Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University) will be speaking at the Cognition & Language Workshop this Thursday, Apr 9, at 4pm in the Greenberg Room (Building 460, Room 126).
CHALLENGES AND SUPPORT FOR VERB LEARNING
Young children the world over appear to expect that a verb presented in a transitive frame surrounded by nouns maps onto a causative meaning and is best associated with an event involving an agent and a patient. At the same time, however, they struggle when a verb appears in an intransitive frame in which two conjoined nouns occupying the subject position. This contrast in performance between the two syntactic environments has been replicated time and again across labs, and has led some researchers to conclude that the fault lies in children’s underdeveloped syntactic representations or in the heuristics they deploy to assign semantic roles to a verb’s arguments. However, I will present the results of a set of word learning studies demonstrating that not only do adults also flounder when presented with a novel verb in an intransitive frame, but when children are provided with semantic support for the form-meaning mapping in the form of an additional informative lexical item or distributional evidence concerning the intended interpretation of the syntactic frame in the discourse, they fare much better with the intransitive frame. These findings suggest that the problem may not be an immature grammar, but rather lack of sufficient information to narrow down the hypothesis space. Verb learning calls upon children’s syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. When these aspects of the linguistic system work in concert, mapping form to meaning is facilitated.
This Wednesday at 4:15 in the Greenberg Room, Phil Crone will be talking about Arabic first conjunct agreement. This is a version of his upcoming talk at the 29th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics.
Arabic First Conjunct Agreement: Against Late Operations
Several recent analyses of Arabic first conjunct agreement (FCA) employ novel syntactic operations that may occur late in a syntactic derivation (Soltan 2007, Larson 2013). I show that these “late operations” analyses are empirically insufficient by failing to capture cases in which FCA and agreement with the full, conjoined subject DP (full agreement) occur on distinct elements within the same clause (mixed agreement). These cases are straightforwardly captured through an interaction between constraints on Agree and movement. I apply this analysis to non-standard dialects of Arabic, for which I use Lebanese Arabic (LA) as a representative example. I then show how this analysis can be extended to cover Standard Arabic (SA) data on the assumption that FCA and partial agreement with non-conjoined plural subjects have separate explanations in SA. The independence of FCA and partial agreement in SA is supported by corpus data from the Penn Arabic Treebank (Maamouri et al. 2010).
Kai von Fintel (MIT) will be giving a department colloquium today (April 3) on imperatives, followed by a social and dinner. As always, it will happen in the Greenberg Room (460-126) at 3:30PM.
A modest proposal for the meaning of imperatives
In this talk, I report on ongoing joint work with Sabine Iatridou. We discuss two challenges for any semantics for imperatives that has them denote (strong) modal propositions: the use of imperatives to signal acquiescence (“A: I’d like to open the window. B: Go ahead, open it!”) and their use in conditional conjunctions (“Ignore the slightest detail and the experiment is flawed”). We demonstrate remarkable cross-linguistic uniformity in these uses of the imperative. In the course of the investigation, we also explore several puzzles in the analysis of conditional conjunction. We conclude with a recommendation in favor of analyses that give imperatives a non-modal semantics paired with a modulated pragmatics.
Ivano Caponigro (UCSD/CASBS) will be giving a colloquium next Friday, talking about his work on Richard Montague’s life. It will be at 3:30 in the Greenberg Room (420-126).
Richard Montague: The simplicity of language, the complexity of life. Toward a biography.
Richard Montague (1930-1971) was a brilliant UCLA logician and philosopher. He revolutionized our conception of language meaning with a theory (known after his death as “Montague Grammar”) that unveiled the logical “simplicity” of natural language, and triggered a major breakthrough and the beginning of a new subfield in linguistics and philosophy of language: formal semantics.
Montague was more than just an exceptionally gifted academic: he was a man with a complex multifaceted personality. At Berkeley, he was a brilliant student, with Alfred Tarski as his advisor. He had a passion for languages and literature and was close to the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance. At UCLA, he was a dedicated teacher who wrote a successful introductory logic textbook with his colleague Donald Kalish and a caring advisor who mentored students like Michael Bennett, Daniel Gallin, Hans Kamp, and Jeff Pelletier. His manner and temper were not always easy to handle and many colleagues found him intimidating. He was an accomplished organist and harpsichord player. He was close to Christopher Isherwood and his literary circle in Santa Monica. He also managed to become wealthy and owned fancy cars and real estate properties in Beverly Hills and the in the San Fernando Valley. And he was a gay man, who had to deal with legal and personal trouble and was murdered in his own home at the age of 40 (the crime is still unsolved).
In this talk, I present some preliminary results of my project to create an intellectual and personal biography of Richard Montague aimed at a broad not-exclusively academic audience. I will start by highlighting Montague’s contributions to linguistics and then look back at his life to try to reconstruct his intellectual development and the cultural and social milieu around him (Stockton, CA in the 30s and 40s; Berkeley in the late 40s and mid 50s; Los Angeles from the mid 50s to the early 70s).
Sesquikudos to Annette D’Onofrio, who has just been awarded a Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship! The Mellon Fellowship supports a year of research and writing to help advanced graduate students in the humanities and soial sciences in the last year of PhD dissertation writing.
You can read more about the Mellon Fellowship here.
QPfest 2015 will take place on the afternoon of Friday, April 24. Mark your calendars!
Lauri Karttunen gave a talk at UT Austin Linguistics last Friday on “From Natural Logic to Natural Reasoning”.
Phil Crone will give a talk at the 29th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, April 9-11 at UW Milwaukee: “Arabic First Conjunct Agreement: Against Late Operations.”
Dan Lassiter will give a colloquium at UC Santa Cruz next Friday on “Nested and informative epistemic modals in a graphical models framework”.