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
Speaker: Maria Kouneli (University of Leipzig) Title: Upwards-oriented complementizer agreement: The view from Kipsigis Abstract: A number of African languages display upwards-oriented complementizer agreement, where the complementizer agrees in phi-features … Read More
Speaker: Justin Royer (UC Berkeley) Title: Binding and anti-cataphora in Mayan Abstract: The Binding Conditions are widely held to reflect a universal property of human language (e.g., Reinhart 1983; Grimshaw … Read More