Category: Events

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.