Linguistics Graduate Students Association

A Generative Phonetic Analysis of the timing of L- Phrase Accents in English Edward Flemming (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT) Abstract: The narrow goal of this research is to … Read More

(joint work with Léa Nash, Paris 8/CNRS) The typological literature on relativization talks about correlatives, externally headed relatives and internally headed relatives as distinct relativization strategies. We discuss the case of Georgian, a language which we argue has all three, and show how it builds these up from essentially the same ingredients. We add to the typology of correlative constructions … Read More

Rising declaratives provide a challenging test case for theories of the semantics-pragmatics interface that aim to explain why the main clause types are canonically linked to certain discourse functions. For example, declaratives are canonically used to assert, and thus usually commit the speaker to their propositional content and signal the goal of updating the common … Read More

Trivalent Strong Exhaustivity – towards a uniform semantics for question embedding Danny Fox, MIT Abstract In this talk I will go over well-known arguments that there are three different interpretive schemas … Read More

How children are and aren’t like adults when interpreting pronouns: A computational cognitive modeling investigation Lisa S. Pearl   Abstract: Interpreting pronouns in context is a complex linguistic task, especially … Read More

Revisiting nominal licensing in Zulu Claire Halpert   Abstract:  The questions of whether and how nominals are syntactically licensed in Bantu languages have been a matter of recent active debate … Read More

Building prosodic trees Kristine M. Yu Abstract: Computational perspectives from string grammars have richly informed our understanding of phonological patterns in natural language in the past decade. However, a prevailing theoretical assumption of phonologists since the 1980s has been that phonological patterns and processes are computed on trees built with prosodic constituents such as syllables, … Read More

Syntactic structure building: lessons from periphrasis Asia Pietraszko   Abstract:  Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat the auxiliary verbs be and have as lexical items that enter syntactic … Read More

A theory of oddness Amir Anvari   Abstract:  We will rehearse a host of puzzles that have been uncovered in the literature on oddness pertaining particularly, but not exclusively, to … Read More

Building machines that process natural language like human Yohei Oseki   Abstract: Despite the close alliance in the 1980s, theoretical linguistics (a branch of cognitive science) and natural language processing … Read More