Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1533_ponsmoll_1.pdf

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1534_ponsmoll_1.pdf

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1529_ponsmoll_1.pdf

Form and Meaning in the Hebrew Verb
Itamar Kastner
June 2016
Direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003028

This dissertation is about the basic building blocks that make up words, and how these building blocks interact with the rest of the grammar. The grammar is generally viewed as an inventory of contentful units and the rules governing their combination. One question for linguistic theory is what these units might be like. Are they different for different languages? A second question is how these pieces are put together, and again we ask whether these combinatory processes are the same in different languages. A third question is to ask what we can build. This study concentrates on building verbs, specifically how the grammar builds their structure in a way that then constrains semantic interpretation and phonological pronunciation.

The empirical domain is the verbal system of Modern Hebrew, where this work attempts to unify our treatment of concatenative and non-concatenative morphology. The hypothesis put forward is that hierarchical syntactic structure, once generated, must be interpreted according to specific locality constraints when transferred to the interfaces with semantics and phonology. At each interface additional calculations take place. These calculations are interface-particular: semantics and phonology are not identical objects of study. Yet the two have in common a locality constraint on calculations that derives directly from the syntactic structure. In addition, individual lexical items (“roots”) place their own requirements on the meaning and/or the pronunciation. The theory developed here limits this influence of roots to the two interfaces, making the claim that individual roots have no syntactic features. Nevertheless, roots are active at the interfaces in ways that are predictable once the right generalizations are sought out. The phonological form of roots is relevant at the phonology and their lexical semantics is relevant at the semantics: roots have no syntactic features, only interface requirements.

Hebrew, being a contemporary Central Semitic language, shows the kind of non-concatenative, “root-and-pattern” morphology that is organized around consonantal “roots” and prosodic “templates”, the latter consisting of a prosodic shape, certain vowels and an affix. The account put forward argues that Hebrew roots are abstract lexical elements which combine with discrete syntactic functional heads. The combination, once fed through the phonology of the language, results in morphophonological templates which are not primitives of the system in and of themselves. The architecture defended supports the view of constrained interpretation at the interfaces which lies at the core of this proposal, using non-hierarchical surface forms in order to mount an argument for hierarchical structure.

Chapter one of the dissertation introduces the issues at hand and the basics of the Hebrew verbal system. It also reviews a number of earlier approaches which help set the stage for the analysis that follows.
Chapter two develops the syntactic-semantic part of the proposal, defining the syntactic elements needed to derive verbal morphology both for Hebrew and crosslinguistically. It is shown that the different combinations of these elements produce the verbal system of Hebrew in a way that is constrained, in the semantics, by the lexical idiosyncrasies of individual roots.
Chapter three takes the proposed structures and manipulates them in the phonological component of the grammar. The view of linearization pursued here is shown to make correct predictions. The effect of different classes of roots is highlighted, and the point is made that verbal templates are not holistic morphemes but the spell-out of distinct functional heads.
Chapter four takes a quantitative approach, surveying previous psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic work on Semitic languages and presenting novel findings from a recent magnetoencephalography experiment. These findings support the claims made in the previous chapters regarding the organization of the system.
Chapter five considers how the child might acquire this system. Recent developmental findings are surveyed and a novel computational model is discussed. This chapter outlines a model of Semitic acquisition in which the consonantal character of roots is used as a learning cue, leading to acquisition of basic verbal templates and eventually the system as a whole.
Chapter six concludes, recapitulating the main contributions of this work: derivations in a generative grammar combine rigid grammatical principles with unstructured lexical material. This dissertation defends an explicit view of how such combination takes place.

Prosody and object clitic placement: A comparison of Old and Modern Spanish
Imme Kuchenbrandt
June 2016
Direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003022

It has often been claimed that the Tobler–Mussafia Law, i.e. the ban on sentence-initial clitic pronouns, is based on prosodic properties such as the ban on unstressed monosyllabic words at the sentence beginning ( Mussafia, 1886) or the inherent enclitic nature of the respective pronouns (Meyer-Lübke, 1897). More recent research has identified a number of extra-phonological motivations for this clitic placement, making a prosodic explanation seem superfluous. The present study addresses the question whether Old Spanish, a clear Tobler–Mussafia language, differs in its prosodic patterns from Modern Spanish, which does not show the Tobler–Mussafia placement any longer. The comparison of the data shows that Old Spanish tolerates more sentence-initial unstressed monosyllables and unstressed pretonic syllables at the sentence beginning than Modern Spanish does, contrary to expectations. Together with the observation that the direction of clitic attachment is rather due to the prosodic context (i.e. the immediate preceding or following prosodic words and potential Phonological Phrase boundaries) than to a fixed directionality parameter, this falsifies the hypothesis that the clitic placement pattern in the TML language Old Spanish is due to specific prosodic patterns.

Propagation and preservation of rounded back vowels in Lucanian and Apulian varieties
Leonardo Savoia, Benedetta Baldi
June 2016
Direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003020

This article addresses the descriptive and theoretical aspects of the relation between cavity properties of vowels and consonants. This relation is studied on the basis of some vocalic harmonizing processes depending on the adjacency between [u] and a velar (or labial) consonant in the domain of the stressed nucleus. Propagation of /u/ and preservation of /u/ in pre-tonic position in Southern Italian varieties provide the crucial testing ground for our analysis; one last process we investigate is the distribution of metaphonic outcomes in a Salento dialect. The nature of phonological representations is the other question we are concerned with. This point has been recently explored specifically in relation to the explanatory role of structure and its relation with the melodic content of segments. Our proposal is that the phonological structure of the string corresponds in a direct and exhaustive way to the elementary melodic properties of the segments.

Formal Monkey Linguistics: the Debate [Replies to Commentaries]
Philippe Schlenker, Emmanuel Chemla, Anne Schel, James Fuller, Jean-Pierre Gautier, Jeremy Kuhn, Dunja Veselinovic, Kate Arnold, Cristiane Cäsar, Sumir Keenan, Alban Lemasson, Karim Ouattara, Robin Ryder, Klaus Zuberbühler
June 2016
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003016

We explain why general techniques from formal linguistics can and should be applied to the analysis of monkey communication – in the areas of syntax and especially semantics. An informed look at our recent proposals shows that such techniques needn’t rely excessively on categories of human language: syntax and semantics provide versatile formal tools that go beyond the specificities of human linguistics. We argue that ‘formal monkey linguistics’ can yield new insights into monkey morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as raise provocative new questions about the existence of a pragmatic, competition-based component in these communication systems. Finally, we argue that evolutionary questions, which are highly speculative in human language, can be addressed in an empirically satisfying fashion in primate linguistics, and we lay out problems that should be addressed at the interface between evolutionary primate linguistics and formal analyses of language evolution.

The pursuit of word meanings
Jon Stevens, Lila Gleitman, John Trueswell, Charles Yang
June 2016
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003012

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning; two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from naturalistic corpora of parent child-interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (2007), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest.