will have two practice presentations for the upcoming AMP conference:

Time: Monday, October 28 5pm-7pm
Location: 32-D831

Speaker #1: Bingzi Yu (MIT)
Title: Learners’ generalization of alternation patterns from ambiguous data
Abstract: A key question in the study of phonological acquisition is how learners acquire a pattern from data compatible with multiple possible generalizations. For example, the phonotactic data {[pita], [bida], [fisa], [viza]}, regarding consonant harmony, is consistent with the following generalizations:a simple Voicing harmony generalization: [ɑ voi][ɑ voi]a simple Continuancy harmony generalization: [β cont][β cont]a complex Voicing+Continuancy harmony generalization: [ɑ voi, β cont][ɑ voi, β cont]Durvasula and Liter (2020) investigated the acquisition of the above phonotactic pattern and found that learners preferred the simplest generalization and were able to keep track of multiple such generalizations, i.e., both (1) and (2). The current study employed the ALL paradigm to examine how learners generalize when presented with ambiguous alternation data. We found that participants acquired only a single simplest generalization, which diverges from the results of phonotactic learning but aligns with the simplicity bias.

Speaker #2: Alma Frischoff (MIT) and Ezer Rasin (MIT and Tel Aviv University)
Title: Unattested opaque interactions are Input Strictly Local
Abstract: Input Strictly Local (ISL) Maps have been proposed by Chandlee (2014) as a function class that is claimed to properly characterize the notion of process locality in phonology. Chandlee, Heinz, and Jardine (2018) have extended this claim from individual processes to process interaction, showing that a range of attested (local) opaque interactions belong to the ISL class. They conclude that in terms of their typological predictions, ISL maps compare favorably to rule-based and constraint-based theories of opaque interactions. We contribute to the evaluation of the ISL class by showing that opaque interactions that have been argued to be unattested – mutual counterfeeding and mutual counterbleeding – are also ISL. We conclude that while ISL maps may provide a useful characterization of the locality of individual processes, as proposed by Chandlee (2014), they are lacking as a model of process interaction because of their over-reliance on the input.

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: Long-distance pivot movement measures Phase Unlocking: Malagasy vs. Dinka
Time: Tuesday, October 22, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Austronesian Malagasy and Nilotic Dinka Bor share non-trivial parallels: (i) an Austronesian voice/pivot system, where one (any) DP argument of the clause is promoted to a syntactically and discourse-wise prominent pivot position; (ii) clausebound promotion to pivot exhibits core properties of A-movement; (iii) promotion to pivot may be long-distance, so that a matrix pivot is thematically linked to an embedded gap; (iv) long-distance pivot movement proceeds via Phase Unlocking.

Based on fieldwork in Malagasy, I present two empirical findings: (i) The Malagasy-Dinka parallelism breaks down in long-distance pivot movement: in Dinka it retains its A-properties, whereas in Malagasy it suddenly only exhibits core A’-properties relative to arguments of the matrix clause; (ii) In Malagasy, embedded CP complements that either become the matrix pivot themselves or allow their own pivot to be extracted to the matrix clause, must first undergo (covert) A-movement to the matrix pivot position.

To explain their difference, I make the two following proposals: (i) Dinka and Malagasy differ in the structural height of Phase Unlocking: it happens by matrix v in Dinka, but by matrix C in Malagasy; (ii) their difference in the locus of Phase Unlocking is a conspiracy of three factors: (1) head V-movement in Dinka vs. phrasal roll-up VP-movement resulting in smuggling of the theme pivot in Malagasy; (2) different ’alignment’, contingent on the order of Agree and Merge at the v/Voice cycle: ACC-like in Dinka, split-ERG-like in Malagasy; (iii) Dinka’s composite pivot probe is not sensitive to partial A-intervention, whereas Malagasy’s is.

The analysis has several implications: (i) the Dinka pivot is a clausal topic with A-properties, dissociated from subjecthood, whereas the Malagasy pivot is both a topic and surface subject; (ii) Phase Unlocking may exceptionally undo the scope-island status of CPs for (covert) QR, allowing cross-clausal inverse scope; (iii) Phase Unlocking is not an ‘altruistic’ primitive of the grammar, but only occurs if the unlocking Agree operation is independently available locally: unlike Dinka, Malagasy v/Voice does not unlock the CP complement phase because it never gets the chance to directly Agree-interact with the internal argument during the derivation.

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT)
Title: On two types of aspectual coercion and before-/after-clauses: Evidence from processing
Time: Thursday, October 2412:30 PM
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: As originally observed by Anscombe (1964) and Heinamäki (1974), certain sentences with before and after are prima facie ambiguous between a strong reading and a weak reading. There is an entailment relation between the two purported readings, and as such two types of theories of these sentences have been proposed. Deflationary theories (Heinamäki 1974, Beaver & Condoravdi 2003, Krifka 2010) posit that the sentences in question are not actually ambiguous: their only LF corresponds to the weak reading, and the strong reading falls out as a subcase. Coercion-based ambiguity theories (Condoravdi 2010; Rett 2020), by contrast, claim that the LF for one reading of the sentences in question has a coercion operator that the other lacks.

This work-in-progress tests an online processing prediction that Rett’s (2020) coercion-based theory makes and deflationary theories do not. Rett’s (2020) theory, which relies on two coercion mechanisms (inchoative coercion and completive coercion), makes processing predictions because coercion has a distinctive psycholinguistic profile (Piñango et al. 1999; Brennan & Pylkkänen 2008, etc.): parsers show processing slowdowns in a coercion sentence upon realizing that insertion of a coercion operator is necessary for its grammaticality or felicity. Past work has tested coercion-based theories of various data via processing experiments, arguing for coercion if the claimed coercion cases have an online cost; however, no past work has tested Rett’s (2020) theory in this way. We do just that, presenting two self-paced reading experiments and pilot results for a third that probe for the existence of Rett’s inchoative and completive coercion operators. We find initial evidence for Rett’s completive coercion operator but no comparable evidence for inchoative coercion (cf. Brennan & Pylkkänen 2010).

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT)
Title: Deriving Uniqueness of Definites from Contradiction
Time: Wednesday, October 23, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This is Part I of a two-part talk. In this Part I, I explore a hypothetical: what if definites are not that different from indefinites syntactically? More specifically, extending an idea of Omri Doron’s, I will propose that we give definites and indefinites exactly identical make-up — with an existential quantifier taking a restrictor and a nuclear scope — except that definites be given an extra PEX operator embedded in the restrictor argument of the existential quantifier that indefinites lack. The trivalence resulting from this PEX operator projects from out of the restrictor to the matrix level, and this trivalence, I argue, is what is conventionally understood as the uniqueness presupposition of a definite. Crucially, I will show that the oddness perceived during the violation of the uniqueness presupposition of a definite can be analytically captured by such a PEX-based view of the definite-indefinite distinction because it predicts that, exactly in the cases that lead to such a violation, the truth condition of the whole sentence is a contradiction. This talk is the basis for Part II, where I will show some data from Bengali which point exactly to this effect: that definites and indefinites are not all that different after all.

Speaker: Maya Honda, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, and Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)
Title: MIT Linguistics reaches out: Making the field’s biggest questions accessible to its youngest stakeholders
Time: Thursday, October 17, 12:30 PM
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Language is essential to being human and to understanding ourselves. Yet, Linguistics, the science of language, is not part of the school curriculum in the US; students are rarely exposed to Linguistics prior to going to university. Addressing this school-university gap could open up access and increase diversity in the field. To meet this need, linguists at MIT and across the country are doing educational outreach to introduce Linguistics to middle school and high school students.

In this presentation, those of us involved in outreach will discuss our work collaborating with one another and with partner teachers to design and teach Linguistics lessons for middle schoolers and high schoolers. We will discuss a range of topics, including our belief that studying Linguistics offers students the opportunity to develop scientific thinking skills, while gaining an understanding of the rule-governed nature of language and cultivating metalinguistic awareness. We will also address some of the key challenges of making big questions in the field (and possible answers) conceptually accessible to students, and the approaches that we have used to teach students in different grades and from different educational backgrounds, remotely and in-person in formal and informal venues. In addition to looking back at the history of this work in the Department, we will look ahead to possible future directions.

Michel DeGraff has organized the following series with funding from MindHandHeart and the Women & Gender Studies program:

Seminar for MIT Community on Language & Linguistics in Decolonization & Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine & Israel

Fall 2024, Wednesdays noon–2pm, Room E51-095

This seminar is an invitation to sociolinguistics & postcolonial linguistics with case studies from Haiti Palestine & Israel. We will examine the exclusion vs. inclusion of certain languages & their speakers in avenues where knowledge & power are created & transmitted. Additionally, we will explore the use of language & linguistics in propaganda in the context of conflicts where words, definitions, phrases, syntactic patterns, etc., are enlisted to political ends to the detriment of academic freedom, freedom of speech, mutual understanding, empathy, peace, community building, social justice, etc.

Objectives:

• Analyze the use of language & linguistics as tools for either hegemony and conflictual propaganda vs. mutual understanding, justice and a #BetterWorld.
• Explore linguistic analyses & education policies as potential contributions to the foundations for peace, community-building & universal respect of human rights worldwide.

Current list of guest speakers:

Jean Casimir (Université d’État d’Haïti)
Sally McConnell-Ginet (Cornell University)
David Beaver (University of Texas, Austin)
Camelia Suleiman (Michigan State University)
Joseph Levine (UMass Amherst)
Samira Alayan (The Seymour Fox School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Nurit Peled-Elhanan (formerly at Hebrew University)
Holly M. Jackson (University of California, Berkeley)
Yonatan Mendel (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
Chana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge)
Vivien Sansour (Palestine Heirloom Seed Library)

For more information and scheduling details, please contact Michel DeGraff at degraff@MIT.EDU

Speaker: Levi Driscoll (MIT)
Title: P-Map Biases Enable Joint Learning of Allomorphy and Phonology
Time: Monday, October 21 5pm-7pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: The objective of this study is to build an unsupervised learner that can deduce a set of stems and affixes and a phonological grammar when presented with a corpus of surface forms to which some phonological processes have applied. The central question under investigation is whether introducing a learning bias informed by the P-Map (Steriade 2008) enables the learner to outperform one that considers an unrestricted hypothesis space.

This model is unique in that it is tasked with segmenting a set of surface forms, determining whether the proposed morphemes are related, and generating a constraint-based grammar with no prior information about meanings associated with forms or phonological processes that may have applied to the data. Other models are often primarily concerned with segmentation (Goldsmith 2000 et seq.), or learn phonology given perfectly segmented input (Boersma & Pater 2016), or learn phonological rules rather than constraint weights or rankings (Albright & Hayes 2003, Calamaro & Jarosz 2015). The present model seeks to simulate learning both morphology and phonology with no endowment beyond knowledge of natural classes and a set of unweighted constraints.

Fourth-year graduate student Giovanni Roversi presented at the biannual GLOW in Asia 14 which took place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, March 6 to March 8, 2024. Giovanni presented his work “Condition C, Anti-cataphora, and “Reverse Crossover” in Äiwoo”. 

Last Saturday (March 1), faculty David Pesetsky presented a talk titled “Is there an LLM challenge for linguistics? Or a linguistics challenge for LLMs?” at a one-day workshop Magdalen College, University of Oxford. The workshop entitled “Does ChatGPT know language as humans do?” was organized by our own recent alum Danfeng Wu. 

This past weekend, visiting professor Jon Rawski was invited to the “Algebraic Models of Generative Linguistics” workshop at the Merkin Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics at Caltech. 

Workshop description: “This meeting brings together theoretical linguists, mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and computational linguists, for informal discussions on algebraic models of the Merge operation in generative linguistics, models of the syntax-semantics interface, and models of semantic spaces, along with the question of their realization in large language models.”

A big welcome back to the department, everyone! Here are news of what some of us got up to during the summer:

• June 24: Shrayana Haldar presented an invited talk at one of LSA’s workshops, How Many Mothers: Multidominance in Syntax. It was titled Linearizing Disintegrated Traces.
• July 19: Jad Wedbe presented a talk at the homogeneity workshop HNM2, titled Homogeneity as presuppositional exhaustification. 
• Aug 11: Yurika Aonuki presented a talk at UBC, titled Degree semantics in Gitksan and Japanese.
• Aug 14-15: Adèle Hénot-Mortier and Eunsun Jou presented posters at SICOGG 25! Adele presented Bridging the gap between French tough-constructions and pseudorelatives, while Eunsun presented Case Marking of Korean Nominal Adverbials Correlates with Subject Position.
  
• The 2023 LSA Linguistic Institute was hosted at UMass Amherst. Student participants from MIT included Taieba Tawakoli, Zhouyi Sun, and Shrayana Halder (see above). Several classes were taught by faculty and alums: 
  * Athulya Aravind ‘18 (Acquiring Word Meaning [cotaught])
  * Mark Baker ‘85 (Complementizers Relating to Noun Phrases: Rare Constructions within a Theory of Universal Grammar)
  * Seth Cable ‘07 (Introduction to Semantics)
  * Jessica Coon ‘10 (Structure of Mayan)
  * Ray Jackendoff ‘69 (The Parallel Architecture and its Components)
  * Hadas Kotek ‘14 (Careers in Language Technology)
  * Giorgio Magri ‘09 (What Exactly is Phonological Opacity? [co-taught] & Advanced Phonology)
  * Elise Newman ‘21 (Feeding and Bleeding in Syntax)
  * David Pesetsky ‘82 (Introduction to Syntax)
  * Juliet Stanton ‘17 (Introduction to Phonology)
  * Michelle Yuan ‘18 (The morpho-syntax of case and licensing) 
• Creteling 2023 was a smashing success! Pictured here is (most of) the CreteLing 2023 Faculty, Staff, and TAs along the beautiful coast: 
  

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Speaker: Michelle Yuan (UCSD)
Title: Morphological conditions on movement chain resolution: Inuktitut noun incorporation revisited
Time: Friday November 4, 3:30pm, 32-141

Prior research on the Copy Theory of Movement has suggested that the realization of movement chains may be regulated by well-formedness conditions governing complex word formation, such as the Stray Affix Filter (e.g. Landau 2006; Kandybowicz 2007). This talk provides new evidence for this idea, based on an investigation of noun incorporation in Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). At the same time, this talk aims to offer new insights into the nature of incorporation in Inuktitut (and Inuit as a whole), informed by its interactions with clausal syntax.

 

Noun incorporation in Inuktitut (and Inuit) is cross-linguistically unusual, in that a small set of verbs is obligatorily incorporating (i.e. affixal), while for most other verbs incorporation is not possible. I provide novel data showing that, in Inuktitut, incorporated nominals are syntactically active, able to participate in case and agreement alternations and undergo phrasal movement, despite surfacing within the verb complex. That these nominals nonetheless invariably surface within the verb complex even when extracted follows straightforwardly from the aforementioned interaction between chain resolution and morphological well-formedness. Moreover, in contrast to most previous characterizations of incorporation (in Inuit and cross-linguistically), I conclude that noun incorporation at least in Inuktitut takes place to satisfy the morphological requirements of the incorporating verb—and not in response to the structural deficiency of the noun.

Speaker: Magdalena Kaufmann (UConn)
Title: How to be impossible or remote
Time: Friday October 14, 3:30pm

Abstract: Natural languages mark so-called subjunctive conditionals that allow speakers to specify consequences of states of affairs they present as unlikely or counterfactual. Different morphosyntactic strategies within and across languages show what often seem to be idiosyncratic interactions between temporal and modal information. Building on in-depth studies of individual languages and more fine-grained distinctions between types of hypotheticality, the recent literature sees a trend towards a distinction between unrealized past possibilities and co-temporal counterfactual states of affairs.

In this talk, I draw on novel data from Serbian (joint work with Neda Todorović) and German in comparison to English and Japanese (joint work with Stefan Kaufmann), to support this idea and develop a compositional analysis.

Speaker: Soo-Hwan Lee (NYU)
Title: Introducing arguments in and out of the thematic domain: Evidence from Korean case markers
Time: Tuesday, September 13th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: Extensive research has focused on how VoiceP (Kratzer 1996), ApplP (Pylkkänen 2008), and i* (Wood & Marantz 2017), an overarching term for Voice and Appl, establish argument structure inside the thematic domain (below TP). A question arises as to whether argument structure can be established outside the thematic domain (above TP). This work provides empirical evidence from Korean in arguing that an argument can be introduced by Voice/Appl (i*) in the left periphery. Specifically, it lends support to the claim that the discourse participant ‘addressee’ is represented in syntax (Hill 2007; Haegeman & Hill 2013; Miyagawa 2017; 2022; Portner et al. 2019 among others). In this regard, this work draws parallels between the thematic domain and the speech act domain, which have been considered to be two separate domains.

Speaker: Ryan Bennett (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: Vowel Deletion as Grammatically-Controlled Gestural Overlap in Uspanteko
Time: Friday September 9, 3:30pm

Abstract: Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be phonetic, being variable, gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement. Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to [C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).

Speaker: João Costa (Minister of Education, Portugal; and Professor of Linguistics, Nova University of Lisbon)
Title: Language Acquisition and Education Policies
Time: Friday, June 10th, 3:30pm - 5pm

Abstract:

After several decades of findings in the field of generative approaches to language acquisition, this research has still not had an impact on the definition of education policies. Sometimes this is because linguists are too far away from the debates on education, sometimes because education policies are not aware of the full potential of the findings for more effective and relevant policies.

After an overview of current global debates on the “whats”, “whos” and “hows” of education, I will argue that linguists and linguistics matter.

About the speaker:

João Costa has had a unique and brilliant double scientific and political career both as a linguist specializing in syntax and language acquisition and as a leader in research-driven educational innovation currently serving as the Minister of Education in Portugal. Dr. Costa received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Leiden in 1998 (and in 1995 was a visiting student at MIT Linguistics), and is a renowned researcher in formal linguistics, language acquisition and development, and educational linguistics. He is the author of several books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He has served as Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and President of the Scientific Council of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. He has also served as a member of the Scientific Council of the National Reading Plan, the National Commission of the International Institute for the Portuguese Language, and the Consulting Council of the Camões Institute. He was also President of the European Association of Linguistic Students (SOLE) and the Portuguese Linguistic Association.

In March 2022, Dr. Costa was named Minister of Education in the Socialist Party government led by Prime Minister António Costa. From 2015, he served as Secretary of State for Education in the two previous Socialist governments. The Minister of Education formulates, conducts, enforces and assesses the national policy on the education system, in the context of pre-school education, basic education and secondary education, and extra-schooling education. The Minister of Education also articulates the national education policy and the national vocational training policy under the scope of the national policies for fostering the population’s qualification.

https://www.portugal.gov.pt/en/gc23/ministries/education/minister

Speaker: Norvin Richards
Date and time: Tuesday March 1, 1-2 pm
Location: 32-D461

Title: Bans on extraction of ergatives (cont’d)

Speaker: Yeong-Joon Kim (MIT)
Title: Cluster simplification and correspondence at acoustic boundaries
Time: Monday, December 7th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: In this talk, I discuss the C2 dominance effect in cluster simplification: in intervocalic C1C2 clusters, C1 is a typical target of deletion but C2 is not. This positional asymmetry has been a problem for parallel versions of Optimality Theory, especially when consonant deletion takes place in clusters derived by syncope (Wilson 2001, Jun 2002, McCarthy 2011). For the formal analysis of the C2 dominance effect in cluster simplification and its interaction with syncope, I propose a new approach, based on correspondence constraints for auditory properties within Flemming’s (2008) Realized Input model. Potential benefits and problems of this new proposal will also be discussed in the talk.

Speaker: Bruna Karla Pereira (UFVJM)
Title: Silent nouns and gender agreement in Brazilian Portuguese copular sentences
Time: Tuesday, December 1st, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: This work in progress investigates nominal agreement in sentences such as (1), in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), where the subject is feminine whereas the adjective, in the predicate position, is masculine. While current proposals (Rodrigues and Foltran 2013, 2014, and 2015, Conto 2016, Siqueira 2017, and Martin et al. 2020) focus on the “disagreement” between the subject and the adjective, I argue that there is agreement between the adjective and a silent noun, in the internal structure of the post-copula DP. This proposal is coherent with a broader project on constructions with apparent mismatch of agreement in BP (Pereira 2016a, 2016b, 2017, and 2018).

(1) Moto                           é  perigoso.                          (Family conversation, Belo Horizonte, 11/19/2020)
      Motorcycle-FEM.SG is dangerous-MASC.SG
      A motorcycle is dangerous.

Kayne (2005, 2019), Pesetsky (2013), and Höhn (2016) consider the existence of a null category to account for the apparent mismatch of agreement, respectively, in number in Italian and French, in gender in Russian, and in person in Spanish and Greek. Likewise, I assume that a pronominal null category, in the DP predicate, triggers the gender agreement in sentences like (1). Therefore, the predicate of the copular sentence is not simply an adjective, but a DP made up with an indefinite null pronoun (algo ‘something’) plus an adjective, as observed in (2) and (3). This silent (pro)noun bears masculine gender features (and singular number) and triggers agreement in gender with the adjective. In this operation (Pesetsky and Torrego 2007), the adjective (probe), containing uninterpretable gender features, becomes valued [uF val] via agreement with the silent noun algo (goal), containing interpretable and valued gender features [iF val].

(2) Moto                           é  [DP (ALGO)              perigoso                       ].
      Motorcycle-FEM.SG is         (SOMETHING) dangerous-MASC.SG
      A motorcycle is (something) dangerous.

(3) [DP D [AgrP (ALGO_MASC)_i Agr [AP perigoso_MASC A [NP t_i]]]].

In sum, this analysis demonstrates that there is no “disagreement”, in the copular sentences at stake, but agreement between the adjective and a silent noun, in the internal structure of the post-copula DP.

Speaker: Canaan Breiss (UCLA)
Title: Between Grammar and Lexicon: New Experimental Evidence for Lexical Conservatism
Time: Monday, November 30th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Abstract: In this talk I will discuss my dissertation research on Lexical Conservatism (Steriade 1997, et seq.), a theory of the relationship between lexicon and grammar which holds that markedness-improving phonological alternations are enabled by the presence of phonologically-optimizing morphologically-related forms in the lexicon. For example, English cómpensate undergoes rightward stress shift when affixed with -able, to yield compénsable, while phonologically-similar ínundate does not (ínundable, *inúndable): Lexical Conservatism holds that this is due to the presence of a phonologically-optimizing morphologically-related form compéns-(atory), while there is no similar form with a stem allomorph inúnd-. Noting this correlation, however, does not provide the detailed information necessary for a fully fleshed-out phonological model, nor a thorough understanding of how the grammar interacts with the lexicon when forming novel words. Drawing on two experiments on English and a third on Spanish, I demonstrate that Lexical Conservatism is robust in the laboratory setting, but holds as a probabilistic tendency rather than as a rule. That is, I find that we observe both the markedness-avoiding behavior pointed out by the original discussion of Lexical Conservatism in Steriade (1997), but that the likelihood of this behavior is responsive to processing factors like the accessibility of the Remote Base, as manipulated by priming. This implies a dynamic trading relationship between the phonological grammar and the lexicon that is not well-captured by extant theories of lexicon-phonology interaction. I discuss which of these findings we might want to incorporate into a phonological theory, and propose a model couched in a Maximum Entropy framework (Goldwater & Johnson 2003) to account for the phonological facts, while allowing principled integration of lexical characteristics that are, I argue, better thought of as non-phonological.

Speaker: Sherry Yong Chen (MIT), Christine Soh (UPenn), Athulya Aravind (MIT)
Title: Intermediate Wh-Copies in a Non-Wh-Copying Language
Time: Friday, December 4th, 2pm - 3:30pm

Abstract: A core issue within current theories of movement is to explain the conditions that drive and constrain the phonological realization of copies left by movement. Although the moved item syntactically and semantically occupies two positions, in languages including English only the highest copy is pronounced, while all lower copies are deleted. At the same time, multiple copy spell-out is attested in many languages, and is also found in the grammars of children acquiring English, a language where we otherwise do not find such phenomena. English-acquiring preschoolers produce long-distance wh-questions with an extra medial wh-word, as in (1) (Thornton 1990, Lutken et al. 2020), a result taken by some to be indicative of the realization of intermediate copies in children’s grammar:

(1) a. Who do you think who is in the box?
b. What do you think what she brought?

In this work-in-progress, we ask whether English-speaking adults respond differently to violations of copy spell out rules from other kinds of ungrammaticality, to see if there is continuity between adult and child grammars in their treatment of intermediate copies. We will present two experiments where we compare adults’ behavioral responses to sentences like (2a) and (2b). Neither is a well-formed sentence of English and both have a corpus frequency of 0. (2a), however, can be construed as a syntactically well-formed structure that violates constraints on copy spell-out, in contrast to (2b) whose infinitival complement does not provide an intermediate landing site for movement.

(2) a. Who did the consultant expect who the new proposal had pleased?
b. Who did the consultant expect who the new proposal to have pleased?

Pilot results are less-than-promising. We’d like to reflect on some of our operationalization assumptions in light of these results, and would welcome comments and suggestions on how to improve our approach.

Speaker: Candace Kaleimamoowahinekapu Galla (UBC)
Title: Hawaiian language-based digital realities and futures
Time: Friday, December 4th, 3:30pm - 5pm
Zoom link: (Please email ling-coll-org@mit.edu for more information)

Abstract: This presentation discusses the realities of digital technologies – the “promise”, potential, complexities and hindrances – that Indigenous peoples face when engaging in language reclamation, revitalization, maintenance, and education. For language learners and speakers that choose contemporary pathways, digital technologies provide creative, interactive, and/or immersive opportunities for language learning, teaching, and being. Examples of digital technologies that are adopted and adapted for Indigenous language work will be shared to demonstrate how digital tools are used in the Hawaiian language context to bridge language learners and speakers, facilitate access towards resources, and create and develop relevant materials and content that is centered in community.

Speaker: Cater Chen (MIT)
Title: The tough path to passive
Time: Tuesday, November 17th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: The Mandarin BEI-construction, where BEI introduces an eventuality proposition that the subject of BEI undergoes, is known to show mixed A-/Aʹ-behavior similar to the English tough-construction. An analysis of the BEI-construction that has been widely accepted involves base-generation of the subject of BEI and Aʹ-movement of a null operator to the left periphery of the eventuality complement, akin to Chomsky’s treatment of the tough-construction. In this talk, I argue that a different derivation of the BEI-construction must be possible (and the default), due to its distinct behaviour when interacting with IP-external topicalization (that shows Aʹ-behavior under the standard diagnostics) and IP-internal topicalization and focalization (that shows mixed A-/Aʹ-behavior), which have also been proposed to involve null operator movement. Specifically, I use the subject-oriented long-distance reflexive ziji as a diagnostic for subjecthood to reveal that two moved objects must conform to a nesting path when BEI-construction and IP-external topicalization are involved, but they must conform to a crossing path when BEI-construction and IP-internal topicalization/focalization are involved. By comparison, when two objects undergo IP-external topicalization and/or IP-internal topicalization/focalization, no systematic nesting/crossing asymmetry is found.

Speaker: Frank Staniszewski (MIT)
Title: Polarity sensitive weak necessity modals
Time: Wednesday, November 18th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract: I develop a new analysis of ‘weak necessity’ modals ‘should’ and ‘supposed to’ that is motivated by novel observations of weaker than expected meanings in some environments. For example, ’supposed to’ in (1a) gives rise to a meaning that can be paraphrased as the weaker modal statement in (1b).

(1) A: Can you please pick up a book for me at the office?
      B: I don’t know… Are we supposed to be back on campus without a Covid test?
      B′: I don’t know… Are we allowed to be back on campus without a Covid test?

I argue that this and other evidence of weak readings shows that these modal verbs exhibit a type of variable force. They express universal force in positive sentences and existential force under negation. The analysis will build on an analogy with free-choice disjunction that assumes a basic weak meaning that strengthens in upward-entailing environments (Fox 2007; Bassi & Bar-Lev 2016).  I hypothesize that the precise distribution of the strengthened readings is governed by the polarity-sensitive nature of the modals (cf. Iatridou Zeijlstra 2013; Homer 2015).  In particular, I argue that the polarity sensitivity of the modals is the result of the association of their domains with a covert even-like operator (cf. Lahiri 1998; Crnič 2014, 2019  for NPI ‘any’).

This hypothesis makes intricate predictions about the range of readings that should be observed in various logical environments that I show to be borne out. It predicts that the modals should receive strong interpretations in positive sentences, and weak readings in negative sentences. For environments that contain both negative and positive components, such as the question in (1), and in the scope of non-monotonic quantifiers, two possible readings are predicted: one in which the positive component strengthens, and the negative component remains weak, and another in which both components remain weak, and the contribution of the covert ’even’ results in strong constraints on the discourse context. I discuss the logic of these predictions, and also argue that the analysis provides a natural link between polarity sensitivity and ‘weak necessity’ modals.

Speaker: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi (MIT) & Vincent Rouillard (MIT)
Title: Tying Free Choice in Questions to Distributivity
Time: Wednesday, October 30th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract:Disjunctive answers to universally modalized wh-interrogatives have been noted to lead to free choice inferences.

(1) Q: Which books are we required to read?
A: The French books or the Russian books.
Implies: You are allowed to read the French books and you are allowed to read the Russian books.

The presence of such inferences has lead many to propose that wh-items can quantify over generalized quantifiers (Spector 2007,2008; a.o.). However, this move does not capture the lack of such inference when the restrictor of the wh-item is singular.

(1) Q: Which book are we required to read?
A: The French book or the Russian book.
Does not imply: You are allowed to read the French book and you are allowed to read the Russian book.

We propose to account for this contrast by capturing the free choice inference using a covert existential distributivity operator (Bar-Lev 2017). We show that this moves derives many restrictions that the generalized quantifier theory must stipulate.

Speaker: Anne Charity Hudley (UCSB)
Title: Talking College: A Community Based Language and Racial Identity Development Model for Black College Student Justice
Time: Thursday, October 31st, 12:30pm - 1:50pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: “Critical knowledge about language and culture is an integral part of the quest for educational equity and empowerment, not only in PreK-12 but also in higher education. As Black students transition from high school to college, they seek to add their voices and perspectives to academic discourse and to the scholarly community in a way that is both advantageous and authentic.

The Talking College Project is a Black student and Black studies centered way of learning more about the particular linguistic choices of Black students while empowering them to be proud of their cultural and linguistic heritage. The Talking College Project is funded by the University of California-Historically Black College and University (UC-HBCU) Initiative and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program. Students take introductory linguistics courses that examine the role of language in the Black college experience and collect information from college students through interviews and ethnography. We value the perspectives of undergraduates from a range of disciplinary backgrounds as researchers and we have a special focus on students at institutions that do not offer linguistics as a major.

One key question of The Talking College Project is: how does the acquisition of different varieties of Black language and culture overlap with identity development, particularly intersectional racial identity development? To answer this question, we conducted over 50 interviews with Black students at several Minority-Serving Institutions, Historically Black College, and Predominantly White Universities. Based on information collected from the interviews, it is evident that Black students often face linguistic bias and may need additional support and guidance as they navigate the linguistic terrain of higher education. We present themes and examples from the interviews that illustrate the linguistic pathways that students choose, largely without sociolinguistic knowledge that could help guide their decisions.

To address the greater need to share information about Black language with students, we also highlight our findings from interviews with Black students who have taken courses in linguistics to demonstrate the impact of education about Black language and culture on Black students’ academic opportunities and social lives. These findings serve to help us create a model of assessment for what linguistic information Black students need in order to be successful in higher education and how faculty can help to establish opportunities for students to access content about language, culture, and education within the college curriculum. We address the work we need to do as educators and linguists to provide more Black college students with information that both empowers them raciolinguistically AND respects their developing identity choices.”

Speaker: Colin Davis (MIT)
Title: The nature of overlapping A-bar chains as revealed by parasitic gaps (NELS practice)
Time: Tuesday, October 22nd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: The intricate properties of parasitic gaps (PGs) have long enriched research on the syntax of (A-bar) movement (Engdahl 1983, Nissenbaum 2000, Legate 2003, Overfelt 2015, Branan 2017, Kotek & Erlewine 2018, Fox & Nissenbaum 2018). In this work, I use PG licensing in English to reveal a novel generalization about derivations where two A-bar movement chains pass through vP. 

Generalization: If XP1 and XP2 move to become A-bar specifiers of vP such that XP1 c-commands XP2, then the final surface position of XP1 c-commands the final surface position of XP2.

While this is surprising for some theories of movement, I argue that it is a natural consequence of Cyclic Linearization (CL; Fox & Pesetsky 2005, a.o.), which predicts that the relative order established for the constituents of a given phase must be preserved throughout the derivation. I also show that CL interacts with the distribution of covert movement to yield Pesetsky’s (1982) Path Containment Condition (PCC).

Speaker: Vincent Rouillard (MIT)
Title: An Alternative Based Analysis of Temporal in-Adverbials
Time: Wednesday, October 23rd, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Following the idea that polarity sensitivity in language results from the logical relation between alternatives, I analyze the changing polarity sensitivity of temporal in-adverbials as the result of a change in the logical structure of alternatives. More precisely, I compare the lack of polarity sensitivity of such modifiers in (1), where they specify the length of an event, with their status as NPIs in (2), where they assign a left-boundary to the Perfect Time Span.

(1) a. Mary wrote the paper in minutes. b. Mary didn’t write the paper in minutes.

(2) a. *Mary has had a seizure in years. b. Mary hasn’t had a seizure in years.

I propose to understand the emergence of polarity sensitivity in (2) as resulting from an interaction between aspect and alternatives. Aspect creates a logical relationship between the alternatives of the sentences in (2), a relationship absent from the alternatives to the sentences in (1).

Speaker: Philip Shushurin (NYU)
Title: A head movement approach to second position clitics: The case of Russian polar particle li
Time: Wednesday, October 23rd, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: In many languages of the world, certain clitics are restricted to appear in the second position of the clause. Russian polar particle li, for instance, cannot follow branching phrases (2) and cannot contain focussed material to its right (3).

(1) Kvartiru li Anna kupila?
apartment LI Anna bought
`Did Anna buy an apartment?’

(2) *Doroguju kvartiru li Anna kupila?
expensive apartment LI Anna bought
int. `Did Anna buy an expensive apartment?’

(3) Doroguju li kvartiru Anna kupila?
expensive LI apartment Anna bought
`Did Anna buy an expensive apartment?’ — OK
`Did Anna buy an expensive apartment?’ — not possible

I suggest that the ban on phrasal constituents in the pre-li position is a consequence of the Head Movement Constraint: the associated constituent must head move and left-adjoin to li, which is supposed to be the head of the polarity phrase (Sigma) merged directly above the associated constituent. Phrasal constituents, like the one in (2) are unable to do so yielding ungrammaticality. Only those constituents that move to li can get polar interpretation, explaining the pattern in (3). The resulting complex head (X+li) acts as a constituent largely equivalent to a wh-word: at later stages of the derivation, it is attracted to the left periphery of the clause. li can be seen as an analogue of a wh-morpheme, which merges with different morphemes to form a wh-word. Treating X+li as a constituent allows to reduce the second position requirement of li to the left edge requirement on the X+li, a requirement often postulated for wh-words. Next, I show that X+li is different from wh-words in that X+li must always be at the left edge of the DP, while wh-words need not to. I suggest several explanations of this asymmetry.

Speaker: Miklós Törkenczy (Eötvös Loránd University)

Title: Hungarian vowel harmony: beyond the standard data set.

Time: Wednesday, October 16th, 5pm - 6:30pm

Location: 32-D831

Abstract:

Vowel harmony (especially backness harmony) is clearly the best known and most analysed aspect of Hungarian phonology. Nevertheless, even current analyses often rely on a data set that only affords a simplified view and is sometimes misleading. In the talk I will focus on variation and vowel neutrality in backness harmony and discuss phenomena that fall outside the “standard” data set typically used. I will concentrate primarily on the relationship between morphology and harmony and will show that morphology interacts with backness harmony in a way that is far richer than the usual canonical view according to which morphological complexity does not matter within the domain of harmony. If time permits I also want to briefly discuss the results of some experiments we did that extend and partially question experimental results on variation in Hungarian harmony recently published in the literature by Hayes et. al 2006, 2009. Throughout the talk my intention is to highlight problems that any analysis has to tackle in order to give a realistic account of Hungarian backness harmony.

Speaker: Mitya Privoznov and Justin Colley (MIT)

Title: On the topic of subjects: composite Probes in Khanty

Time: Thursday, October 17th, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

We examine movement to subject position (MSP) in the Kazym dialect of Khanty (Finno-Ugric, Uralic). We show that Khanty MSP is a ‘mixed’ movement, having both A-properties (case and agreement, variable binding) and A′-properties (locality, topic interpretation). We explain these properties in terms of a composite Probe on T, which searches for a Goal with both Topic and ϕ-features. We will also propose a notion of Topic based solely on the semantics of the declarative C (which we assume to be the ~ operator from Rooth 1985) and briefly discuss the typology of the relation between C and T (and topics and subjects).

Full abstract: https://nels50.mit.edu/sites/default/files/abstracts/382-ColleyPrivoznov.pdf

Speaker: Filipe Hisao Kobayashi and Sherry Yong Chen (MIT)

Title: Comprehending and: Development Path of English Conjunction in Child Language

Time: Friday, October 18th, 2pm - 3pm

Location: 32-D461

Abstract:

And presents a challenging case for language learning because of its abstract meaning and cross-categorial flexibility. Nevertheless, previous studies report that even 2-year-olds use and productively in various syntactic environments (Sentence-and, VP-and, & NP-and), leaving open the possibility that and is acquired as an intrinsically cross-categorial operator. 

In this on-going project, we exploits scope interaction with quantifiers to distinguish S-and and NP-and:

(1) Somebody has a pineapple and somebody has a donut. (adult: and > somebody)

(2) Somebody has a pineapple and a donut. (adult: somebody > and)

Building on a recent study by Koring et al, we used an act-out paradigm to test children’s comprehension of sentences like (1) and (2). We present preliminary results suggesting that (i) children as young as 3-years-old have adult-like understanding of S-and, but their performance on NP-and is less adult-like; (ii) For NP-and specifically, children’s performance differs in the adult-true vs adult-false scenarios; (iii) there is no clear improvement for both ands from 3-year-olds to 5-year-olds. The difference between our results and Koring et al’s results will be discussed.

Speaker: Reuben Harry Cohn-Gordon (Stanford University)
Title: Bayesian Pragmatic Models for Natural Language
Date and time: Thursday, 10/18, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract: The Rational Speech Acts model (RSA) formalizes Gricean reasoning through nested models of speakers and listeners. While this paradigm offers an elegant way to simulate pragmatic behavior in NLP tasks such as image captioning and translation, scaling from simple models to natural language presents several challenges. In particular, I discuss the problem of choosing alternative utterances among an unbounded set of sentences, including work on image captioning and on-going work on translation.

I have proposed that human languages reconstruct back to an intransitive absolutive-like grammar, which provides the foundation and common denominator for crosslinguistic variation in the expression of transitivity (e.g. Progovac 2015, 2016). The proposal is based both on an internal reconstruction using syntactic theory (in particular, Chomsky’s 1995 Minimalism), and on comparative typological considerations, in an attempt to directly bring together formal, typological, and evolutionary considerations.

The internal reconstruction is achieved by peeling off, from the top, the syntactic layers postulated to form the basic skeleton of the modern sentence/clause (CP>TP > vP > VP/SC), leading to reconstructing the initial, ancestral grammar as intransitive, featuring only the VP/SC layer with one single argument. Approximations of such one-argument grammars are arguably found in the absolutive and middle constructions across a variety of languages, as well as in certain verb-noun compounds, both of which will be illustrated and discussed. Rather than staying with general, vague claims, I will use specific data and detail in an attempt to make this proposal testable, and will report the results of an fMRI experiment designed to test some predictions of this proposal (Progovac et al. 2018: doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00278).

I will furthermore introduce The Five Problems/Challenges routinely encountered in language evolution research (Progovac, In Press), and will use the proposal above as a test case to demonstrate how these challenges can begin to be addressed.

1. Identification of the initial stage(s) of language (The Decomposition Problem)
2. The genetic basis for language, i.e. how genetic basis for language came to be (The Selection Problem)
3. The language-brain-genes linkage (The Loop Problem)
4. Compatibility with the parameters of language variation and change (The Variation Problem)
5. Grounding in linguistic theory and analysis (The Theoretical Grounding Problem)

We have some summer news to share with you:

• The CreteLing Summer School took place in July at the University of Crete in Rethymnon, and several MIT faculty (and alumni) taught courses:
  
  • Adam Albright - Advanced Morphology: Syncretism and Paradigm Structure
  • Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou - The Linguistics of Desire
  • Sabine Iatridou - Introduction to Syntax
  • Shigeru Miyagawa - Language and Animal Communication in Evolution
  • Donca Steriade - Introduction to Phonology

The summer school was attended by many MIT students as well: Rafael Abramovitz (4th year), Daniel Asherov (2nd year), Tanya Bondarenko (2nd year), Colin Davis (4th year), Ömer Demirok (5th year), Verena Hehl (4th year), Maša Močnik (4th year), Elise Newman (3rd year), Frank Staniszewski (3rd year) and Stan Zompi (2nd year). Rafael, Daniel, Tanya and Ömer also served as course TAs. Check out nice photos from the event, such as this one below, on the summer school’s Facebook page.

• Justin Colley (4th year), Verena Hehl, Anton Kukhto (1st year) and Mitya Privoznov (4th year) went into the heart of Siberia for a fieldwork expedition in the village of Kazym, Central Khanty. Mitya reports: “We had a lot of fun, suffered from mosquitoes and hopefully gathered some useful data as well :).”

• In August, Tanya Bondarenko and Colin Davis participated in a joint fieldtrip with a group of researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University to study Barguzin Buryat in Baraghan village, the Republic of Buryatia, Russia.

• Conference presentations:
  • Neil Banerjee (3rd year) presented at the Canadian Linguistic Association (May 30-June 1) on CARP in Kinyarwanda, and at CHRONOS 13 (June 4-June 6) on the temporal orientation of necessity modals.
  • In early June, Elise Newman (3rd year) went to the University of Olomouc, Czech Republic and presented work on the English auxiliary system at OLINCO. Elise: “Several MIT alumni were there; Joe Emonds co-organized the conference and I found out that he and I are both Cubs fans!”.
  • Filipe Kobayashi (2nd year) and Sherry Chen (2nd year) presented joint work on distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese at the student session of the North American Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), held at CMU in late June. Maša Močnik also attended the summer school. 
  • On August 4, Danfeng Wu (3rd year), Shigeru Miyagawa (faculty), Masatoshi Koizumi (PhD ’95, now at Tohoku University) and Mamoru Saito (PhD ’85, now at Nanzan University) gave talks at the Workshop on Case Theory and Labeling of Structures at the University of Tokyo. Prior to that on July 28, Danfeng presented a poster co-authored with Shigeru and Masatoshi at MAPLL × TCP × TL × TaLK (MT3) at Keio University. After that, she also attended and presented at the Summer Seminar on Frontiers of Language and Cognition Research.
  • Norvin Richards (faculty) gave a series of talks on Contiguity Theory at SICOGG 20 in Seoul, held on August 8-10, and then another talk at Kyungpook National University in Daegu. 
  • Just a few days ago, Verena Hehl gave a presentation at SLE in Tallinn on Bildungsplan Baden Württeberg 2016: Promoting Grammar as Science from the bottom up – a case study.

• Education:
  • Neil Banerjee, Cora Lesure (3rd year) and Dóra Takács (2nd year) taught a 7-week introductory linguistics course for middle and high school students as part of HSSP, from June till August. Their course, entitled `How language works’, covered topics ranged from sound production and the IPA over cross-linguistic variation and case to NPIs and implicatures. Dóra writes: “About 35 students participated in the class, which was hopefully a lot of fun and definitely an interesting and valuable experience for everyone.”
  • Naomi Francis (5th year), Verena Hehl and Maša Močnik graduated from the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program (KTCP) in June. The participants report: “Graduates of the KTCP attend 8 sessions on a wide range of topics in teaching and learning and are exposed to current research on pedagogical methodology through assigned readings and in-class discussions. We also had the opportunity to create and receive feedback on teaching philosophy statements for academic job applications.”
  • In May, Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), an MIT initiative to support global education, announced a grant funding to MITILI  student Newell Lewey and to prof. Norvin Richards for the project Skicinuwi-npisun: A Community-Centered Project for Documentation and Teaching of the Passamaquoddy Language. The project supports language teaching and curriculum development to help preserve the severely endangered Passamaquoddy language of Northern Maine. The grant includes funding for Newell’s language classes, and for a group of graduate students from the department to travel with Norvin to Passamaquoddy country to work with elders. Here you can read a little more about the project. Congratulations Newell and Norvin!
• Alumni news:
  • Our distinguished alum Heidi Harley (PhD 1995), now at  the University of Arizona, has been elected a 2019 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America! Heidi’s colleagues as LSA Fellows include 38 other MIT alums and members of our faculty who have been elected in previous years — more than a quarter of the (now) 138 Fellows of the Society. Congratulations Heidi (and our warmest congratulations to the other newly elected Fellows as well)!
  • Another one of our distinguished alums, John McCarthy (PhD 1979) - a pioneer in the development of phonological theory for over four decades - has been named Provost and more at UMass Amherst, where he has taught since 1985. Very exciting news — congratulations John! 

Speaker: Jessica Coon (McGill)
Title:  Feature Gluttony and the Syntax of Hierarchy Effects   (joint work with Stefan Keine, USC)
Date/Time: Thursday, August 23, 1:00pm-2:30pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

This talk offers a new take on a family of hierarchy effect-inducing configurations, with a focus on Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects (Anagnostopoulou 2005, Nevins 2007) copular constructions (Coon, Keine, and Wagner 2017), and dative-nominative configurations (Sigurdsson & Holmberg 2008, Rezac 2008). Following previous work, we take these effects to arise in contexts in which two accessible DPs are found in the same domain as a single agreeing probe (Béjar & Rezac 2003; Anagnostopoulou 2005). We draw on Cyclic Agree in the sense of Béjar & Rezac (2009), according to which an articulated probe continues probing if at least some features are left unvalued after an Agree relation.

Béjar & Rezac (2003) and many related accounts seek to derive hierarchy effects from an underapplication of Agree and concomitant failures of nominal licensing, formalized as a Person Licensing Condition (see also Béjar & Rezac 2009, Baker 2011, Preminger to appear). By contrast, we argue that hierarchy effects are the result of an overapplication of Agree. We propose that in hierarchy effect-inducing structures, a probe participates in more than one valuation relation, effectively “biting off more than it can chew”, a configuration we refer to as feature gluttony. Feature gluttony––i.e., the coexistence of multiple values on a single probe––can then create conflicting requirements for subsequent operations, leading to a crash.

Our account captures commonalities and differences across hierarchy constructions, both in terms of the types and specifications of the features involved, as well as in the result of hierarchy violations and their possible repairs. In the case of PCC configurations, a probe which interacts with more than one DP creates an intervention problem for clitic-doubling. In violations involving agreement, gluttony in features may result in a configuration with no available morphological output. Important motivation for our account comes from the fact that hierarchy effects commonly disappear in the absence of agreement. This is unexpected on a standard licensing account, but it receives a principled explanation in terms of gluttony: because the probe that otherwise creates the conflict is absent, the conflict disappears.

Speaker: Koichi Tateishi (Kobe College/MIT)
Title: Trimoraicity and Monomoraicity: Cases in Japanese
Date/Time: Monday, May 14, 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

This presentation is about Japanese syllables, which appear to be one of the best-studied areas in phonology, starting from McCawley (1968) and traditional Japanese linguistics papers preceding it. I will point out that /N/, a moraic nasal, which is never a nuclear component of a syllable and hence can never be accented according to McCawley and later works, actually stands out as an independent syllabic nucleus at some morphological peripheries. This syllabic /N/ can be accent-bearing and can undergo Initial Lowering, another signatory tonal phenomenon that is typically observed only with a syllabic nucleus. The presentation also points out that the syllabic /N/ is only for the borrowings and mimetics, while we find an independent phenomenon in the Yamato (native Japanese) stratum that derives a string that appears to derive a syllabic /Q/, moraic obstruent, and that this constitutes a counterargument to Ito and Mester’s (1995) strata-dependent reranking hypothesis.

Speakers: Thomas Schatz and Naomi Feldman (UMD/MIT)
Title: A simple framework to study how phonological structure can emerge from the interaction of social, physical and cognitive evolutionary pressures
Date/Time: Monday, May 7, 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Nowak and Krakauer (1999) proposed a framework to study how combinatoriality in language can emerge from evolutionary pressures to communicate in the presence of noise in the communication channel. I will present this framework and discuss possible extensions that might lead to functional accounts for certain phonological phenomena. I will focus in particular on an extension of the framework that adds a pressure to limit the production costs of words in the language, for which I will present a few preliminary results.
This is very preliminary work in collaboration with Matthias Hofer and Naomi Feldman. The main object of the presentation will be to get feedback on the potential of the framework and to advertise the project to students with a formal background in phonology - which both Matthias and me lack - who might be interested in collaborating with us.

Speaker: Carolyn Spadine (MIT)
Title: Evaluating Syntactic Approaches to Interrogative Flip: Test cases from English and Malayalam
Date and time: Tuesday May 8, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

“Interrogative flip” describes a phenomena in which elements that appear to orient to the speaker in a declarative utterance shift perspective and orient to the addressee in an interrogative context — evidentials, perspective-sensitive anaphora, modals, adverbs, predicates of personal taste, and others have been reported to show this behavior. In proposing a mechanism for encoding discourse-pragmatic information in syntax, interrogative flip is one of the core phenomena that Tenny and Speas 2003 intend to address, and the same problem has been subsequently taken up in Woods 2014, Zu 2018, and many others.

This talk presents preliminary work on two constructions that display interrogative flip, and examines the ways in which existing syntactic approaches to modeling interrogative flip account for or fail to account for this data. The first is discourse participant-oriented modifiers in English, as in (1):

1. a. [As a film critic], this movie deserves an Oscar.
b. [As a film critic], does this movie deserve an Oscar?

In (1a), the preferred and perhaps only interpretation of the bracketed constituent is that the speaker is a film critic, whereas in (1b), English speakers report both speaker- and addressee-oriented interpretations for the same constituent. A similar but more constrained pattern emerges for embedded instances of these modifiers, posing a challenge for some proposals. The second comes from a reportative evidential marker ennu (glossed as REP) in Malayalam (2a), which can either scope under or over the question particle, yielding two different interpretations — either a question about a report heard by the addressee (2b), or a declarative report of a question overhead by the speaker (2c).

2. a. prime minister varunnu ennu
prime minister come.PROG REP
“I heard that the Prime Minister is coming”
b. prime minister varunnu enn-oo?
prime minister come.PROG REP-Q
“Did you hear if the Prime Minister is coming?”
c. prime minister varunn-oo ennu
prime minister come.PROG-Q REP
“I heard someone ask if the Prime Minister is coming”

In both cases, I suggest the data supports the general pattern that existing proposals intend to account for, but also raise concerns about the specific structures proposed to implement them.

Title: on Schlenker (2012) 
Date and time: Monday April 23th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

Vincent will be presenting Philippe Schlenker’s paper ‘Maximize Presupposition and Gricean Reasoning’.

As per usual, reading the paper is not mandatory, although feel free to read it if you’re feeling brave.

Speaker: Jaehyun Son (Duksung Women’s University)
Title: Pitch Accent Systems in Korean
Date and time: Monday, 23 April 2018, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Research on the Korean accent has been carried out within the Korean linguistics community, but in that context, the Korean accent system has traditionally been compared to the tone system of Chinese, in which pitch contours are syllabic. In contrast, Japanese researchers have proposed that the Korean accent system should be analyzed from the point of view of word-level and phrase-level accentual systems seen in Japanese dialects. One possible reason for this difference of opinion is that recently in Japan, despite the growing influence of the accentual systems of Tokyo Japanese and the dialects of other major cities, a great variety of smaller dialects have been observed and documented, and as a result of this work researchers have discovered accent types that have played a crucial role in uncovering the history and evolution of the Japanese accentual system. In Korea, on the other hand, accent has been lost in the regions surrounding and including Seoul (the national capital) but there are still dialects, mainly in the south-eastern regions of the Korean peninsula, that retain an accentual system and can shed light on the history of accent in Korea. For the present study, I took the Japanese-oriented view rather than the traditional Chinese-oriented view and analyzed the accentual systems of Korean dialects using data from a purely synchronic field survey of several locations across the Korean-speaking region. The field survey includes dialects that have already been documented by Korean and Japanese researchers, but by including the whole Korean-speaking region in its scope and using a new theoretical framework, the current study was able to highlight the shortcomings of previous work. The current study presents the Korean accent types and their geographical distribution. Moreover, by comparing the various accent types, it was possible to look back and investigate how the Korean accent system has evolved up to the present day.

Speaker: Hendrik Strobelt (IBM)
Title:  Visualization for Sequence Models for Debugging and Fun
Date and time: Monday, April 23, 5-6pm
Location: 46-5165
Abstract:

Visual analysis is a great tool to explore deep learning models when there is no strong mathematical hypothesis yet
available. I will present two visual tools where we used design study methodology to allow exploration of
patterns in hidden state changes in RNNs/LSTMs (LSTMVis) and exploration of Sequence2Sequence models (Seq2Seq-Vis).
Both model types have shown superior performance for NLP like language modeling or language translation.
Examples about both tasks will be shown on a variety of models.

As beautiful distraction, we also utilize data science methods to investigate large data in a more artistic way.
Formafluens is such a data experiment where we analyze a large collections of doodles made by humans in the Google
Quickdraw tool.

Speaker: Hanzhi Zhu (MIT)
Title: Conditionals in although constructions
Date and time: Wednesday, April 18, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk, I’ll be looking at biclausal constructions with although/even though which convey the truth of two propositions as well as the oddness of their juxtaposition:

1. John went out for a walk, even though it’s raining.
2. Although Bailey is rich, she doesn’t give to charity.

The link between although constructions and conditionals has been explored in previous accounts, in which “although p, q” is analyzed as presupposing “normally, if p then ¬q”. However, these accounts ignore the compositional contribution of even, which appears in these constructions in English as well as cross-linguistically. Lund (2017), borrowing from Guerzoni and Lim’s (2007) account of even if, proposes an account in which “although p, q” asserts a conjunction and has a scalar likelihood presupposition: ¬p and q is less likely/expected than p and q. I’ll present a counterexample to this account which favors having a presupposition even closer to Guerzoni and Lim’s proposal for even if: “although p, q” presupposes that if ¬p, q is less likely/expected than if p, q. I’ll also discuss further consequences of this proposal regarding the role of the additive presupposition of even.

Title: on Stalnaker (2004)
Date and time: Monday April 9th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This week’s paper is Stalnaker’s Assertion Revisited: On the Interpretation of Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics, available here. 

Christopher will be presenting the paper.

Speaker: Yunjing Li (Tianjin Foreign Studies University & MIT)
Title:  Rule Interaction in Mandarin Tonal Phonology
Date and time: Monday, April 9th, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

In Mandarin Chinese, there are some rules governing tone sandhi changes. In some cases, more than one rule may be applicable, hence rule interaction occurs.

This talk will introduce some basic facts about Mandarin tonesand their representation, followed by a description of the interaction between the Third Tone Sandhi Rule and the Neutral Tone Rule in disyllabic words. The ordering of these two rules causes phonological opacity. An analysis in the framework of Harmonic Serialism is proposed.

Speaker: Sze-Wing Tang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong/MIT)
Title: On the Syntax of Sentence-final Elements
Date and time: Tuesday, April 10, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

Insights of Ross (1970) of the analysis of the clausal periphery have been revived under the cartographic approach (Rizzi 1997, 2004, Cinque 1999, see also Speas 2004, Tenny 2006, Hill 2007, Miyagawa 2012, 2017, and Wiltschko and Heim 2016). The goal of this talk is twofold. First, it is argued that there should be two distinct syntactic layers in the clausal periphery that are dedicated to “grounding” and “responding” (Wiltschko and Heim 2016), respectively, by examining the grammatical properties of the Mandarin sentence-final particle (“SFP”) ma and Cantonese SFP ge and the “h-family”. Second, it is argued that some sentence-final expressions, such as tags in tag questions in English should be in the highest syntactic position and form a coordination structure with a silent head, in the sense of Kayne (2016). A hierarchical structure/ordering “Proposition > SFP > Tag” is proposed, which may serve as a working hypothesis to study the syntax of speech act cross-linguistically.

Speaker: Frank Staniszewski (MIT)
Title: Wanting, Acquiescing, and Neg-raising
Date and time: Wednesday, April 11, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

I argue that neg-raised (NR) readings for negated sentences containing want are the result of want expressing an underlying weak (existential) quantificational force, which gives rise to the globally strong meanings under negation. To derive the universal interpretation that is attested for non-negated want, then, I adopt Bassi & Bar-Lev (2016)’s treatment of bare conditionals, and hypothesize that want undergoes strengthening in a manner analogous to Free Choice disjunction, as analyzed in Fox (2007).

As evidence for this view, I examine a puzzling paradigm discussed in Homer (2015), in which want appears to show scopal ambiguity w.r.t. the presuppositional adverbial no longer. I show how assuming an underlying existential semantics for want, motivated by a new observation about the data, provides a solution to the puzzle.

Homer’s puzzle: Assuming that the negative adverbial no longer presupposes that the proposition denoted by the clause that is in its scope used to be true, sentence (1a) is ambiguous between narrow and wide scope of want w.r.t. no longer (Homer 2015).

(1) a. Consumers no longer want to be kept in the dark about food.
b. I no longer want to be called an idiot.

Homer suggests that on its most salient reading, want takes wide scope over no longer, as it is not assumed that consumers ever had a desire to be kept in the dark about food, or that the speaker of (1b) used to want to be called an idiot. The absence of want from the presupposition of no longer on the most natural reading is taken to be evidence that want can QR over no longer, which is consistent with additional evidence that want may be a ‘mobile positive polarity item’ (PPI).

I provide evidence against a QR approach, and suggest that want is indeed within the scope of no longer in sentences like (1a-b). While I agree that they don’t presuppose that consumers used to have a desire to be kept in the dark (or be called an idiot), the meaning of want is not entirely absent from the presupposition. Instead, (1a-b) appear to require the weaker assumption that consumers in some way used to ‘be willing to’ or ‘be OK with’ being kept in the dark (or being called an idiot).

In the spirit of von Fintel and Iatridou (2017)’s discussion of weak variants of imperatives, I refer to these asacquiescence readings, which in addition to being detected in the presupposition of no longer, can also be detected in sentences like (2a-b).

(2) a. If you want to wait here for a minute, I’ll be right back.
b. Do you wanna give me a hand with this box?

The acquiescence readings in (2a-b), as well as the attested NR readings for want in other DE environments (sentential negation, scope of no NP, restrictor of comparatives/superlatives) suggest that an analogy with free choice is on the right track. There are, however, some DE environments (restrictor of no NP, additional questions/conditionals) that don’t show the predicted pattern. I address these, and other problems, and suggest possible solutions. I also explore how this analysis could extend to other priority modals, like should and for-infinitival relative clauses.

Speaker: Matthew Tyler (Yale) and Michelle Yuan (MIT)
Title: Nominal-clitic case mismatches (WCCFL Practice Talk) 
Date and time: Thursday, April 12, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

When arguments are clitic-doubled, the clitic and the nominal it doubles typically bear the same case feature. However, recent theoretical work on clitic-doubling, including but not limited to so-called ‘Big DP’ analyses (e.g. Uriagereka 1995, Nevins 2011, Kramer 2014) treats clitics and nominals as separable entities in the syntactic derivation. Given this background, we propose that under the right syntactic conditions, nominals and their clitics should be able to mismatch in case features. In particular, we identify and investigate two classes of mismatch, which form the mirror image of each other. In Choctaw (Muskogean), nominals acquire case features that their associated clitics lack, while in Yimas (Lower-Sepik; data from Foley 1991), clitics acquire case features that their associated nominals lack. We argue that these mismatches are the consequence of case-assignment operations that target nominals or clitics individually.

Title: on Stalnaker (1978)
Date and time: Monday April 2nd, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

This week’s paper is Robert Stalnaker’s Assertion. Pre-read is not required.

Mallory will be presenting the paper.

Speaker: Gašper Beguš (Harvard)
Title:  Learning the Blurring Process
Date and time: Monday, April 2nd, 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:

Many artificial grammar learning experiments have provided strong evidence for the assumption that learning biases influence phonological typology: typologically rare processes have been shown to be more difficult to learn. Most of the experiments, however, fail to control for diachronic influences: in many cases, the observed typology can be explained by diachronic factors equally well. In this talk, I present a method for controlling for diachronic influences when testing learning biases. Unnatural processes provide a crucial solution to this problem. I show that a statistical model of diachronic development (that I call Bootstrapping Sound Changes) identifies a crucial mismatch in predictions between the learning and diachronic bias approaches. This mismatch allows me to design experiments such that diachronic factors are controlled for. I present results from two experiments that test learnability of complex vs. unnatural processes and suggest that learnability differences have to influence observed typology in cases that cannot be explained by historical factors. I also discuss implications of this approach for phonological theory in general.

Speaker: Idan Blank (MIT)
Title:  When we “know the meaning” of a word, what kind of knowledge do we have?
Date and time: Monday, April 2nd, 5:00-6:00pm
Location: 46-5156
Abstract: 

Understanding words seems to require both linguistic knowledge (stored form-meaning pairings and ways to combine them) and world knowledge (object properties, plausibility of events, etc.). In this talk, I will pose some challenges for common distinctions between these knowledge sources. First, I will ask whether rich information about concrete objects could be, in principle, learned from just the co-occurrence statistics of different words even in the absence of non-linguistic (e.g., perceptual) information. To this end, I will introduce a domain-general approach for leveraging such statistics (as captured by distributional semantic models, DSMs) to recover context-specific human judgments such that, e.g., “dolphin” and “alligator” appear relatively similar when considering size or habitat, but different when considering aggressiveness. Second, I will probe DSMs for “syntactic”, abstract compositional knowledge of verb-argument structure (e.g., “eat”, but not “devour”, can appear without an object). I will demonstrate that these syntactic properties of verbs can often be predicted from distributional information (i.e., without explicit access to “syntax”), indicating that DSMs capture those aspects of verb meaning that correlate with verb syntax. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of distributional information is needed for predicting verb argument structure - the rest appears to capture semantic properties that are relatively divorced from syntax. In fact, the overall similarity structure across verbs in a DSM is independent from the similarity structure across verbs as determined by their syntax, and both kinds of similarity are needed for explaining human judgments. Together, these two studies attempt to push against the upper bound on the potential complexity of distributional word meanings.

Speaker: Stanislao Zompí (MIT)
Title: Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism
Date and time: Thursday, April 5, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

This is a practice talk for GLOW 41. The abstract can be found here.

Speaker: Abdul-Razak Sulemana
Title: Obligatory Controlled Subjects in Buli
Date and time: Tuesday March 20, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

It has long been noted that PRO makes no contribution to PF, as it is phonetically null. Several approaches to control have been developed based on this conclusion. These theories could be put into two broad categories. Under one (Bresnan 1978, 1982, Chierchia 1984, Dowty 1985, Jackendoff and Culicover 2003, a.o) this has been taken as evidence that there is no syntactic representation of this element. Under the other (Chomsky 1981, Manzini 1983, Landau 2000, 2001, 2013, 2015 a.o) PRO is syntactically present but its nullness is due to the licensing properties of the controlled structure. In this paper, I present data from Buli a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in Sandema (Ghana) that argue against theories that deny the syntactic presence of PRO. I argue that Buli is a language where PRO is overtly expressed and conclude that phonetic nullness is not an inherent property of PRO.

Title: on Goldstein- Free Choice and Homogeneity
Date and time: Monday, March 12th, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D831

David Boylan will be presenting. No preread required.

Speaker: Colin Davis
Title: Parasitic Gaps and the Structures of Multiple Movement
Date and time: Tuesday March 6, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In this talk, I present some work in progress about the structure of derivations where multiple A’-movement chains overlap. These derivations show interesting complexities that do not (and could not) arise in derivations with only one A’-movement (Pesetsky 1982, Richards 1997). Towards deepening our understanding of this issue, I use Nissenbaum’s (2000) findings about parasitic gap licensing as a diagnostic for the multiple specifier structures created by successive-cyclic movement through vP in these derivations.

This test reveals a puzzle: While Richard’s (1997) theory of specifier formation predicts tucking-in structures at vP in these scenarios, I show via parasitic gap licensing that (at least sometimes) tucking-in fails to occur. Observations about parasitic gaps in superiority violating D-linking from Nissenbaum provide another instance of the same puzzle. It seems to be the case that the structure at vP, tucked-in or not, reflects the final order of the moved phrases. This is exactly what we predict under the hypothesis of Order Preservation (Fox & Pesetsky 2005). However, it remains mysterious how derivations can ‘know’ what vP configurations to form based on what the final result of the derivation will be. I do not have a good solution, but I hope discussing these puzzles will help.

Speaker: Itai Bassi
Title: Fake Indexicals without feature transmission
Date and time: Wednesday March 7, 1-2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:

In a footnote, Partee (1989) mentioned that 1st person pronouns can be semantically bound (“fake indexicals”), pointing to sentence (1). That footnote generated a line of research (Kratzer 1998, Kratzer 2009, Wurmbrand 2017; Heim 2008) according to which bound variables (can) enter the syntactic derivation lacking interpreted phi-features, and inherit features from their binder at the PF branch, as a result of some “feature transmission” mechanism(s).

(1) I am the only one around here who will admit that I could be wrong
—> the speaker is the only individual in {x: x is willing to admit that x could be wrong}

In this talk I offer a formal syntax-semantics for this construction which derives a bound reading for (1) while maintaining that the bound “I” has its person feature interpreted, rendering feature transmission unnecessary. My proposal is to reduce (1) to focus constructions like (2), for which there are alternatives to the feature-transmission story (Bassi and Longenbaugh 2017, a.o.). I will thus propose, building on a suggestion made in Bhatt (2002), that the construction in (1) involves silent association with focus. In addition, I show how my proposal can account for the contrast between (1) and the minimally different (3), which does not have a bound reading for “I” and constitutes a problem for existing feature-transmission analyses (Wurmbrand, Kratzer).

(2) Only I will admit that I could be wrong

(3) I met the only one around here who will admit that I could be wrong (no bound reading)

Speaker: Athulya Aravind (MIT)
Title: Principles of presupposition in development
Time: Thursday March 8th, 12:30-2:00pm 
Place: 32-D461
Abstract:

Natural language affords us the means to communicate not only new information, but also information that we are already taking for granted, our presuppositions. The proper characterization of presuppositions–the way they enter into the compositional semantics and the way they fit into the exchange of information in communicative situations–has been at the center of long-standing debate. One class of theories treat presuppositions as categorically imposing restrictions on the conversational common ground: presuppositions must signal information that is already mutually known by all participants. While principled and elegant, these theories are often thought to be empirically inadequate, as the common ground requirement is not always met in everyday conversation. A second class of theories, therefore, adopt weaker and less categorical approaches to the phenomenon that are nonetheless a better fit to the empirical facts. 

 

This talk compares these two classes of approaches to presupposition in terms of their implications for language acquisition. I argue that children initially adopt a view of presuppositions as uniformly placing restrictions on the conversational common ground, even in situations where these requirements may be bent. More tellingly, I show that children initially lack the ability to use presuppositions in ways that violate the common ground requirement. The observed two-step developmental trajectory supports a common ground theory of presuppositions, according to which the “rule of thumb” is that presuppositions are already common knowledge, and informative uses involve strategic violations of this rule. In turn, the acquisition data vindicate some of the theoretical idealizations whose empirical validity is masked in part due to the pragmatic sophistication of adult language users.

Speaker: Sandhya Sundaresan (Leipzig)
Title: An Alternative Treatment of Indexical Shift: Modelling Shift Together Exceptions, Dual Contexts, and Selectional Variation
Date and time: Friday March 9, 3:30-5:00pm
Location: 32-155
Abstract:

I present the following three types of evidence that challenge both context-overwriting and quantifier-binding approaches to indexical shift (the phenomenon where the denotation of an indexical is interpreted, not against the utterance context, but against the index associated with an intensional verb). (I) Systematic exceptions to Shift Together (the constraint that all shiftable indexicals in a local intensional domain must shift together) in Tamil, varieties of Zazaki and Turkish, and potentially also Late Egyptian; (II) novel evidence from imperatives in Korean and supporting secondary data from imperatives in Slovenian, showing that the utterance context continues to be instantiated even in putatively shifted environments; and (III) results from personal fieldwork in Tamil dialects and secondary data from 26 languages (from 19 distinct language families) showing that there is structured selectional variation in the intensional environments in which indexical shift obtains and, furthermore, that such variation is one-way implicational. The following desiderata emerge: 1. Shift Together holds whenever possible, but systematic exceptions may nevertheless obtain; 2. the utterance-context is never overwritten; 3. indexical shift is an embedded root phenomenon that privileges speech predicates. To capture these, I develop an alternative model of indexical shift with the following properties. The context-shifter is not a context-overwriting operator, but a contextual quantifier. At the same time, unlike with standard quantificational approaches to shifting, this contextual quantifier (or “monster”) is a distinct grammatical entity severed from the attitude verb. Specifically, I present evidence from nominalization patterns and complementizer deletion to show that the monster is encoded on the complementizer selected by the attitude verb. I then propose that selectional variation for indexical shift ensues as the result of the monster being encoded on structurally distinct types of complementizer head, each selected by a different class of attitude verb (as has also been recently proposed in the literature).

Speaker: Thomas Schatz (UMD/MIT)
Title: Leveraging automatic speech recognition technology to model cross-linguistic speech perception in humans
Date and time: Monday, February 26 5:00-6:00pm
Location: 46-3310
Abstract: 

Existing theories of cross-linguistic phonetic category perception agree that listeners perceive foreign sounds by mapping them onto their native phonetic categories. Yet, none of the available theories specify a way to compute this mapping. As a result, they cannot provide systematic quantitative predictions and remain mainly descriptive. In this talk, I will present a new approach that leverages Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to obtain fully specified mapping between foreign and native sounds. Using the machine ABX evaluation method, we derive quantitative predictions from ASR systems and compare them to empirical observations in human cross-linguistic phonetic category perception. I will present results both where the proposed model successfully predicts empirical effects (for example on the American English /r/-/l/ distinction) and where it fails (for example on the Japanese vowel length contrasts) and discuss possible interpretations.