The department welcomes Bill Croft (University of New Mexico), who will be speaking at 3:30pm today, February 6 in the Greenberg room. All are welcome, with a social to follow. The title and abstract are given below.
Force-dynamic image schemas: between verb and argument structure construction
There has been a long debate over the relative semantic contribution of verbs and argument structure constructions to the structure of the event expressed by a clause, in particular semantic structures described as “transfer”, “emission”, “application” and so on. In this talk, I will argue that these semantic structures are force-dynamic image schemas that are only partly constrained by verb meaning and argument structure construction. Verbs have a force-dynamic potential that allows them to be construed in more than one force-dynamic image schema. Argument structure constructions constrain but do not determine the force-dynamic structure of the event expressed by the verb occurring in the construction. The mapping between verb roots and force-dynamic image schemas varies across languages, but additional research is required to determine what constraints there are on possible mappings.
Join the P-Interest Workshop today in the Greenberg Room, as they hear from our graduate student Kate Lindsey.
Finding your Feet in Chuvash
The syllabic structure of Chuvash reveals an unexpected incompatibility between the mechanisms of foot structure and stress assignment, generally considered to be equivalent. Words in Chuvash with foot structure but without stress challenge the assumption that these phenomena are the same. This observation supports Vaysman (2009), who found analogous mismatches in other languages, including neighboring Eastern Mari. Here, I claim that all Chuvash words are composed of bimoraic metrical feet and that some Chuvash words lack word-level stress. I provide evidence for metrical feet by exploring segmental phenomena such as word minimality, vowel deletion and consonant lengthening. I show that word-level stress is optional by analyzing the phonetics and phonotactic distribution. I compiled my data from the Electronic Word list of Chuvash (Luutonen et al. 2008) and personally collected audio/video recordings of Chuvash speech.
We’re pleased to announce a colloquium talk next Friday by Jacob Eisenstein (Georgia Tech). As always, the talk will be in the Greenberg Room at 3:30.
Variation and Change in Online Writing
Online writing is an increasingly ubiquitous mode for informal, phatic communication, but the implications of this shift for the relationship between writing and speech are still contested. While some point to the rise of a new “netspeak” dialect, quantitative analysis suggests a picture that is more complex: online writing reproduces lexical and phonetic variation from spoken language, while simultaneously hosting an impressive array of apparently novel orthographic variables. I will present computational statistical techniques for identifying variation in online writing, and will discuss the geographical, social, and linguistic properties of several types of variables. Next, I will consider the diachronic perspective, where large-scale longitudinal data enable robust inferences about patterns of linguistic influence across thousands of lexical variables. I conclude with ongoing work on whether and how orthographic variables can maintain their social and geographical distinctiveness in the face of pressure towards leveling in an ever more densely-connected online world.
Dan Grodner (Swarthmore) will speak at the Cognition & Language Workshop next Thursday at 4PM in the Greenberg Room.
A Bayesian Account of Conversational Inferences
Much if not most of the meaning that speakers convey with their words is implicit. The standard account of how perceivers recover implicit content is via a process of rational psychosocial inference: Perceivers appeal to a set of maxims to formulate a generative model of a cooperative speaker (Grice, 1975). This view requires that perceivers reason about the communicative intention of the speaker’s speech act (the whole utterance). Over the past 10-15 years, a number of researchers have argued that the standard account is inadequate because it cannot account for the existence of so-called local implicatures. These are cases where an inference appears to be generated within an embedded constituent within an utterance (e.g., Chierchia, Fox & Spector, 2012; Chemla & Spector 2011, Gajewsky & Sharvit, 2012). I will describe a probabilistic model that follows from the assumptions of the standard Gricean account (Russell 2012) and provide experimental evidence that supports it. I will show how this model can explain seemingly local implicatures without appealing to special grammatical operators. In addition to providing a formalization of Gricean reasoning, this approach allows us to preserve the traditional division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. The present approach is similar in spirit to other recent probabilistic approaches (e.g., Goodman & Stuhlmueller 2013) but covers different empirical territory and differs in its mechanics.
FrameWorks Institute, where Julie Sweetland (Ph.D. 2006) is Director of Learning, has been chosen as one of nine organizations around the world to receive the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. The “organizational genius grant award,” which was announced February 5, recognizes exceptional nonprofit organizations who have demonstrated creativity and impact, and invests in their long-term sustainability with sizable one-time grants. As the MacArthur announcement puts it,
“FrameWorks has pioneered an approach to communications it calls Strategic Frame Analysis, which yields clear and actionable insights into how the framing of issues affects people’s sense of efficacy, urgency, and appraisal of public solutions. The approach integrates the cross-disciplinary work of anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and sociologists who research public attitudes through surveys, in-depth and “man on the street” interviews, media analysis, and expert study groups. From this deep and broad set of inputs, it produces communications and framing materials designed to help the public understand complicated issues through comprehensible metaphors and examples.”
Julie received her PhD from the department in 2006 with a dissertation titled Teaching writing in the African American classroom: A sociolinguistic approach, directed by John Rickford.
Congratulations, Julie!
Reviewed by alum Sarah Bunin Benor (Ph.D. 2004) – Read it here! Spoiler alert: reading Dan’s book may “significantly change” the way you look at the world.
Join the Fieldwork Workshop as they hear from Martin Benjamin (Kamusi.org; advisory committee, PanLex). Martin is visiting on Tuesday, February 24th to talk about his work creating a vast system of monolingual dictionaries, where each unique concept is matched to similar ideas in all other participating languages. Martin will be discussing the general issues of multilingual lexicography. This visit precedes his talks at ICLDC, where he will be expanding upon the crowd-source methods that Kamusi uses to elicit reliable language data.
This informal talk will be in the Ivan Sag Room, 127B at 1PM on February 24th.