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February 2014

Week of March 3, 2014

MIT Syntax Square

Laura Grestenberger (Harvard University)
Two voice mismatch puzzles in Sanskrit and Greek
Tuesday, March 4 | 1pm | 32-D461

Sanskrit and Greek both have binary voice systems in which active morphology alternatives with non-active (middle) morphology. In this talk I will present two problems in the morphosyntax of these languages, both of which concern exponence of voice morphology in unexpected syntactic environments ("voice mismatches").
The first one comes from deponent verbs, which take non-active morphology, but syntactically and semantically behave exactly like active agentive verbs. The second problem arises in contexts in which a distinct passive morpheme is available. Contrary to what is expected in standard approaches to Voice, this passive morpheme obligatorily co-occurs with middle morphology (Sanskrit) or active morphology (Greek). I propose that both puzzles can be solved by adopting an approach in which only active and middle are values of vP, while passive is a distinct functional head. In this approach, only passive is valency-changing, while active/middle are sensitive to their syntactic environment but do not operate on it.  I will show that this predicts the distribution of active and middle morphology in languages like Sanskrit and Greek, as well as where potential mismatches can occur.

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop:

Tyler Lau (Harvard University)
Microvariation in Ryukyuan Verbal Morphology
Wednesday, March 5 | 5:15pm | Boylston 303

The Ryukyuan languages show remarkable diversity in verbal morphology. One area in which differences are of note are in what are traditionally called by Classical Japanese grammarians the "irrealis" forms (comprising of the negative, passive, and causative verb forms). I explore differences, especially in the vowel-final verb classes in the Ryukyuan languages vis-à-vis Japanese and discuss implications for past discussions of Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan morphology.

Language Universals/Polinsky Lab Meeting 

Reading: Jarosz 2010
Discussion led by Kevin Ryan
Wednesday, March 5 | 5:15pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

Language Universals and Linguistic Diversity Colloquium 

Gaja Jarosz (Yale University)
Modeling the Acquisition of Phonological Structure
Friday, March 7 | 4:30pm | Boylston 103

Please go to the event page for the abstract.

Week of February 24, 2014

Language Universals/Polinsky Lab Meeting 

Boris Harizanov (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Syntactically decomposing denominal adjectives in Bulgarian
Wednesday, February 26 | 5:15pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

Please go to the Universals Workshop page for the abstract.

Linguistics Circle Workshop 

Mark Hale (Concordia University, Montréal, QC)
What is Diachronic Syntax a Theory of? Transcending ‘the physical body of the sentence’
Friday, February 28 | 4:30pm | Boylston 103

Please go to the Circles Workshop page for the abstract.

Week of February 17, 2014

Polinsky Lab Meeting:

Jeffrey T. Runner (University of Rochester)
Binding constraints in action: implications for processing
Wednesday, February 19 | 5:30pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

In this talk I will present the results of two visual world eye-tracking experiments. The first, done in collaboration with Kellan Head, was designed to test two claims in the literature: (a) that the binding theory is a set of "linked" constraints as in the classic binding theory (Chomsky 1981) and HPSG's binding theory (Sag, Wasow & Bender 2003); and (b) that the binding theory applies as an initial filter on processing (Nicol & Swinney 1989, Sturt 2003). Experiment 1 results instead support two different claims: (a) that the constraint(s) on pronouns and the constraint(s) on reflexives are separate constraints that apply differently and with different timelines, in line with "primitives of binding" theory, Reuland (2001, 2011); and (b) that neither constraint applies as an initial filter on processing, as in Badecker & Straub (2001). Experiment 2, done in collaboration with Kim Morse, further explores the relationship between pronouns and reflexives, showing even more clearly that the resolution of the appropriate antecedent for pronouns is delayed compared to that of reflexives. This project started as an examination of the on-line effects of the constraints of the binding theory, developing an approach based on Nicol & Swinney 1989, Badecker & Straub 2001, and Sturt 2003. Recent work, however, implicates the critical role of memory access in reflexive interpretation (Dillon et al. 2013). Thus, I will also try to relate the current results to current models of memory access.

Language Universals and Linguistic Diversity Colloquium 

Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware)
Subject-Verb Inversion as Generalized Alignment
Friday, February 21 | 4:30pm | Boylston 103

This talk explores the idea that what is behind subject-verb inversion in many languages, including subject-auxiliary inversion in English, is phonological alignment, as in the theory of Generalized Alignment (McCarthy and Prince 1993).  Specifically, a projection of C needs to be aligned with an edge of the tensed verb.  I show that this explains many facts about subject-auxiliary inversion in English, including facts that are puzzling for traditional views of that phenomenon.  I also explore cross-linguistic variation in how the Align constraint can be stated, and show that differences between English and Stylistic Inversion in French fall out from the way Align constraints can vary.

Fieldwork Updates

Jenny Lee spent the semester in Papua New Guinea, collecting data on a previously unstudied language, Ranmo (a dialect of Blafe), spoken by around 300 in Western Province. The language has a very complex inflectional morphology, with many implications for the syntax/morphology interface to be spelled out. She enjoyed working with consultants, planting yams, and bathing in the rain/creek with children, but will not miss the 40-km bike ride through the jungle. 

Week of February 10, 2014

Polinsky Lab Meeting:

Ewan Dunbar (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, ENS / EHESS / CNRS)
Context in phonological development: Computational approaches
Wednesday, February 12 | 5:30pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

Early cognitive development in the systems implied in perceiving and producing speech (phonological processing) is well-studied experimentally and observationally.  Recently, statistical machine learning tools have begun to address three fundamental problems in phonological development: perceptual learning, morpheme segmentation, and lexical organization. In this talk, I address an issue that cross-cuts all three problems: contextual adaptation. I focus primarily on the perceptual learning problem. Using Bayesian models of category learning, I argue against a widespread assumption in developmental psycholinguistics, in which early speech perceptual development largely consists of the formation of context-independent segmental categories, while sensitivity to coarticulatory and allophonic effects of speech context must wait for a later stage of more abstract development. I propose a new model, in which phonetic units are inherently context-dependent. The model is analogous to standard approaches to talker normalization in speech recognition, has support from the cross-linguistic typology of allophony and coarticulation, and is grossly consistent with the behavioral evidence about the role of phonetic context in speech perception. I also briefly discuss an approach to lexicon organization and word segmentation in which the ideal learner is characterized as adhering to a measure of overall lexicon "coherence", by which top-down effects of semantic context can influence phonological development. Finally, I outline the very recent emergence of collaboration and methodological convergence between developmental psycholinguistic modeling and unsupervised or low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) research, where models must be trained without any phoneme labels. This engineering problem corresponds perfectly to the learning problem the infant faces. I argue that, in ASR, too, handling contextual variability is a sine qua non, but that standard approaches are difficult or impossible to recreate in the unsupervised setting; effective methods for contextual adaptation in the unsupervised setting are thus a defining issue for the coming decades of ASR research. I suggest a few ways in which domain knowledge from speech sciences may be able to help us build better models both for ASR and for answering developmental questions.

MIT Colloquium 

Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
Decomposing adjectival/ stative passives
Friday, February 14 | 3:30-5pm | 32-141

SCLA Conference

The 13th Annual Conference of the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association (SCLC-2014) will take place February 15-17, 2014. The conference is organized by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Provostial Fund Committee for the Arts and Humanities, the Department of Linguistics, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Language Resource Center at Harvard University. The program for the conference can be found here.

Week of February 3, 2014

Polinsky Lab Meeting:

Jeffrey T. Runner (University of Rochester)
Binding constraints in action: implications for processing
Wednesday, February 5 cancelled due to snowstorm RESCHEDULED TBA  | 5:30pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)

In this talk I will present the results of two visual world eye-tracking experiments. The first, done in collaboration with Kellan Head, was designed to test two claims in the literature: (a) that the binding theory is a set of "linked" constraints as in the classic binding theory (Chomsky 1981) and HPSG's binding theory (Sag, Wasow & Bender 2003); and (b) that the binding theory applies as an initial filter on processing (Nicol & Swinney 1989, Sturt 2003). Experiment 1 results instead support two different claims: (a) that the constraint(s) on pronouns and the constraint(s) on reflexives are separate constraints that apply differently and with different timelines, in line with "primitives of binding" theory, Reuland (2001, 2011); and (b) that neither constraint applies as an initial filter on processing, as in Badecker & Straub (2001). Experiment 2, done in collaboration with Kim Morse, further explores the relationship between pronouns and reflexives, showing even more clearly that the resolution of the appropriate antecedent for pronouns is delayed compared to that of reflexives. This project started as an examination of the on-line effects of the constraints of the binding theory, developing an approach based on Nicol & Swinney 1989, Badecker & Straub 2001, and Sturt 2003. Recent work, however, implicates the critical role of memory access in reflexive interpretation (Dillon et al. 2013). Thus, I will also try to relate the current results to current models of memory access.

MIT Colloquium 

Raj Singh (Carleton)
Implicature and free-choice signatures: embedding, processing complexity, and child development
Friday, February 7 | 3:30-5pm | 32-141

Fieldwork Updates

Nick Longenbaugh ('14) went to Auckland to do field work on Niuean over the winter break. He looked at processing time asymmetries in relative clauses and raising. Nick visited Auckland and surroundings, and here are some photos from the trip:

SCLA Conference (SCLC - 2014)

http://slavic.fas.harvard.edu/scla/2014-conference