Colloquium Series

Spring 2023
April 21, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst)
Principle B: The view from comprehension and production (details)

February 24, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Kenyon Branan (Universität Göttingen)
Syntax-phonology interactions and the Left Edge Ban (details)

February 17, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Justin Royer (UC Berkeley)
Binding and anti-cataphora in Mayan (details)

February 10, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Maria Kouneli (University of Leipzig)
Upwards-oriented complementizer agreement: The view from Kipsigis (details)

February 3, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Rodrigo Ranero (UCLA)
A new perspective on the syntax of silence: The view from Mayan (details)

January 27, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Ksenia Ershova (MIT)
The nuanced typology of syntactic ergativity: Insights from parasitic gaps in Samoan and West Circassian (details)

Fall 2022

September 30, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Luke Adamson (Rutgers)
A noun’s gender is locally determined: Evidence from gender and possession (details)

November 11, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Aaron White (University of Rochester)
Semantic Category Induction (details)

December 16, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College)
Spoken rhythms and drummed speech: Bidirectional iconicity at the crossroads of language and music (details)

Fall 2021

October 15, 2:00 – 3:30 PM ET
Lisa Pearl (UC Irvine)
How children are and aren’t like adults when interpreting pronouns: A computational cognitive modeling investigation. (details)

November 19, 3:00 – 4:30PM ET
Claire Halpert (University of Minnesota)
Revisiting nominal licensing in Zulu (details)

December 3, 3:00 – 4:30PM ET
Kristine Yu (UMass Amherst)
Building prosodic trees (details)

Spring 2022
January 28, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Carly Dickerson (Rutgers)
Sociolinguistic Knowledge of Albanian Heritage Speakers in the U.S. (details)

March 25, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Asia Pietraszko (University of Rochester)
Syntactic structure building: lessons from periphrasis (details)

April 1, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Amir Anvari (MIT)
A theory of oddness (details)

April 29, 3:00 – 4:30 PM ET
Yohei Oseki (University of Tokyo)
Building machines that process natural language like humans (details)

Fall 2020

Friday, October 30, 11:15 AM ET
Gillian Ramchand (Tromsø): Verbal Symbols and Generalized Demonstrations (details)

Friday, Nov 20, 4:00 PM ET
Stefan Keine (UCLA): Crossover asymmetries (joint work w/ Rajesh Bhatt) (details)

Friday, Dec 04, 1:30 PM ET
Janet Pierrehumbert (Oxford): Capturing semantic and social factors in morphological derivation (details)

 

 

Spring 2021:

Friday, February 05, 3:00 PM ET
Edward Flemming (MIT):
A Generative Phonetic Analysis of the timing of L- Phrase Accents in English (details)

Friday, March 05, 3:00 PM ET
Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst): Deconstructing Relativization — the case of Georgian `rom’ relatives
(joint work with Léa Nash, Paris 8/CNRS) (details)

Friday, March 26, 3:00PM ET
Daniel Goodhue (UMD): `Rising declaratives and the semantics-pragmatics interface’ (details)

Friday, April 16, 3:00 PM ET
Danny Fox (MIT):
Trivalent Strong Exhaustivity – towards a uniform semantics for question embedding (details)

 

Spring 2020:

Friday, January 31
Nadine Theiler (UConn):

• Ungrammaticality from triviality: deriving selectional restrictions of attitude verbs (details)
  
• Witness protection: A unified semantics for additive particles in assertions and questions (details)

Friday, February 7
Deniz Özyıldız (UMass):

• Rethinking questions (details)
• The shape, meaning, and sound of factivity (details)

Friday, February 14
Dorothy Ahn (Harvard):

• Semantic research in the signed modality (details)
• A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions (details)

Friday, February 21
Virgina Dawson (UC Berkeley):

• What do imperatives mean? (details)
• Paths to exceptional wide scope: Choice functions in Tiwa (details)

Friday, March 6
Jon Ander Mendia (Cornell):

• Genericity and Grammar (details)
• Structuring ignorance (details)

 

Fall 2019

Friday, October 18
Lynn Burley (University of Central Arkansas): Teaching Linguistics with Case Studies: High-Impact Learning

Friday, October 25
Jason Bishop (CUNY): Prosodic evidence for individual differences in speech production planning

Friday, November 1
Jim Wood (Yale): Putting our heads together: Icelandic deverbal event nouns and allosemy (details)

Friday, November 22
Jeff Heinz (Stony Brook): Deterministic Analyses of Optional Processes

Friday, December 13
Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford): Polarity Reversal and Scalarity in Counterfactuals

Fall 2018

Friday, September 21
Keir Moulton (University of Toronto). Exceptional Agreement via Clausal Determiners

Friday, October 19
Anna Szabolcsi (NYU): Title TBD

Friday, October 26
Kevin McMullin (University of Ottawa): Title TBD

 

Fall 2017

Friday, October 20
Craige Roberts: De se semantics for indexicals

Friday, November 03
Juliette Stanton: Constraints on contrast motivate nasal cluster dissimilation

Friday, December 15
Thomas Graf: One reason to move, a million reasons to be an island: Third-factor explanations from computational syntax

Spring 2018

Tuesday, January 23
Ryan Bochnak: Temporal interpretation in complement clauses: The view from Washo, an optional tense language

Friday, February 02
Andries Coetzee: Radically Individualized Linguistic Competence

Tuesday, February 06
Yimei Xiang: Complete and true: Attitudes held of questions

Friday, February 09
Greg Scontras: Property noise and ambiguity resolution: The case of stubborn distributivity

Tuesday, February 13
Yasutada Sudo: How scalar implicatures and presuppositions interact

Friday, February 16
Susi Wurmbrand: ECM cross-linguistically — Consequences for the A/A’-distinction, Case and clause reduction

Tuesday, February 27
Prerna Nadathur: Necessity, sufficiency, and actuality: causal dependence in implicative inferences

Friday, March 02
Mariapaola D’Imperio: Language-specific prosodic parsing: a window into the nature of phonological and phonetic category learning

Friday, March 09
Elliott Moreton: Featural-simplicity biases in phonological learning

Fall 2015

Friday, September 25
Andrew Nevins (UCL): Where Can Linearity Trump Hierarchy in Syntax?

Friday, October 23
Gillian Gallagher (NYU): Natural Classes and Phonotactic Patterns

Friday, November 06
Ian Roberts (Cambridge): A Parameter Hierarchy for Passives

Friday, December 04
Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard): Where Does Weak Crossover Come From?

Spring 2016

 

 

Fall 2014

September 26
Liliana Sanchez (Rutgers): Modularity from the bilingual perspective: Crosslinguistic influence, feature reassembly and functional convergence

October 24
Florian Schwarz (UPenn): Presupposition and implicatures in online processing

November 21
Magda Kaufmann (UConn): Embedded imperatives: venturing into the cross-linguistic picture

December 5
Bruce Tesar (Rutgers): Output-Driven Phonology

Spring 2015

February 6
Douglas Pulleyblank (UBC): Out from under lying forms

March 6
Alexander Williams (UMD): Implicit agents and remote control

April 3
David Pesetsky (MIT): Islands in the modern world

Fall 2013

September 27
Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins): ‘About’ attitudes

October 25

Chris Collins (NYU): Horn Clauses and the Analysis of Negative Polarity Items*

Spring 2014

January 28-29
Andreea Nicolae
Polarity and Exhaustivity in Questions.

Am I right or wrong? Where do disjunctive questions come from?

February 6-7
Peter Klecha
Imprecision and Modality

Constraints on Temporal Orientation

February 13-14
Igor Yanovich
Necessity modals: from two strengths to many colors

Variable-force modality

February 27-28
Simon Charlow
Locality in the syntax and semantics of attitude ascriptions.

The dynamic core of exceptional scope.

March 4-5
Benjamin George

March 7
Brett Hyde (Wash U): TBA

April 25
Marcel Den Dikken (Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences): The Attractions of Agreement