Laura Kalin (UCLA) will give a colloquium today (Friday Jan. 31) at 3:30 PM in the Greenberg Room, followed by a departmental social.
Aspect and Argument-Licensing in Neo-Aramaic
Abstract: In this talk, I present two empirical puzzles that involve intriguing interactions between aspect and agreement in Neo-Aramaic languages. Verbs in Neo-Aramaic come in several different ‘base’ forms that are built with root-and-template morphology and encode tense, aspect, or mood. The two verb bases of interest here are the imperfective base, for example, qatl (from the verb root q-t-l, ‘kill’), and the perfective base, for example, qtil. Subject and object agreement appear as suffixes on these bases.
The first puzzle I address is the various aspect-based agreement splits seen across Northeastern Neo-Aramaic: the form and configuration of subject and object agreement reverses depending on the aspect of the verb base, with the subject agreement morpheme of one base looking like the object agreement morpheme of the other, and vice versa. I propose that we can make sense of these aspect splits if we allow imperfective aspect itself to license an argument, with agreement being the overt manifestation of this licensing. The second puzzle is a secondary perfective strategy employed in many of these languages, which makes use of the imperfective verb base with an added prefix (qam-, varying phonologically by language). This secondary perfective verb form takes subject and object agreement as though it were imperfective, rather than perfective. I argue that this data reveals that there are two aspectual projections in the syntax, with only the lower aspectual projection determining the form of the verb base.
Finally, I put the two proposals together: If aspect can license an argument, and there are in fact two aspectual projections in the syntax, then I predict that each aspectual projection should be able to license an argument separately. This is precisely what we find in progressives in the Neo-Aramaic language Senaya. Overall, then, my two proposals (aspect as an argument-licenser and the existence of two aspectual projections) are able to capture a range of empirical phenomena in Neo-Aramaic and add to our understanding of the syntactic options provided by Universal Grammar.
Please join the Phonology Workshop today (Friday January 31) at noon in the Greenberg Room for a talk by our own Kevin McGowan, with lunch to follow.
Phonetic detail in perception and phonology
Abstract: In this informal presentation I describe a new project I am undertaking to investigate listeners’ use of phonetic detail during speech perception. In an influential semantic priming study, Andruski et al. (1994) showed that a word like king facilitates the recognition of (or primes) a semantically-related target, like queen. However, this was only found for what the authors describe as a fully-articulated initial [k] with a long voice onset time (VOT) –something rare in speech– and not for an initial [k] with reduced VOT more similar to that which naturally occurs. Andruski et al’s interpretation of this result, and indeed an interpretation that continues to be influential in psycholinguistics and phonology, is that mental representations encode a canonical VOT. Perception is inhibited to the extent that actual VOT in the speech signal does not match this canonical target. I will review some of my previous work on nasal coarticulation which demonstrates that listeners are exquisitely sensitive to phonetic details in the speech signal. The time course of perception reveals that listeners can make use of coarticulatory information as soon as it becomes available. Crucially, different listeners use these details in individually systematic ways —suggesting listener-specific rule-governed use of acoustic cues at a sub-segmental level typically excluded from our discussions of grammar. I propose that coarticulation is not unique in this respect and that Andruski et al’s finding can best be understood as listener sensitivity to speech rate and its effect on the myriad interdependent acoustic cues necessary for successful speech perception.
Pavel Caha (CASTL, University of Tromsø) will give a seminar this Monday, Feb. 3 at 4 PM in the Terrace Room (MJH 4th floor).
Case and its role in spatial expressions
Abstract: In the talk, I look at case marking through the lens of cross-linguistic variation. My focus will be on the following questions: What are the dimensions along which case marking varies from language to language? What are the limits of variation, if any? How can they be captured? What role does case play in spatial expressions? Why do some languages use the same marker for spatial and non-spatial meaning (e.g., dative = allative), while other languages don’t?
I propose that a large part of the variation and the restrictions it is subject to may be captured in a model where case decomposes into several independent syntactic projections ordered in a universal hierarchy. Contrary to previous accounts, I further propose that case marking may apply to PPs (and not only to the DPs embedded inside), and show that a number of facts concerning the syntax of spatial expressions falls out from this proposal.
Pavel Caha (CASTL, University of Tromsø) will give a colloquium this Tuesday, Feb. 4 at noon in the Greenberg Room.
Semi-lexical Categories Revisited
Abstract: It is standardly assumed that an item cannot simultaneously belong to two syntactic categories at the same time. Something either is – or is not – a noun/a preposition/a numeral/… The ‘single category view’ plausibly reflects the common understanding that lexical items occupy the terminals of the syntactic tree, and that the terminals of the syntactic tree have a unique label (X or Y, but not both). However, there are reasons to believe that such a view does not do justice to all the complexities of the categorization problem.
To illustrate that, I revisit some traditional observations (going back at least to Ross’ work from the early seventies) that many items stand somewhere in between the traditional (and prototypical) linguistic categories. The particular cases I will consider correspond to Luganda/Czech analogues of examples such as: in FRONT of the car (P) vs. the FRONT of the car (N); HUNDRED cars (Num) vs. HUNDREDs of cars (N). Such items have been sometimes called ‘semi-lexical’ categories (see in particular van Riemsdijk 1998).
However, the ‘items as terminals’ view has alternatives. In a theory like Nanosyntax (Caha 2009, Starke 2009), lexical items may correspond to a whole set of terminals provided that they form a constituent. If that is so, semi-lexical categories may be understood as items whose lexical specification corresponds to a complex syntactic tree containing (by definition) several terminals with distinct category labels (e.g., [ X [ Y ]]). I argue that if this view is adopted, some curious properties of the data receive an accurate and neat explanation.
Boris Harizona (UC Santa Cruz) will give the following seminar this (Thursday Feb. 6) at noon in building 320 room 106.
On the interactions between syntax and prosody in the determination of word order
Abstract: One of the central concerns of generative syntax has been to account for word order patterns crosslinguistically. Much work since the 1970s has suggested, however, that word order might be introduced only in the mapping of unordered, hierarchical syntactic structures to phonology. I explore the consequences of this thesis in the context of cliticization in two South Slavic languages.
The starting point is a striking contrast in clitic placement between the closely related languages Bulgarian and Macedonian: Macedonian clitics can be initial within root clauses, but Bulgarian clitics cannot. In this talk I first show that the clitics in both languages form complex morphosyntactic heads with the verb; these heads are syntactically atomic in a number of ways. Second, while Macedonian object clitics have been argued to be the morphophonological reflex of syntactic agreement relations (Franks 2009), I demonstrate on the basis of various syntactic diagnostics that object clitics in Bulgarian are not agreement but instead exhibit the characteristics of nominal phrases.
I leverage this syntactic difference between the two languages to explain the non-initiality requirement in Bulgarian and its absence in Macedonian. However, syntax alone is not sufficient — it is its interaction with independently motivated principles of prosodic structuring that ultimately determines the surface order of clitics in these languages. Such sensitivity of order to prosody can be understood in a model of grammar where order is imposed on the hierarchical structures of syntax as part of the mapping to phonology.
Boris Harizanov (UC Santa Cruz) will give a colloquium on Friday February 7 at 3:30PM in the Greenberg Room. A departmental social will follow.
On the mapping from syntax to morphophonology
What are the atoms of syntax and how do they correspond to words? In this talk I address this question by documenting a certain kind of mismatch between the set of objects that syntax manipulates and morphophonological words. In particular, I provide novel empirical evidence from Bulgarian denominal adjectives that certain parts of words can behave syntactically as (non-branching) phrases. The nominal component of these denominal adjectives is syntactically active in ways expected of typical nominal phrases with respect to their thematic interpretation, anaphoric properties, and interaction with syntactic movement dependencies.
However, these denominal adjectives exhibit a number of adjectival characteristics as well. I attribute this kind of mismatch to the application of Morphological Merger (cf. Marantz 1981), an operation that is part of the mapping procedure from syntax to morphophonology. Consequently, I treat denominal adjectives as underlying nominal phrases that are converted into adjectives by Morphological Merger in the course of the derivation, as part of the word formation process which combines a nominal phrase with adjectivizing derivational morphology.
This approach results in the syntactic decomposition of morphophonological words, which leads to a syntactic treatment of at least some aspects of word formation: syntactic objects realized as parts of words and those realized as autonomous words do not necessarily differ for the purposes of syntax. The present investigation contributes to a long line of research on what have traditionally been viewed as mechanisms of syntactic word formation, such as head-to-head movement (Baker 1985, 1988) and merger under adjacency (Marantz 1981, 1988).
Luc Steels is Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, head of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and a visiting researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He will give the lecture described below on Monday, February 3 at 4 pm in Margaret Jacks Hall, Bldg. 460, Room 126. His abstract is given below.
CAN ROBOTS INVENT THEIR OWN LANGUAGE?
Abstract: For more than a decade we have been doing robotic experiments to understand how language could originate in a population of embodied agents. This has resulted in various fundamental mechanisms for the self-organisation of vocabularies, the co-evolution of words and meanings, and the emergence of grammar. It has also lead to a number of technological advances in language processing technologies, in particular a new grammar formalism called Fluid Construction Grammar, that attempts to formalise and capture insights from construction grammar, and a new scheme for doing grounded semantics on robots.
This talk gives a (very brief) overview of our approach and discusses some details of the technical spin-offs that have come out of this work. The talk is illustrated with live software demos and videos of robots playing language games.
The next installment of the Cognition & Language Workshop will feature behavioral scientist Jean-Francois Bonnefon from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the director of the CLLE research center in Toulouse. He works on reasoning, decision-making and moral judgment. Please join us at CSLI (Cordura 100) at 4PM for Bonnefon’s talk. Refreshments will be provided!
The pragmatics of decision-making: Experiments on face-saving connectives and quantifiers
Abstract: Because connectives (if, or) and quantifiers (some, probably) are the building blocks of judgment and reasoning, any pragmatic factor that affects their interpretation also affects a broad range of inferences and decisions. In this talk, I review experiments investigating the interpretation of connectives and quantifiers that apply to face-threatening contents such as criticisms, impositions, or bad news. I show that these interpretative effects cannot be explained by frameworks that assume speakers to use language efficiently. Rather, these effects are borne out of the tension that exists between speaking efficiently and speaking kindly.