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 when cues to a pronoun’s intended interpretation conflict. Children have to learn to interpret pronouns like adults do, and computational cognitive modeling can help identify … 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 (e.g. Diercks 2012; Halpert 2015, 2019; van der Wal 2015; Sheehan and van der Wal 2018; Carstens and Mletshe 2016; Pietraszko 2020). While a number … 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 derivation like any other lexical item, i.e. via the operation Merge. An alternative view that has received much attention in recent years is that auxiliary … 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 disjunction (Singh 2008, Katzir & Singh 2014, Mayr & Romoli 2016, Mandelkern & Romoli 2018, Marty & Romoli 2021 and references therein). The ambition is … 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 (a branch of artificial intelligence) have traditionally been divorced, especially since the recent advent of deep learning. Theoretical linguistics proposed computational theories to represent linguistic … Read More
Speaker: Luke Adamson (Rutgers) Title: A noun's gender is locally determined: Evidence from gender and possession Abstract: What determines a noun’s grammatical gender? Often this question is posed in terms of how gender is ‘assigned’, with one answer being that a noun’s gender can depend on semantic criteria (e.g. animacy, sociocultural gender), nominalizing morphology, arbitrary … Read More
Speaker: Aaron White (University of Rochester) Title: Semantic Category Induction Abstract: Our ability to use language to convey arbitrarily complex information about the world's possible past, present, and future configurations is undergirded by systematic relationships between linguistic expressions and conceptual categories. Understanding these relationships is not only a core part of understanding what it … Read More
Speaker: Prof. Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) Title: Spoken rhythms and drummed speech: Bidirectional iconicity at the crossroads of language and music Abstract: Language and music share many of the same raw ingredients, including pitch, rhythm, prosodic grouping, and timbre. This talk focuses on an underexplored aspect of the language-music connection: the iconic representation of one … Read More
Speaker: Ksenia Ershova (MIT) Title: The nuanced typology of syntactic ergativity: Insights from parasitic gaps in Samoan and West Circassian Abstract: Syntactic ergativity is broadly defined as the sensitivity of syntactic rules to the distinction between subjects of transitive verbs (= ergative) on the one hand and objects of transitive verbs and subjects of intransitive … Read More