Category: Announcements

This Thursday, February 16th, Elliott Moreton (UNC) will be giving a colloquium talk at 1:30pm in Hum 1, Room 210. His talk is entitled “Emergent positional privilege in blend formation”, and the abstract is included below:

In many languages, sounds in certain “privileged” positions preserve marked structure which is eliminated elsewhere. Does that happen because learners are predisposed towards grammars which protect those positions, or because sounds in those positions are less likely to suffer misperceptive sound change? To test directly for predisposition towards positional faithfulness, a lexical blending task was used to force a choice of which source word to be more unfaithful to. Given source words which could be blended in two ways (e.g., flamingo + mongoose -> “flamingoose” or “flamongoose”), participants preferentially matched the blend that preserved more second-word phonology (“flamongoose”) to a definition which made the second word privileged. The experiments tested for two kinds of faithfulness — to segments and to mainstress location — and in three privileged positions: morpho-semantic heads (vs. non-heads), nouns (vs. verbs), and proper nouns (vs. common nouns). Results from English and, in one experiment, Spanish speakers show both segmental and stress privilege effects in heads, proper nouns, and, to a lesser extent, nouns generally. We interpret these results as evidence for the universal availability of positional-privilege constraints protecting any phonological property of any privileged position.

This Thursday, February 9th, Juliet Stanton (MIT) will be giving a colloquium talk at 1:30pm in Hum 2, Room 259. Her talk is titled “Constraints on the Distribution of Nasal-Stop Sequences: An Argument for Contrast”, and an abstract is included below:

It has been argued that certain typological generalizations regarding the distributional properties of nasal-stop sequences can be explained by explicitly referencing contrast (e.g. Herbert 1977, 1986; Jones 2000). This work explores the hypothesis that all generalizations regarding the distribution of nasal-stop sequences can be explained by explicitly referencing contrast, and presents results of multiple cross-linguistic studies designed to test that hypothesis. I show first that taking into consideration cues to the contrast between oral and nasal vowels allows us to accurately predict generalizations regarding the distribution of allophonic nasal-stop sequences (i.e. those that are not phonemically contrastive with other segment types). Following this, I show that taking into consideration cues to the contrasts between nasal-stop sequences and their component parts (nasals and stops) allows us to accurately predict generalizations regarding the distribution of phonemic nasal-stop sequences (i.e. those that are phonemically contrastive with other segment types). Broadly, the results presented here contribute to a larger body of evidence that constraints on contrast are a necessary component of the phonological grammar.

In an exciting double-header, we’ve got a second colloquium this week: Dustin Chacón (Minnesota) will be giving a talk this Thursday, February 2nd, at 1:30pm in Hum 1, Room 202. (Note the room difference between the two colloquiua!) His talk is entitled “Filling in Gaps in Comparative Syntax”, and the abstract is given below.

In comparative syntax and typology, linguists have discovered that languages can vary along a number of ways, which sometimes can be subtle or surprising. However, psycholinguistic work has largely focused on a small set of closely related languages, and careful cross-language psycholinguistic and language acquisition work is still in its infancy. In this talk, I will present findings from cross-language studies on the processing and acquisition of filler-gap dependencies. Filler-gap dependencies are the relation between a word or phrase that appears in one position in the sentence, but is interpreted in another position, e.g., who in who did Dale say that Sarah saw __ behind the bed?. Filler-gap dependencies are a particularly useful case study, because their properties are well-described in syntax and psycholinguistics. The first set of studies examine filler-gap dependency processing in Bangla, which shows that comprehenders do not actively construct filler-gap dependencies into embedded contexts, unlike Japanese speakers (Aoshima et al 2004; Omaki et al 2014). The second set of studies examine resumptive pronoun dependency processing in English. I argue that resumptive dependencies are formed “passively”, likely due to their ungrammaticality status. This contrasts with recent findings in Hebrew, which suggest active resumptive dependency formation processes (Kishev & Asscher-Meltzer 2015). Finally, the last set of studies investigate the learnability of constraints on filler-gap dependencies, specifically the that-trace constraint. I argue that there is not sufficient evidence for English and Spanish learners to infer whether their grammar has the constraint or lacks it, respectively (Torrego 1984; Pearl & Sprouse 2012; Phillips 2013). I argue that the learner must instead rely on related properties to learn this constraint, as in “parametric” theories of language learning (Rizzi 1982; Torrego 1984; Pearl & Lidz 2013; pace Newmeyer 2004).

This Thursday, January 26, Shota Momma (UCSD) will be giving a colloquium at 1:30pm in Hum 1, room 210. His talk is entitled “Aligning parsing and generation” and the abstract is below:

We use our grammatical knowledge in at least two ways. On one hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to say what we want to convey to others. On the other hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to understand what others are saying. In either case, we need to assemble the structure of sentences in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of our language. Despite the fact that the structures that comprehenders and speakers assemble are systematic in an identical fashion (i.e., obey the same grammatical constraints), the two ‘modes’ of assembling sentence structures might or might not be performed by the same system. The potential existence of two independent systems of structure building underlying speaking and understanding doubles the problem of linking the theory of linguistic knowledge and the theory of linguistic performance, making the integration of linguistics and psycholinguistic harder. In this talk, I will discuss whether it is possible to design a single system that does structure building in comprehension, i.e., parsing, and structure building in production, i.e., generation, so that the linking theory between knowledge and performance can also be unified into one. I will discuss both existing and new experimental data pertaining to how sentence structures are assembled in understanding and speaking, and attempt to show that the unification between parsing and generation is plausible.