Week of October 21, 2013

Harvard at WeCIEC 2013

Laura Grestenberger will be presenting her work "‘Split deponency’ in Proto-Indo-European" at the 25th annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, October 25–26.

Harvard at NELS 44

The following talks featured Harvard presenters at the 44th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS) that took place this weekend at UConn:

Universals Reading Group/Polinsky Lab Meeting:

Annie Gagliardi
The Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Q'anjob'al Mayan
Wednesday, October 23 | 5:15-7pm | Boylston 303

Q’anjob’al (Mayan) is reportedly syntactically ergative, meaning that ergative-marked subjects cannot be extracted. To form a relative clause (RC) headed by the subject of a transitive (agent-RC), speakers use the ‘agent focus’ construction, turning ergative-marked subjects into absolutive arguments. To form an object RC (theme-RC), speakers have two options: extraction of the object from a transitive, or extraction of the subject of a passive. As no work has investigated the acquisition of RCs in syntactically ergative languages, we looked at the comprehension of RCs by adult and child Q’anjob’al speakers.

MIT Colloquium 
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Barbara Partee (UMass)
The Starring Role of Quantifiers in the History of Formal Semantics
Friday, October 25 | 3:30-5pm | 32-141

The history of formal semantics is a history of evolving ideas about logical form, linguistic form, and the nature of semantics. This talk emphasizes parts of the history of semantics where quantifiers played a major role, including the “Linguistic Wars” of the late 1960’s and the conflicts in the philosophy of language between the Ordinary Language philosophers and the Formal Language philosophers. Both conflicts resulted in part from the mismatch between first-order logic and natural language syntax. Both were resolved in part once Montague applied his higher-order typed intensional logic to the analysis of natural language, as illustrated most vividly by the treatment of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers. In subsequent developments, generalized quantifier theory led to the first substantive ideas in formal semantics about semantic universals (Barwise and Cooper, Keenan), and the failure of Barwise and Cooper’s universal provoked some of the earliest work in formal semantic typology. Quantifiers have also been central in debates about dynamic approaches to semantics, and about the nature of anaphora.

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