Week of Mar 9
ECO-5 at Harvard
The Department of Linguistics at Harvard held this year's ECO-5 conference on Saturday, March 7. Three students from our department gave wonderful presentations:
- Nofar Rimon (G3): Understanding Kazakh '-men': Comitatives revisited
- Jane Loney (G2): The Typology of Voice in Nguni
- Hrefna Svavarsdóttir (G2): The Old Icelandic 'what' partitive construction
Huge congratulations to our fantastic presenters for the intellectual food! And thanks so much, Jane and Nofar, for organising the conference and providing actual food!
About: ECO-5 is a group consisting of five East Coast universities (UMass, MIT, Harvard, UConn & UMD). The conference is a venue for graduate students to present their current, original work usually in syntax (but not necessarily so).
Rimon at PLC50
Third-year PhD student Nofar Rimon presented her work titled ‘The emergence of secondary stress in Hebrew phrases’ at the 50th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC50) on February 28th. Congrats, Nofar!
LangCog
The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be Tuesday, March 10th, from 5:30-7:00pm, in William James Hall, Room 1550. The speaker is Daria Bikina (Harvard), and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. You can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on the LangCog website. Food will be provided, as always!
Title: Uniqueness without articles: what Russian bare singulars tell us about (in)definiteness
Abstract: Languages like English mark (in)definiteness overtly with articles, but many languages, including Russian, lack articles altogether. A natural assumption would be that in languages like that, bare nouns freely alternate between definite and indefinite readings. A closer look shows that the situation is more nuanced, and even in the absence of articles, bare nouns do not uniformly correspond to both definites and indefinites. Theoretical accounts diverge sharply. Some claim that bare singulars encode uniqueness and thus are definites (or kind-denoting expressions). Others argue that they are always existential, and definite readings arise through some pragmatic mechanism. A third class of approaches treats them as ambiguous, deriving (in)definiteness effects from information structure.
In this talk, I argue that Russian bare singulars systematically show sensitivity to uniqueness, a component of meaning considered central for definite readings. Across three experiments manipulating uniqueness, familiarity, and word order, I show that bare singulars are sharply degraded under forced non-uniqueness when domain restriction is blocked. Apparent null effects are only observed in contexts that allow the domain of restriction to be pragmatically narrowed. These findings challenge fully existential accounts and suggest that bare singulars encode a uniqueness constraint whose empirical visibility depends on how the contextual domain is constructed.