Monthly Archives: February 2019

Foley colloquium at 3:30 Friday March 1

Steven Foley (UCSC) will present “Why are ergatives hard to process? Reading-time evidence from Georgian” in ILC N400 at 3:30. All are welcome!

ABSTRACT: How easily a filler–gap dependency is processed can depend on the syntactic position of its gap: in many languages, for example, subject-gap relative clauses are generally easier to process than object-gap relatives (Kwon et al. 2013). One possible explanation for this is that certain syntactic positions might be intrinsically more accessible for extraction than others (Keenan & Comrie 1977). Alternatively, processing difficulty might correlate with the relative informativity of morphosyntactic cues (e.g., case) ambient to the gap (Polinsky et al. 2012; cf. Hale 2006). Ergative languages are ideal for disentangling these two theories, since they decouple case morphology (ergative ~ absolutive) and syntactic role (subject ~ object). This talk presents reading-time data from Georgian, a split-ergative language, which suggests that case may indeed be a crucial factor affecting real-time comprehension. Across four self-paced reading experiments, ergative DPs in different configurations are read consistently slower than absolutive ones — bearing out the predictions of the informativity hypothesis. However, the case is not closed: it seems that accusative morphology, at least in Japanese and Korean, does not seem to be associated with a processing cost, even though it is just as informative as ergative is. To reconcile this ergative–accusative processing asymmetry, I turn to the debate in formal syntax between different modalities of case assignment, and argue that a theory in which case is assigned by functional heads (Chomsky 2000, 2001) gives us better traction for understanding both Georgian-internal and crosslinguistic processing data than does a configurational theory of case (Marantz 1991).

“Phonetic knowledge” (1994) appears in Best in Language III

From John Kingston

Thanks to Seth, I learned that a paper Randy Diehl and I had published in Language in 1994, “Phonetic knowledge,” had been chosen for inclusion in the third collection of Best in Language for the period 1986-2106. Here’s a link to the collection:

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/best-language-volume-iii

The criteria for inclusion are that the paper be “influential, controversial, or otherwise interesting.” You decide which criteria our paper met.

Now I have to get to work to produce another.

Letter of Support for Linguistics Faculty and Students at Hampshire College

We are very pleased to share with you all a letter written collectively by linguistics faculty at the Five Colleges, in support of our colleagues and students at Hampshire College.

Please do feel free to share this broadly:

 

February 22, 2019

To President Nelson, the Hampshire College Board of Trustees, and the Five College Community:

We the linguistics faculty of the Five Colleges are writing to express our distress at the recent news that Hampshire College will be accepting an extremely reduced first year class in 2019, and that this decision will precipitate a significant number of layoffs among both faculty and staff. This distress is tied to both the central role that Hampshire has played in the history of linguistic studies at the Five Colleges and to the ongoing importance of both its faculty and its students to the uniquely rich intellectual community surrounding language science here, one that has been instrumental in UMass Linguistics becoming one of the top linguistics programs in the country. We would therefore like to express our fervent hope that the strongest efforts will be made to help this special educational institution survive.

It is no exaggeration to say that the development of linguistics both at UMass and at the Five Colleges would never have happened without the presence of Hampshire College and its unique academic environment. Right from its beginning, Hampshire College created one of the two strongest undergraduate linguistics programs in the country, designed and constructed by visionary Hampshire faculty members Neil Stillings, Mark Feinstein, and Bill Marsh, later joined by Steven Weisler. At this time too, Hampshire was a pioneer in placing linguistics centrally in the then-nascent field of Cognitive Science. The founder of the UMass Department of Linguistics, Don Freeman, first taught at Hampshire during its opening year, and his experiences there were critical to his development of the UMass department not long after. Similarly, former LSA president Emmon Bach – another early member of the UMass department – at first taught half-time at Hampshire before moving to UMass full-time. Perhaps most importantly, Hampshire College, its faculty, and its students, were of central importance to the highly active Five College Linguistics Committee, which in the 1970s and 1980s was a major stepping-stone to the development of the undergraduate program in linguistics at UMass. Hampshire faculty also played an important role in helping to establish the UMass Cognitive Science program in the late 1970s and to win a major grant from the Sloan Foundation to support it.

This legacy continues to this day, as Hampshire faculty and students remain a crucial resource for both our students and ourselves. Thanks to its uniquely interdisciplinary program, Hampshire students have enormously enriched our classes, asking searching questions, sometimes challenging the strictures of our discipline and forcing the class to think in new ways. Some of the most memorable and gifted of the students we have taught have been from Hampshire. Some of these students have gone on to graduate studies in our own and others’ top-rated programs, including one of ourselves – Mara Breen – who is now an Associate Professor at Mount Holyoke College. Furthermore, our own students have benefited considerably from the rich and often interdisciplinary classes that Hampshire offers in Cognitive Science and Linguistics. An undergraduate major in Linguistics can – and should – touch so many other fields, and Hampshire has allowed those interconnections to happen. The linguistic offerings in the Valley would be sorely reduced if Hampshire were to drop their contribution, and our students (as well as ourselves) will be all the worse for it.

It must also be noted that Hampshire faculty continue to play a crucial role in our own graduate programs, advising students and even serving as influential outside members of doctoral committees. These dedicated teacher-scholars have devoted their careers to the unique educational mission of Hampshire, one that places special emphasis on both pedagogy and service. Consequently, these immensely talented individuals have often made deep sacrifices to the development of their own research programs in order to further the special interests of the College. It would be a tragedy to lose these irreplaceable people, especially since their academic futures may be in jeopardy as a result of their sacrifices to this unique institution.

For all of these reasons, we urge that the Five Colleges find a way to continue the bold, noble educational experiment that is this priceless institution. Hampshire’s educational example has been a major influence for us all not only in the past, but also in our current efforts to promote Team Based Learning, outside internships, community outreach, cooperative research opportunities with undergraduates in our labs, and our general efforts to promote and develop a mutually supportive intellectual environment at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

We also hope fervently for a solution to these issues that does not significantly reduce the number of faculty or students at Hampshire, and that it is developed with the full transparent participation of the faculty and staff, in the spirit of shared governance. We cannot simply stand by and allow this defining feature of our intellectual community to fade from existence.

Sincerely,

Daniel Altshuler, Hampshire College and University of Massachusetts Amherst

Luiz Amaral, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Ana Arregui, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Giovanna Bellesia, Smith College

Rajesh Bhatt, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Maria Biezma, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Mara Breen, Mount Holyoke College

Seth Cable, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Craig Davis, Smith College

Jill de Villiers, Smith College

Peter de Villiers, Smith College

Brian Dillon, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Mark Feinstein, Hampshire College

Lyn Frazier, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Donald Freeman, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Jay Garfield, Smith College

Lisa Green, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Alice Harris, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Vincent Homer, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Gaja Jarosz, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Kyle Johnson, University of Massachusetts Amherst

John Kingston, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Angelika Kratzer, University College London and University of Massachusetts Amherst

Magda Oiry, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Barbara Partee, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Joe Pater, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doug Patey, Smith College

Thalia Pandiri, Smith College

Naoko Nemoto, Mount Holyoke College

Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Elisabeth Selkirk, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Eric Snyder, Smith College

Kristine Yu, University of Massachusetts Amherst

 

 

 

Syrett colloquium Fri. Feb. 22 at 3:30

Kristen Syrett of Rutgers University (https://sites.rutgers.edu/kristen-syrett/) will present “Playing with semantic building blocks: Acquiring the lexical representations of verbs and adjectives” in ILC N400 Friday Feb. 22 at 3:30. All are welcome!
ABSTRACT: Early lexicons and initial child productions reflect a preponderance of object-denoting lexical items (nouns), while those that denote properties of objects or events (adjectives and verbs) lag behind. If nouns are the “Marsha” of the Brady Bunch, adjectives and verbs compete for the role of “Jan.” In many ways, this asymmetry privileging nouns makes sense: it’s much easier to track event participants than to track ephemeral events and the properties of those participants, which are much less stable, and both verbs and adjectives require nominal elements both syntactically and semantically. But the process of language acquisition is rapid, and within a matter of a few years, the child fairly quickly achieves proficiency, enough so to appreciate polysemy or word play. Given this state of affairs, we might ask two questions about the acquisition of these predicates: (1) What strategies or information sources do children recruit to pin down the lexical meaning of verbs and adjectives?, and (2) When they enter into the lexicon, how rich is children’s semantic knowledge of these words? In this talk, I provide one answer to (1), showcasing the role of the linguistic context. I then highlight a set of examples in response to (2), illustrating children’s early command of selectional restrictions for both categories. In doing so, I also demonstrate that once these words are established as part of the children’s receptive and productive vocabulary, there are certain advantages afforded to the language learner—although here, we uncover an asymmetry between verbs and adjectives implicating other aspects of the grammar and the context. Together, what this body of work reveals is the complex, interrelated process of acquiring and assembling the semantic building blocks of language.

Perkins colloquium Fri. Feb. 15 at 3:30

Laurel Perkins of the University of Maryland (http://ling.umd.edu/~perkinsl/) will present “How to Grow a Grammar: Syntactic Development in 1-Year-Olds” on Friday Feb. 15th at 3:30 PM in N400. All are welcome – an abstract follows.
ABSTRACT: What we can learn depends on what we already know; a child who can’t count cannot learn arithmetic, and a child who can’t segment words cannot identify properties of verbs in her language. Language acquisition, like learning in general, is incremental. How do children draw the right generalizations about their language using incomplete and noisy representations of their linguistic input?
In this talk, I’ll examine some of the first steps of syntax acquisition in 1-year-old infants, using behavioral methods to probe their linguistic representations, and computational methods to ask how they learn from those representations. Taking argument structure as my case study, I will show: (1) that infants represent core clause arguments like “subject” and “object” when learning verbs, (2) that infants can cope with “non-basic” clause types, where those arguments have been displaced, by ignoring some of their input, and (3) that it is possible for infants to learn what kind of data to ignore, even before they can parse it. I will argue that the approach I take for studying this particular learning problem will generalize widely, allowing us to build new models for understanding the role of development in grammar learning.

“Recursion across Domains” published by CUP

A book edited by Luiz Amaral, Marcus Maia, Andrew Nevins, and Tom Roeper on “Recursion across Domains” was recently published by Cambridge University Press. As Tom Roeper notes:

This book has a large UMass footprint — editors: Luiz Amaral, Tom Roeper —  contributors include many former students, faculty and visitors: Suzi Lima, Bart Hollebrandse, Ana Perez, Uli Sauerland, Yohei Oseki, Terue Nakato, Rafael Nonato, Luiz Amaral, Tom Roeper

Summary: Recursion and self-embedding are at the heart of our ability to formulate our thoughts, articulate our imagination and share with other human beings. Nonetheless, controversy exists over the extent to which recursion is shared across all domains of syntax. A collection of 18 studies are presented here on the central linguistic property of recursion, examining a range of constructions in over a dozen languages representing great areal, typological and genetic diversity and spanning wide latitudes. The volume expands the topic to include prepositional phrases, possessives, adjectives, and relative clauses – our many vehicles to express creative thought – to provide a critical perspective on claims about how recursion connects to broader aspects of the mind. Parallel explorations across language families, literate and non-literate societies, children and adults are investigated and constitutes a new step in the generative tradition by simultaneously focusing on formal theory, acquisition and experimentation, and ecologically-sensitive fieldwork, and initiates a new community where these diverse experts collaborate

Table of Contents:

Foreword (Ian Roberts)

A Map of the Theoretical and Empirical Issues (Amaral, Maia, Roeper, & Nevins)

Speech Reports, Theory of Mind and Evidentials

  1. Sauerland, Uli. False speech reports in Piraha ?: A comprehension experi- ment
  2. Hollebrandse, Bart. Indirect recursion: the importance of second-order embedding and its implications for cross-linguistic research
  3. Correa, Let?cia M.S., Marina R. A. Augusto, Mercedes Marcilese & Clara Villarinho. Recursion in language and the development of higher order cognitive functions: an investigation with children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese
  4. Stenzel, Kristine. Embedding as a building block of evidential categories in Kotiria
  5. Thomas, Guillaume. Embedded imperatives in Mbya ?

Recursion along the Clausal Spine

  1. Rodrigues, Cilene, Raiane Salles, & Filomena Sandalo. Word order in control: evidence for self-embedding in Piraha ?
  2. Nonato, Rafael. Switch-reference is licensed by both kinds of coordina- tion: novel K?iseˆdjeˆ data
  3. Duarte, Fabio. Clausal recursion, predicate raising and head-finality in Teneteha ?ra
  4. Vieira,Marcia.Recursion in Tupi-Guaranilanguages:TheCasesofTupinamba ? and Guaran ??

Recursive Possession and Relative Clauses

  1. Terunuma, Akikio  & TerueNakato.Recursive possessives in ChildJapanese
  2. Lima, Suzi, & Pikuruk Kaiabi. Recursion of possessives and locative phrases in Kawaiwete
  3. Amaral, Luiz. & Wendy Leandro. Relative Clauses in Wapichana and the interpretation of multiple embedded “uraz” Constructions
  4. Storto, Luciana, Karin Vivanco, & Ivan Rocha. Multiple embedding of relative clauses in Karitiana

Recursion in the PP Domain

  1. Roeper,Tom & YoheiOseki.Directstructuredrecursionintheacquisition path from flat to hierarchical structure
  2. Sandalo, Filomena, Cilene Rodrigues, Tom Roeper, Luiz Amaral, Marcus Maia & Glauber Romling. Self-embedded recursive postpositional phrases in Piraha ?: a pilot study
  3. Perez-Leroux, Ana T., Anny Castilla-Earls, Susana Bejar, Diane Massam & Tyler Peterson. Strong continuity and children’s development of DP recursion
  4. Franchetto, Bruna. Prosody and recursion in Kuikuro: DPs vs PPs
  5. Maia,Marcus,Anieli Franca, AlineGesualdi, AleriaLage, Cristiane Oliveira, Marije Soto & Juliana Gomes. The processing of PP embedding and co- ordination in Karaja ? and in Portuguese

 

 

Momma colloquium Friday Feb. 8 at 3:30

Shota Momma of UC San Diego (https://shotam.github.io) will present “Unifying parsing and generation” at 3:30, Friday February 8th in ILC N400. All are welcome!
Abstract: We use our grammatical knowledge in at least two ways. On one hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to say what we want to convey to others. On the other hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to understand what others say. In either case, we need to assemble sentence structures in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of our language. In this talk, I will advance the view that the same syntactic structure building mechanism is shared between comprehension and production, specifically focusing on sentences involving long-distance dependencies. I will argue that both comprehenders and speakers anticipatorily build (i.e., predict and plan) the gap structure, soon after they represent the filler and before representing the words and structures that intervene the filler and the gap. I will discuss the basic properties of the algorithm for establishing long-distance dependencies that I hypothesize to be shared between comprehension and production, and suggest that it resembles the derivational steps for establishing long-distance dependencies in an independently motivated grammatical formalism, known as Tree Adjoining Grammar.