Linguistics Graduate Students Association

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 … 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

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 … 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 … 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 … 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 … Read More

Speaker: Rodrigo Ranero (UCLA) Title: A new perspective on the syntax of silence: The view from Mayan Abstract: Ellipsis is structure and meaning without form. In the case of spoken … Read More