Linguistics Graduate Students Association

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

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 associated with question embedding (weak-exhaustivity, strong-exhaustivity and intermediate-exhaustivity), where each embedding predicate selects for the appropriate schema. Despite these arguments I will propose a uniform semantics based on … 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 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