Jennifer Culbertson
University of Rochester
Linguistic Universals as learning biases: Connecting typology to constraints on learning and change
February 3, 3:30-5:00 pm, 460-126
There will be a reception and an informal dinner following this talk. All are welcome!
Abstract
In this talk, I provide evidence for a key assumption of generative linguistics–namely, that biases in the language learning system constrain the space of possible human languages. Recent claims that typological universals do not exist, or are the result of factors outside the cognitive system, have highlighted the need for experimental evidence connecting learning biases to typological preferences (e.g. Evans & Levinson 2009). I focus on a word order universal, first formulated by Greenberg (1963), which bans a language from using both pre-nominal adjectives and post-nominal numerals. I report the results of two artificial language learning experiments showing that learning biases can provide an explanation for this universal. These biases are formalized and quantified as priors within a Bayesian model, which predict how constraints on learning can influence trajectories of language change.
Sesquipedicorrespondent Richard Futrell wrote to us from Egypt on February 2. He said, "I am currently stuck in Cairo, not in danger though, but there’s not a whole lot of internet, and evacuating soon". He supplied the following glossed slogans of the anti-government protesters, suggesting "Curious linguists can listen in morpheme-by-morpheme next time the protests are on TV!"
The most common is just:
’i-rħal!
IMP-leave
"Leave!"
Second most common:
aš-ša‘b yurīd isqāT ar-ra‘īs!
the-people want resignation the-president
"The people want the resignation of the president."
Which is sometimes modified:
aš-ša‘b yurīd isqāT an-niZām!
the-people want resignation the-system
"The people want the regime to stand down."
And some in Egyptian Colloquial; though many slogans are in Modern Standard Arabic:
huwwa yi-mšī, miš ha-ni-mšī
3SG.M 3SG.M-go, NEG FUT-1PL-go
"He (Mubarak)’s going, we won’t go!"
There are some amusing rhymes:
ya mubārak ya mubārak aT-Tayār f-intiZār-ak!
VOC M. VOC M. the-airplane in-waiting-you
"Mubarak, Mubarak, the airplane is in a state of waiting for you!"
Hal Tily‘s paper ‘Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication’, co-authored with Steven T. Pantadosi and Edward Gibson (http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1012551108), has received a lot of attention from the world media:
Congratulations, Hal!
Kristen Syrett (Rutgers) will give a special lecture called ‘Syntactic and contextual support for number word acquisition’ on Monday, February 7, 3:15-4:45 pm, in the Terrace Room (fourth floor of Margaret Jacks Hall).
Abstract
Because of their abstract meaning, variable appearance across linguistic environments, and overlapping distribution with other lexical items (such as adjectives and quantifiers), number words pose a unique challenge for the language learner. In fact, it is not until approximately 3-and-a-half years of age that children appear to fully appreciate their reference to the cardinality of a set, as attested across counting-oriented tasks. One proposal for how children go about acquiring the meaning of words involves tracking the surface-level syntactic frames in which they can or cannot appear, and deducing their meaning, given the semantic constraints of these environments. This type of ‘syntactic bootstrapping’ approach to word learning has proven successful in experiments with other grammatical categories (such as nouns and verbs), but until recently, has not been empirically tested for number words. I will begin by reviewing some relevant background on syntactic bootstrapping and the motivation for its application to number word learning. I will then present experimental evidence from a set of word-learning experiments demonstrating that when a novel word appears in a partitive frame in a referential context supporting a specific-quantity denotation, learners can recruit this information to assign a number word meaning; they do not do so when the novel word is modified by very. However, additional findings shed light on other factors to bear in mind when considering how distributional cues play a role in number word learning.
Kristen Syrett
Rutgers University
Insights into linguistic theory from language acquisition
Tuesday, February 8, 12:00-1:30, 460-126
Abstract
Empirical investigations of child language allow us to better understand the language acquisition process and to uncover ways in which children and adults differ in the interpretations available to them. In this talk I present evidence from three lines of research demonstrating that they can also be informative about the nature of our adult syntactic and semantic representations and the interactions between the grammar, the discourse context, and language processing. Drawing from experimental work on gradable adjectives (big, full), pluralities with number (two boys), and antecedent-contained deletion (Lola read every book that Dora did), I show that three- and four-year-olds have rich semantic and syntactic representations, paired with a developing pragmatic savviness. However, while young children are often able to access the same range of interpretations as adults, at times they appear to overgenerate interpretations or judge as acceptable an utterance that adults explicitly bar in a given context. The systematicity of these response patterns, which at first blush appear to be inconsistent with predictions from semantic and syntactic theory, forces us to revisit those theoretical assumptions and determine whether an explanation for these patterns is best attributed to the linguistic or cognitive capacity of the language learner, to the grammar itself, or to extragrammatical factors.
Lal Zimman gave a data-oriented talk at Sociolunch on February 2. Here’s Lal’s description:
At this week’s Sociolunch I’ll be conducting a data session to explore some of the potential meanings of creaky voice quality among speakers of American English (to be quite broad). I’ll be discussing some of my own data from gay-sounding men and female-to-male transsexual speakers, and I’ll also talk about some of the prior literature on the topic and consider examples of data collected by other researchers.
Thanks Kate!
Rob Podesva (Georgetown) will give a special lecture called ‘Quantifying and Interpreting the PIN-PEN Merger in Washington, DC’ on Thursday, February 10, 9:30-11:00 pm, in 460-126.
Abstract
The PIN-PEN merger is well attested in both Southern (Brown 1991, Baranowski 2007) and African American (Bailey and Thomas 1998, Rickford 1999, Thomas 2007) varieties of English. My current work in Washington, DC strongly suggests that even though the merger is prevalent among African American speakers, it is losing ground.
Previous sociophonetic studies have appealed to a variety of techniques for measuring mergers, including the impressionistic inspection of vowel formant plots, the difference in mean F1 or F2 between vowels, the Euclidean distance between vowel means (Harrington 2006), and the Pillai trace, a measure of overlap between two vowel distributions (Hay et al. 2006, Hall-Lew 2009). Based on an analysis of all three acoustic measures, I show that multiple measures are needed to adequately capture PIN-PEN patterns in DC. Pillai traces and Euclidean differences reveal that African American speakers merge PIN and PEN to a greater extent than white speakers, while differences in mean F1 show that younger women merge less, suggesting a change in progress that begins in the dimension of vowel height. Thus, while newer measures like Euclidean distances and Pillai traces are informative, more traditional measures like differences in mean F1 captures other crucial information.
I attribute the fact that African American speakers exhibit the merger while white speakers do not to the longstanding history of racial segregation in DC. Since the largest influx of African Americans in DC decades before the Great Migration, the city and its suburbs remain largely segregated (Manning 1998), a situation that has maintained distinct merger patterns. The finding that the merger is on its way out is likely due to more recent trends of inter-ethnic interaction, facilitated by discourses of diversity that are sweeping several of the district’s neighborhoods. I suggest that the PIN-PEN merger is losing ground in DC, even in the speech of African Americans, because it has not been enregistered (Agha 2003) as a distinctive feature of African American English, given its greater recognition as a feature of Southern varieties of English.
