Week of September 11

Department Fall Reception

We hope all undergraduate concentrators, graduate students, visitors, faculty and staff will come out  this Thursday, September 14 from 5-6:30 pm in Ticknor Lounge for the department Fall Reception.  We look forward to welcoming back everyone for the fall term, as well as welcoming newcomers to the department. 

Harvard at Sinn und Bedeutung

The annual Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB) semantics conference was held in Bochum, Germany last week, with talks by Yağmur Sağ on "Cardinality and (in)definiteness", Natasha Thalluri and Kathryn Davidson on "Degrees and depiction - gradability in sign languages" and Anastasia Tsilia (MIT) and Kathryn Davidson on "Effects of iconicity and monotonicity on licensing complement anaphora". 

In addition, two-thirds of this year's SuB invited speakers were Harvard Linguistics PhD alumni: Hazel Pearson gave an invited talk on "The logic of de se reports" and Dorothy Ahn gave an invited talk on "Deriving (anti-)uniqueness in definite expressions"! Congratulations to them all!  

Harvard at M@100

The M@100 conference celebrating Morris Halle’s (1923–2018) centenary took place on September 8-10 at MIT, featuring two presenters from Harvard and many attendees! Here is a photo of a "subset" of them:

FoRiM talk

The morphology reading group FoRiM will have a guest lecture by Dr. Paula Fenger on a new paper this Friday. Details: 

Title: Matching domains: The syntax, morphology, and phonology in the Sinhala verb. 

Date/Time: Friday, September 15 @ 12pm

Location: Boylston 104

Abstract: In this paper, we provide an in-depth case study of properties of the verbal domain in the Indo-Aryan language Sinhala across the different modules of grammar. Specifically, we investigate two seemingly independent grammatical phenomena (i) the phonological (under)application of umlaut and its relation to morphological structure and (ii) the syntactically conditioned choice of negation. As we argue, these phenomena strongly suggest respective analyses in terms of locality domains. Crucially, we find that locality domains in the syntax and the ones in phonology are essentially isomorphic. The set of constructions that we analyse as bi-domainal in the syntax corresponds exactly to the set of constructions that we analyse as bi-domainal in the phonology. This cannot be treated as accidental and we devise a model that derives these parallels in a systematic way. The model rests on the assumptions that (i) the syntax creates locality domains and inherits them to the morphology and the phonology and (ii) specific processes in these modules can manipulate the locality domains in a limited way. This allows us to maintain a restricted model of the syntax-morphophonology mapping that proves flexible enough to incorporate systematic exceptions. Such an approach paves the way to a more nuanced understanding of mismatches between different modules.