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 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 … 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 (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 … 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