The New Sesquipedalian

Join us in the Greenberg Room next Friday as we welcome Alan Prince (Rutgers University), who will talk on “Testing the boundaries: aspects of typological structure in OT.” His abstract is given below, as well as a link to a PDF version of the abstract which includes additional figures.

Abstract: The formal typology is perhaps the central object of modern linguistics, where formal typology = the set of all grammars admitted by the premises of a theory. In OT, this object is both self-consciously placed in the foreground and amenable to study.

A formal typology classifies grammars in terms of the inner mechanisms of its theory. In OT, a typology classifies grammars in terms of shared and distinguishing ranking patterns (Alber & Prince) that collectively combine to give the entire set of grammars in the typology. What these are, and may be, depends on the structure of the typology (Merchant & Prince).

Typological structure in OT involves both geometry and order. A notion of adjacency between grammars leads to the ‘typohedron’ of a typology, where each grammar is represented by a single vertex. Adjacency comes from the linear orders (‘rankings’) that grammars consist of. Basic classification involves sets of grammars that are geometrically adjacent in this sense. Because of the way constraint ranking selects optima, order and equivalence relations between entire grammars, grounded in the geometry, also emerge. Basic classification respects these relations as well. (In Merchant & Prince, they are represented by the MOAT — ‘mother of all tableaux’ — which contains the essential OT properties of each constraint.) Both aspects of structure are representable graphically in ways that render them quite accessible (see PDF version).
The logic of OT ranking leads to two further developments that build from the basic structural elements. (1) Ranking properties may take limited scope, so that in grammars outside the scope of a property, certain distinctions are moot. This follows from the fact that constraints need not be crucially ranked with respect to each other in every grammar. (2) Constraints belong to classes as well, based on the symmetries of their ranking behavior. Constraints must often have an atomic character, but their behavior may echo that of symmetrical partners operating in distal regions of the typology.

Find the augmented abstract pdf here.

In addition to his colloquium talk on Friday, Alan Prince will speak at a Psycholinguistics Group meeting next Thursday at 4PM about OTWorkplace, a new computational framework for OT analysis.

Description:

OTWorkplace is an interactive environment for linguistic analysis using the tools of modern rigorous OT, written by A. Prince, B. Tesar, and N. Merchant. In the background lies the previous pioneering work of B. Hayes on OTSoft, and it belongs to a set of packages that includes work by A. Andrews, T. Biro, A. Hogan, W. Raymond, J. Riggle, R. Staubs et al., and M. Walther.

The basic concept is like that of Maple or Mathematica. The aim is to provide a relatively straightforward and easily manipulable user interface which produces output in a form where further calculations can be made, further ideas explored, manually or via software, which may be built-in or user-defined.The end result is an automated research notebook, which may be preserved, indexed, commented, edited, expanded, contracted, as the project flows and develops. 

OTWorkplace runs within Excel and produces Excel workbooks. The virtues of platform-independence have been set aside in favor of the virtues of usability, flexibility, and ease of further development. System requirement are Windows (32 or 64-bit) and Microsof Office (32-bit only). It has been run successfully on Macs using emulators like Parallels and VirtualBox. It is recommended that users install from the installer package on my webpage at http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~prince/. Installation has been reported successful on operating systems ranging from XP to Windows 8.1. Updates are posted on the barebones OTWorkplace website at https://sites.google.com/site/otworkplace. Current version: OTWorkplace_X_70.xlsm. The installer package installs Graphviz, the programming language Ruby (with appropriate add-ons), the Ruby scripts (‘RUBOT’) that are called for various heavy-lifting tasks not covered in the VBA core of the program (which is contained in the OTWorkplace workbook itself), putting everything in the right places and setting the appropriate environment variables. You do none of this, and are responsible only for clicking on a few filenames and responding civilly to a few questions. There’s a readme file with the installer package that guides you through these clicks.

In this meeting, I will focus on using OTWorkplace to analyze OT typologies, which by something close to a fortiori covers OT analysis of single languages. No experience with the program will be assumed, though some prior acquaintance with OT and Excel ought to smooth the way. If you have installed the program on your laptop, you should be able to follow along. Documentation is imperfect at present. The material in the OTWorkplace workbook, where the program resides, is out of date. The OTWorkplace website contains various pieces of current documentation mostly relevant to automated violation counting. The hope is to have a general quick start guide up there shortly.

Read the article here, which also includes an interview with the author himself!

Join the SMircle workshop as they hear from Nico Baier (UC Berkeley), who will be presenting his work on adjectives in Noon (Senegal) on October 13, 3.15pm in the Greenberg Room.

Adjective Agreement in Noon: Evidence for a Split Theory of Noun-Modifier Concord

In this paper, I argue that two distinct mechanisms are needed to account for the pattern of noun-adjective agreement in Noon (Cangin, Senegal). Adjectives in Noon exhibit two types of agreement. First, they take a prefix that encodes the class and number of the noun they modify. Second, attributive adjectives must agree in definiteness with the noun they modify. Nouns and adjectives take an identical definiteness suffix that marks by a suffix on the the head noun’s class/number along with three degrees of deixis. The class/number prefix is obligatory for both attributive and predicative adjectives, while the definiteness suffix is available only for attributive adjectives. Previous work presupposes that the same mechanism derives noun-modifier agreement (concord) and argument-predicate agreement: usually a modified version of Chomsky’s (2001) Agree. However, others have argued that noun-modifier agreement is morphological in nature and should be derived post-syntactically (Norris 2014). Here, I argue for a split approach: prefixal agreement on Noon adjectives is derived by valuation of Phi-probe on a, while another is derived via a post-syntactic process of Feature Copying.

Eve V. Clark is giving the plenary talk “Variation and Experience in First Language Acquisition” at the conference Diferencias Individuales en la adquisicion del lenguaje, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Mexico City on Thursday, October 9.

Vera Gribanova presented “On certain manifestations of polarity focus in Russian” at the LRC Workshop on Syntax and Information Structure.

Andrea Beltrama will present at the Berkeley Syntax Circle next Friday, October 17th.

Dan Jurafsky will present on Extracting Social Meaning from Language: The Computational Linguistics of Food and the Spread of Innovation at MIT’s CSAIL Thursday, October 9th.