There will be a presentation at today’s (2/14) P-Interest meeting from Tim Dozat at noon in the Greenberg Room. His abstract is given alone.
Opacity in Lakota Nasalization
Abstract: Lakota, a Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people in the Sioux tribes of North and South Dakota, contains a number of unique phonological processes that serve to opacify nasalization and the spread of the [+nasal] feature. Shaw (1980) collected a plethora of data on Lakota morphophonology and provided SPE rule-based analysis for the processes that interact with nasalization; I will aim to reformulate her analyses to conform to the Stratal OT framework, looking in particular at how ablaut and stop voicing both feed nasalization, how coronal lenition counterfeeds it, and how denasalization counterbleeds it (yes, denasalizationcounterbleeds nasalization!). While the analysis I propose represents a work in progress, it will be seen that the opacity of the problems I investigate require innovative solutions in a constraint-based system.
Natalia Silveira will be leading a discussion today (2/14) of Dowty’s “The Role of Negative Polarity and Concord Marking in Natural Language Reasoning” at 2:15 in the Greenberg Room.
The paper is linked here.
Alexis Wellwood (University of Maryland) will be speaking at the Cognition & Language Workshop on Thursday, February 20 at 4PM at CSLI, in Cordura 100.
With meaning in mind: tests at the interface
Linguistic meanings are not exhausted by their contributions to truth-conditions. Judgments of truth cannot therefore be the only data for semantic theory, especially if natural language semantics is a part of cognitive science. In this talk, I discuss how other behavioral data can allow us to infer the semantic properties of expressions, relying on assumptions about how they interact with other cognitive systems. As a test case, I discuss speaker understanding of “more” and “most”, combining evidence from child language acquisition and adult performance with a new analysis of the grammatical properties of these expressions.
Celebrate Valentine’s Day by coming to hear Robin Melnick talk about his dissertation project at the Spoken Syntax Lab meeting: 2/14, 1PM in Cordura 100 at CSLI. Robin’s overview:
“My thesis project looks at variation within variation, at how the principle of end weight — a factor underlying a number of different syntactic variation phenomena — itself varies by individual speaker. The project also experimentally explores competing accounts that seek to motivate the end-weight principle in individual differences of cognitive resources or experiences.”
Tom Wasow will be at the 2014 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) next week, serving as the Secretary of Linguistics and Language Science (Section Z).
The department collaboration graphs have been updated, and are linked at the top of this page.
Valentine’s Day-themed linguistics jokes make for a pretty specialized genre – but we managed to find one, courtesy of Sofia Kanibolotskaia at U Toronto.
