Week of September 30, 2013

Harvard at CSSP 2013

Edwin Tsai and Ken Mai presented "Prohibiting Inverse Scope: An Experimental Study of Chinese vs. English" (Gregory Scontras, Cheng-Yu Edwin Tsai, Kenneth Mai and Maria Polinsky) at the Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris, or Syntax and Semantics Conference in Paris (CSSP) 2013, September 26-28, at Université Paris Diderot.

While in Paris, Edwin shared some great photos of the city.

[Photos by Edwin Tsai]

Lauren Eby Clemens Wins Teaching Award

Lauren Eby Clemens has won a Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning for her Spring 2013 course Ling 241r, "Practicum in Linguistics." Congratulations, Lauren!

Polinsky Lab Meeting

Nick Longenbaugh 
On the non-context-freeness of Romanian
Wednesday, October 2 | 5:15pm | Boylston 303

Readings:

• Shieber, "Evidence against the Context-freeness of Natural Language"
• Pullum and Gazdar, "Natural Languages and Context-Free Languages"

The question of the formal computational complexity of human language has been debated since the earliest days of generative grammar (Chomsky 1956), and in various forms remains at the center of ongoing inquiry in linguistics, neurobiology, and anthropology (cf. Everett (2005), Fitch et al. (2005), Jackendoff & Pinker (2005)). Despite myriad efforts to find natural languages which could be definitively classified as weakly non-context-free (see Bar-Hillel & Shamir (1960), Chomsky (1959), Postal (1964), Elster (1978) for attempts, and Pullum & Gazdar (1982) for a summary of the failings of these attempts), to date only three languages have been shown to have this property: Swiss-German (Shieber 1985), Swedish (Miller 1991), and Bambara (Culy 1985). In each of these three languages, the derivations of the string sets that underlie the non- context-freeness arguments depend on operations that may be characterized as post-syntactic or extra-syntactic from the perspective of a standard minimalist derivation. In Swiss-German, the argument relies on verbal head movement, which has been argued to be a PF phenomenon (Chomsky (1995), Schoorlemmer & Temmerman (2012)), within a sentence final verb-cluster to establish so- called cross-serial dependencies. In Swedish, non-context-freeness arises from structures where A′-traces are obligatorily spelled out as pronouns due to a PF requirement Engdahl (1985). Finally, the argument in Bambara depends on two morphological processes, one involving a recursive agentive construction and the other a noun reduplication operation. We propose two things: first that Romanian is weakly non-context-free, and second that unlike the aforementioned languages, in Romanian weak non-context-freeness arise as a reflex of syntax alone, without the need to make recourse to phonological or morphological processes.

MIT Colloquium 

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Michael Wagner (McGill)
Additivity and the Syntax of 'Even'
Friday, October 4 | 3:30-5pm | 32-141

Whether 'even' carries an additive presupposition remains controversial. While Horn (1969), Karttunen and Peters (1979), Wilkinson (1996) and many others have argued that it does, Stechow (1991), Krifka (1992) and Rullmann (1997) reached the opposite conclusion. This talk identifi es a restriction on the focus alternatives that additive operator may range over: They cannot entail or be entailed by what is asserted. Based on tests relying on this restriction and more conventional arguments, the talk then develops a novel syntactic generalization about the circumstances under which even triggers an additive presupposition which reconciles apparently contradictory evidence from the earlier literature. Consequences for our understanding of the syntax of focus operators are explored.