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Week of April 12

Language Universals Workshop 

Matt Goldrick (Northwestern University)

Title: "Understanding sound structure at multiple levels of analysis"

Abstract: Marr (1982) famously claimed that understanding the mind/brain requires developing theories at multiple levels of analysis. In practice, cognitive scientists (myself included) have frequently privileged explanations at a particular level. I'll discuss two recent projects from my lab that rely on understanding sound structure at different levels of analysis. The structured variation of external sandhi arises in part due to the nature of the algorithms that compute word forms in production, suggesting that grammatical theories need to be sensitive to the algorithmic nature of word form processing. On the other hand, understanding puzzling results in psycholinguistic studies of implicit learning of phonotactic constraints required us to understand the nature of functional-level constraints on phonotactic grammars. Insights like these suggest researchers in the cognitive science of language may benefit from more careful attention to insights at multiple levels of analysis.

Friday, April 16 | 12:00-1:30 PM | Check email for Zoom link

 

Harvard at WCCFL 39

The following members of our department gave talks or presented posters at the 39th Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 39), hosted by the University of Arizona's Department of Linguistics (virtually) from April 8-11, 2021.  

  • Luke Adamson: "Gender assignment is local: On assignment by inalienable possessors" (talk)
  • Luke Adamson: "Gender Features, Interpretability, and Agreement in Coordination: Evidence from Greek" (talk), joint work with Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
  • Shannon Bryant and Deniz Satik: "A Minimalist Account of Balinese Binding" (poster)
  • Isabelle Charnavel: "Taking a strong position on strictly read reflexives" (talk), joint work with Dominique Sportiche (UCLA)
  • Rebecca Jarvis (College '19, currently student at UC Berkeley): "Presuppositionality and syntactic nominalization in finite clausal complements" (talk)
  • Josh Martin: "Monoradical intersectivity and the morphosemantics of suppletion" (talk)
  • Jack Rabinovitch: "Using Phasal Syntax to Make Generalizations in Manchu Vowel Harmony" (poster), joint work with Baoqing Qian
  • Deniz Satik: "Turkic default agreement with complex possessors" (talk)
  • Hande Sevgi: "One root to build them all: Roots in sign language classifiers" (poster)

 

Kirby, Satik at ConCALL-4

Deniz Satik and Ian Kirby gave talks at the 4th Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL-4),  hosted by the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CelCAR)  at Indiana University Bloomington, held virtually on April 9-11, 2021 (originally scheduled for April 2020; delayed by the pandemic).  Deniz's talk was titled "Genitive case and agreement asymmetries in Turkic"; for his abstract, he received a ConCALL Student Award with a prize of $400.  Ian's talk was titled "The Sakha focus particle da(qanɨ)".