The article “Famous Names” in the most recent edition of the New Yorker follows the exploits of a Silicon Valley brand-naming company and their illustrious linguist consultant Will Leben. In the article he discusses his extensive research on sound symbolism and his creation of the name “Swiffer.” It’s a fun read! (Though you have to have a New Yorker subscription to read it….)
Sesquipedicongratulations to Stanford philosopher, CSLI associate, and Situation Semantics cofounder John Perry, who is this year’s Ig Nobel Laureate in the field of Literature! His award-winning work is the theory of Structured Procrastination, which holds that to be a high achiever, one should always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important. The Ig Nobel prize is awarded each year in a number of fields for research that is “improbable.”
Reiko Kataoka will address the Phonetics & Phonology Workshop today at noon in the Greenberg Room. She’ll speak on “Phonetic and Cognitive Bases of Sound Changes – Past, Present, and Future.” You can keep up to date with the P&P workshop at their website or our events calendar!
In this talk I will report some of the main results from my dissertation research and will explore possible directions for future research. As a way to investigate phonetic and cognitive factors that may serve as preconditions of coarticulation-based sound changes, I examined how speakers of American English produce, perceive, and repeat the high back vowel /u/ in fronting and non-fronting contexts. Production study found that: (1) the relative acoustic difference between the fronted /u/ and the non-fronted /u/ remained across elicited ranges of vowel duration; and (2) the degree of acoustic variability was less for the fronted /u/ than for the non-fronted /u/. These results were interpreted as evidence that speakers have a distinct and more narrowly specified articulatory target for the fronted /u/ in the alveolar context than for the non-fronted /u/. Perception study found the evidence for (1) compensation for coarticulation (i.e., phonemic category boundary shift as a function of consonantal environment), (2) systematic individual variation in perceptual category judgments, and (3) similarity between the distributional properties of /u/ observed in the production experiment and the range of perceptual responses. Together, these results suggest that the one systematic source of individual variation in speech perception is individual differences in phonological grammar (perceptual category boundary), and that this grammar emerges in response to the ambient language data to which the listeners have been exposed. Finally, vowel repetition study found evidence for (1) compensation for coarticulation and (2) systematic individual variation in the repetition task as well as that (3) perceptual category boundary judgment guides vowel repetition behavior, suggesting that perceptual interpretation determines mental representation of spoken inputs.
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Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst) will be speaking in the department colloquium today at 3:30 in the Greenberg Room. His topic is “Shadows of Ergativity: Variable Agreement in Kutchi”. And in case you can’t make it to his talk today, he’ll also be giving a colloquium at UC Berkeley on Monday!
SHADOWS OF ERGATIVITY: VARIABLE AGREEMENT IN KUTCHI
(joint work with Trupti Nisar, SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai)
Kutchi, a western Indo-Aryan language, presents a typologically unusual split ergative system which manifests ergativity at the wrong end of Silverstein’s scale (1st Person is Ergative, everything else seems Nominative). Ergativity is manifested in the 1st Person in Kutchi via object agreement and hence this split is not a surface morphological split of the kind analyzed by Deo & Sharma (2006). Handling non-morphological person based splits is challenging: can the abstract case licensed by a head depend upon the person features of the DP receiving the case? We show that the Kutchi system makes sense once we extend our understanding of ergativity to cover the impoverished agreement found with 2/3 subjects in Perfective Transitive environments in Kutchi – object agreement can then be seen as a limiting case of impoverished subject agreement. We also discuss the typological oddness of Kutchi in the context of the proper location of Silverstein’s Generalization (nominal versus verbal), and possible diachronic motivations.
A disappointed salesman of Coca Cola returns from his assignment to Israel.
A friend asked: “Why weren’t you successful with the Israelis?”
The salesman explained: “When I got posted, I was very confident that I would make a good sales pitch. But, I had a problem. I didn’t know how to speak Hebrew. So, I planned to convey the message through three posters.”
“First poster: A man lying in the hot desert sand… totally exhausted and fainting.”
“Second poster: The man is drinking our Cola.”
“Third poster: Our man is now totally refreshed.”
“And then these posters were pasted all over the place.”
“Then that should have worked!!” said the friend.
“The hell it should have!” said the salesman, “I didn’t realize that they read from right to left!!!!!!”
World traveler Rob Munro made the perilous journey to UC Berkeley’s Fieldwork Forum this Wednesday 5 October to talk about “Linguistics in a connected world.” He’s contacted us over shortwave radio to say the talk was a resounding success!
The Rochester Center for Language Sciences colloq series for the fall hosted Meghan Sumner this week, and then will host Chris Potts next week.
Elizabeth Traugott took part in the Helsinki Corpus Festival in (you guessed it!) Helsinki this October 2nd, speaking on: “He was quite the gentleman then: The development of quite + NP”.
Ivan Sag is away in Cambridge (MA) this week. He gave a talk at Harvard on grammar and processing, which was followed by a packed MIT Ling Lunch, where he reprised his summer Sapir Lecture on “Sex, Lies, and the English Auxiliary System”. Today he gives an MIT colloquium on “Sluicing without Deletion”.
Want to see your name in print? Tell us what you’re up to!
The newly-formed Syntax and Morphology Circle (SMircle) will be hosting Boris Harizanov (UCSC) this Wednesday 12 October at 5pm in the Greenberg Room. He’ll inform his audience about “Clitic Doubling as Movement: An analysis of object clitics in Bulgarian.” The abstract is below.
Those interested in keeping abreast of SMircle talks should subscribe to this mailing list!
True clitic doubling involves multiple expressions of a single argument in different structural positions. It involves configurations in which a phonologically bound morpheme (the clitic) expresses features of a full noun phrase in an argument position (the associate). True clitic doubling has traditionally been argued to arise via agreement, so that the clitic is a manifestation of an agreement relation between a verb and the associate (see Borer 1984, Jaeggli 1986, Suñer 1988). An alternative possibility is that the clitic is a nominal (e.g. a pronoun of category D) related to the associate via movement (see Sportiche 1996 and Anagnostopoulou 2003); clitic doubling, then, involves the simultaneous realization of both the head and the foot of a movement chain.
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Here’s a whole lot more information about Stanford people’s summer whereabouts!
At the Stuttgart Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Lexical Semantics, where Sven Lauer and Cleo Condoravdi presented, there were also talks by Stanford alum Chris Piñón and by recent Stanford affiliates Fabio del Prete and Lucas Champollion.
The list of Stanford alums presenting at the International Workshop ‘Dimensions of Grammar’ in honor of Paul Kiparsky also included Chris Piñón. Plus, Miriam Butt was one of the organizers!
At the CSSP in Paris in September there were also talks by Stanford alums Steve Wechsler and Liz Coppock, who was presenting joint work with David Beaver.
Elizabeth Traugott gave quite a few talks over the summer, including these:
Joan Bresnan was on the move all summer, giving a plenary talk (“Acquiring syntactic variation in English: A cross-constructional study”) at ICLaVE 6 in Freiburg, then hopping on a plane to Hong Kong to give two lectures as part of the City University of Hong Kong’s Distinguished Scholars in Linguistics Lectures. The lectures were 1: “Is grammatical `competence’ probabilistic?”, and 2: “Do children acquire probabilistic syntactic variation?” As if that’s not enough, in August, she gave a plenary lecture in Helsinki at the conference Variation and Typology: New trends in Syntactic Research about “The development of syntactic variation in the individual: Are there implications for typology?”
Speaking of Helsinki, Jason Grafmiller traveled to that same conference to deliver a talk on joint work with Stephanie Shih: “New Approaches to End Weight”.
Second-year PhD student Hsin-Chang Chen gave a talk in early September on “Conditioned [w] > [v] Across Chinese Dialects: Implicational Scaling and Implications for Phonetic and Phonological Theories” at the 6th meeting of the European Association for Chinese Linguistics. 加油!
Thanks to everyone who submitted news! But we’re always looking for more: past, present, or future. Just mail us!