Week of April 8, 2013

Advising Fortnight Open House

The Department of Linguistics will host an open house for Harvard's Advising Fortnight, an opportunity for freshmen to explore Harvard's concentrations.

Tuesday, April 9 | 5-7pm | Boylston Hall, 3rd Floor

Language Universals Workshop/Polinsky Lab Meeting

Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)
Explain me this: how we learn what not to say
Wednesday, April 10 | 5-6:30pm | Sever Hall 306

Although many constraints are motivated by general semantic or syntactic facts, in certain cases, formulations are semantically sensible and syntactically well-formed, and yet noticeably dispreferred (e.g., ??She explained him the story; ??the afraid boy). Results from several experiments are reviewed that suggest that competition in context—statistical preemption--plays a key role in learning what not to say in these cases.  I will also suggest a domain-general mechanism that may well underlie this process, and offer a proposal as to why L2 learners may have more trouble avoiding these dispreferred utterances.

Linguistics Circle Workshop

Manfred Krifka (Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin)
Negation and Focus in Polarity Questions
Friday, April 12 | 4-5:30pm | Boylston 103

Negation in polarity questions poses theoretical challenges. (i)  As propositional negation as in Is there no vegetarian restaurant around here? it should not have any influence on the meaning, as such questions are supposed to present two propositions as alternatives, one being the negation of the other, and {p, ¬p} is identical to {¬p.¬¬p}. (ii) As extra-propositional negation as in Isn't there a vegetarian restaurant here? (Ladd 1981), it is under debate what is negated, as proposals like Romero & Han (2004) that assume scopal interaction with a VERUM operator are problematic. I will propose an explanation in which (i) polarity questions can be based on one proposition only,  (leading to differences between positive and negative questions), and in which (ii) the speech act of a question amounts to a request for an assertion, and in which questions with extrapropositional negation can be understood as a request to denegate an assertion. It is shown how the biases of such questions can be derived. I will then turn to the issue of focus in polarity questions, as in Did JOHN come to the party? and will argue that they are monopolar questions as well, where focus indicates the presence of alternative monopolar questions, and I will explain their answer patterns -- e.g. yes or no, Bill. Time permitting, I will also turn to the issue of contrastive topics in questions.

Welcome Kazue Takeda

We would like to extend our welcome to Kazue Takeda, who has just arrived to spend a year here as a Visiting Scholar.  Professor Takeda is on leave from the Faculty of Language and Literature of Bunkyo University in Japan.  She received her Ph.D. in 1999 from UC Irvine with a dissertation on the syntax of multiple headed structures, and has conducted research in other areas of syntactic theory.