Toosarvandani published in Language

Associate Professor Maziar Toosarvandani published a journal article titled “The interpretation and grammatical representation of animacy” in the December issue of Language. Here is the abstract:

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity, a cluster of interpretive properties that have been argued also to characterize first-and second-person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer’s (2009) and Harbour’s (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features’ shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (in the well-known person-case constraint) and by animacy.

Three slugs at AMP 2023

Three Ph.D. students presented their works at the 2023 Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) hosted virtually on Oct 20-22. Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Maya Wax Cavallaro gave a talk titled “The syllable in domain generalization: Evidence from artificial language learning” (see slides here). First Ph.D. student Hanyoung Byun presented a poster on “Aggressive Reduplication in Japanese high vowel devoicing” (see poster here) in addition to his joint work with Jaehyun Yim (Seoul National University) on “Extension of phonotactic constraints across morphological subdomains: Evidence from Korean” (see slides here). Second-year student Richard Wang presented a poster on “Distribution of neutral tone and retroflex lenition in Beijing Mandarin” (see poster here).

Gong and Tamura at WAFL17

Two banana slugs presented their work at WAFL17, which took place Sep 27-29 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Assistant Professor Mia Gong gave an invited talk titled “On the Nature of Reflexive Binding in Mongolian: From Nominals to Clauses“, and third-year Ph.D. student Jun Tamura presented a talk on “Compounding Words in the Syntax can Produce Phrasal Phonology: Evidence from Aoyagi Morphemes“.

Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)

Professor Mia Gong (right) and Jun Tamura (left)

Sharvit Colloquium on Friday

This Friday, Yael Sharivit from UCLA will give the second colloquium talk of the fall quarter, titled “Assessing two theories of clausal complementation”. The talk will take place on Friday, 10/27, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

Her abstract is as follows:

Some clause-taking verbs can also take DPs (e.g., ‘believe’), some cannot (e.g., ‘think’), and some can appear without a complement (e.g., ‘groan’). The standard theory of complementation has to resort to lexical ambiguity to explain this. An alternative (due to Kratzer and others) says that “complements” of clause-taking predicates are not arguments, thereby offering a way to explain this variation without resorting to lexical ambiguity. I argue that this alternative fails to deliver the right truth conditions of certain attitude reports.

Bennett colloquium on Friday

This Friday, our own Ryan Bennett will give the first colloquium talk of fall quarter/school year, titled “Vowel deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap in Uspanteko”.  The talk will take place on Friday, 10/13, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

His abstract is as follows:

Uspanteko (Mayan) is spoken by ~5000 people in the central highlands of Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological, being sensitive to phonotactics, foot structure, vowel quality, and morphology; and being largely insensitive to speech rate and style. But deletion also appears to be phonetic in character, reflecting extreme vowel reduction rather than symbolic deletion: it is variable, gradient, insensitive to certain phonotactics, and opaque with respect to accent placement. Electroglottography data suggests that even apparently ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to [C(V)C] intervals, albeit inaudibly. We thus analyze deletion as grammatically-controlled gestural overlap, which masks vowels in [CVC] contexts, either in the phonology proper (e.g. Gafos 2002) or as part of a grammar of phonetic interpretation (e.g. Kingston & Diehl 1994).

Upcoming Centennial LSA Annual Meeting

First-year Ph.D. student Ruoqing Yao‘s honors thesis research, completed at William & Mary under the supervision of Ph.D. alum (2006) Anya Hogoboom, has been accepted for a talk at the Centennial LSA Annual Meeting in New York, to be held in January 2024. Her talk is titled, “Resumptive pronouns in islands show confusability advantage effect.”

Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate Yaqing Cao will present a poster on “Modals and negations LF-PF (mis)matches in English and Mandarin” and second-year Ph.D. student Richard Wang will present a poster on “Rhotic lenition and neutral tone in Beijing Mandarin”. First-year Ph.D. student Aidan Katson‘s work “Vowel nasalization does not cue ambisyllabicity in American English nasal consonants: evidence from nasometry” in collaboration with Jose Alvarez Retamales, Sarah Rose Bellavance, Lisa Davidson, Amanda Eads, Alden McCollum, and Auromita (Disha) Mitra, will also be presented.

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