Genericity and Grammar Generic statements such as those in (1) express non-accidental, fundamental characteristics of some type of individuals and/or situations. 1) a. Birds fly. b. Liz smokes after dinner. c. This machine crushes oranges. Such generic statements are cross-linguistically ubiquitous, tend to be morphosyntactically simple, and provide essential means to express the ways in … Read More
Structuring ignorance Certain constructions in natural language are tied to an inference that the speaker cannot be more informative; they give rise to what is often referred to as 'ignorance inferences'. For instance, the sentences in (1) convey that the speaker doesn't know who/how many people came to the party. 1) a. Liz or Sue … Read More
Verbal Symbols and Generalized Demonstrations Gillian Ramchand Abstract: In this talk I develop a new theory of the ingredients of semantic composition for the verb phrase, building on recent work (Ramchand 2018). I show that the central properties of the approach proposed there make possible a new rapprochement between the theoretical analyses of verbal … Read More
Crossover asymmetries Stefan Keine (joint work w/ Rajesh Bhatt) Abstract: We investigate and analyze a crossover asymmetry in Hindi scrambling: such scrambling is not subject to (secondary) weak crossover but at the same time shows clear (secondary) strong crossover effects. This asymmetry provides empirical evidence that the two types of crossover should be analytically decoupled … Read More
Capturing semantic and social factors in morphological derivation. Janet B. Pierrehumbert (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) Abstract In morphology, the factors predicting the productivity of inflectional patterns have been intensively studied. Both type frequency and phonological similarity are known to play important roles. Quantitative models have thus focussed on how these two factors interact. … Read More
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 develop an analysis of the timing of the English low phrase accent (L-) in H*L-L% and H*L-H% melodies. This is challenging because L- is generally … 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