What's Happening in South College: 11/15/15

15 November 2015

Laura McPherson gives department colloq

Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) will give the department colloquium this Friday at 3:30 in N400. The title of her talk is “Constraint Interaction and the role of spell-out in Dogon tonosyntax,” and an abstract follows.

The Dogon languages of Mali share a unique system of replacive grammatical tone in the DP, where a word’s lexical tone is completely overwritten by tonal overlays in particular morphosyntactic positions. Unlike more typologically common systems of replacive tone, which tend to be triggered by morphemes or morphological features and are confined to a single word, Dogon overlays in the DP may span multiple words and are triggered by certain c-commanding syntactic categories or positions (hence, tonosyntax). In cases where a word is targeted by more than one potential trigger, the Dogon languages differ in their resolutions. I argue that these changes are inherently morphological in nature, despite occurring at the phrase-level rather than the word-level, and propose a construction-based model in which phrase-level morphological constructions encode idiosyncratic phonological changes sensitive to both syntactic category and syntactic structure. Constructional schemas are implemented in the grammar as constraints (construction constraints). The variation found in the Dogon language family is descriptively quite complicated, with no two languages working in exactly the same way, but in this talk, I show that the surface patterns falls out naturally in a maximum entropy (Goldwater and Johnson 2003, Hayes and Wilson 2008) model with weighted constraints, capable of capturing both within-language and between-language variation.

Additionally, data from the tonosyntax of possession and relative clauses provide evidence for the role of phases in determining morphophonological form. In particular, the application of tonal overlays is often, though (crucially) not obligatorily, blocked on material that has spelled out in a previous cycle. I argue that these effects provide evidence for transcyclic faithfulness constraints, which penalize alterations to the morphophonological form of spelled out material in later grammatical cycles. Like all constraints, these too are shown to be violable, with different Dogon languages displaying varying degrees of faithfulness to phasal targets. Thus, the Dogon data show that while spelled out material may be resistant to later phonological changes, it is not immune to it, as argued by proposals such as Lowenstamm (2010) or Newell and Piggott (2014).

SSRG Tomorrow!

Leland Kusmer writes:

For the SSRG meeting next week (Monday the 16th), we'll be doing an overview session of the journal Syntax. We looked at this journal in our first overview session last year, so the goal is to cover newer issues and also some of those issues we missed in the last round. As such, I've put together a sign-up sheet that includes only those issues we haven't yet done.

Remember that the overview session is intended to comprise very short, high-level overviews — you should aim for maybe 5 minutes for the entire issue. We'll then select a few papers that sound interesting to the group which we can all read for the next meeting.
Please claim issues here:

bit.ly/SSRGReadsSyntax

Tu+ on Saturday, November 21

Deniz Ozyildiz writes:

Tu+, aka "the Turkish workshop", is happening on November 21-22, save the date!

The program is available here: http://campuspress.yale.edu/tuworkshop1/program/

The workshop dinner slash party is hosted by Rajesh, at 9 Myrtle St. in Northampton, on Saturday, Nov. 21. We ask for a small contribution (~$15), because we are unable to fund the event. The money will be used to get food and non-alcoholic beverages, but we encourage everybody to bring fancier drinks. (The price is also likely to vary depending on attendance!) If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here: http://goo.gl/forms/1TZAUpCk2N

Marcus Maia and Aniela Franca at LARC on Friday

Jon Nelson writes:

LARC will meet this Friday at noon in ILC N451. All are welcome! Two talks will be presented:

A Computational Efficiency Principle in action in the processing of recursively embedded PPs in Brazilian Portuguese and in Karaja - Marcus Maia (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

An ERP Evaluation of the comprehension of PP embedding and coordination in Karaja and in Portuguese - Aniela França (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Barbara at U Michigan

Barbara Partee writes:

I will be part of a small workshop on the Origins of Formal Semantics organized by Rich Thomason at the University of Michigan November 19-21. The other invited participants are Max Cresswell, Hans Kamp, Jeff Pelletier, Martin Stokhof, and Ivano Caponigro.

I will give an opening ‘topic-framing’ talk, and will also be part of a closing panel on UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rich, Barbara, and Ivano (who is working on a biography of Montague) earlier worked up a set of questions that were circulated to all the workshop members, including lots of questions about who influenced whom about various topics, the connections among people like Montague, David Lewis, Arthur Prior, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel; counterfactual conjecture questions like how and whether formal semantics would developed if Montague hadn’t lived or hadn’t done any of what he did, as well as what a possible world might look like in which he didn’t die so young.

The program is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/lpw15/program.html

Tom and Jeremy at Jackson Street School

Jeremy Hartman and Tom Roeper will make a presentation at “Science Night" at the Jackson Street School on November 19th. There talk will be on acquisition and psycholinguistics.

UMass at BUCLD

The Fortieth meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development happened over this weekend, and UMass was represented by:

Mike Clauss and Jeremy Hartman gave the paper “Syntactic cues in adjective learning"

Elliott Moreton gave the talk “Phonological pattern learning involves both implicit and explicit processes” with K. Pertsova.

Amy Schafer gave the poster “Mapping prosody to reference in L2” with A. Takda, H. Rohde and T. Grüter.

Tom Roeper, Anca Sevecenco and Barbara Pearson gave the poster “The acquisition of recursive locative prepositional phrases and relative clauses in child English.”

Roeper in Connecticut

Tom Roeper is giving a talk “Recursion and Disorders” at Connecticut College tomorrow, November 16.

ECOM Workshop at UConn

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology — of various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

Information about the workshop can be found at the workshop webpage. You may find the schedule, abstracts and information about visiting Storrs at the workshop page. Registration for the workshop, which is free, but required, is available by following this link. The workshop is open to the public and ECOM encourages attendance by researchers in the cognitive sciences from nearby institutes to attend.

Workshop Schedule:
  Thursday, November 19th - Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Conference Room:
            2:00-2:25PM                Registration
            2:25-2:30PM             Welcome
            2:30-3:45PM                Timothy Jay (Psychology, Massachusetts College) - "Doing Research with Taboo Words"
            4:00-4:40PM                Trip Glazer (Philosophy, Georgetown) - "Contemptuous Speech"
            4:40-5:20PM              Helen L. Daly (Philosophy, Colorado College) - "Silently Insulting"
            5:30-6:45PM                Ljiljana Progovac (Linguistics, Wayne State) - "Expressive Language in the Evolution of Grammar"
            6:45-7:15PM                Reception

Friday, November 20th - Homer Babbidge Library Class of 1947 Conference Room:
        9:30-10:00AM              Breakfast - Coffee & Bagels
          10:00-11:15AM           Mark Richard (Philosophy, Harvard) - "Why Do We Care About Slurs?"
        11:30-12:10PM           Bianca Cepollaro (SNS & IJN) & Tristan Thommen (IJN) - "What's Wrong with the Truth-Conditional Accounts of Slurs?"
        12:10-12:50PM           Andrew Morgan (Philosophy, Virginia) - "Hybrid Speech Acts: A Theory of Normative Language that 'Has it Both Ways'"
          12:50-2:00PM              Lunch! (sandwiches, etc. provided)
        2:00-3:15PM                 Dean Pettit - "Objectivity and Emotion"
        3:30-4:10PM                 John Voiklis (CPS, Brown)* - "Building a Moral Lexicon to Study (and Implement) Moral Communication
        4:10-4:50PM                 Laura Niemi (Psychology, Harvard)** - "Implicit Causality and Moral Inference"
          5:15-6:30PM                 Anna Papafragou (Psychology, Delaware) - "Evidentiality Across Languages"
          7:00PM                             Workshop Dinner at Chang's Garden - REGISTRATION REQUIRED

The Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group is pleased to announce that it will be hosting its second annual interdisciplinary workshop this November on "Expressive Language: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Origins", to be held November 19-20, 2015 at the University of Connecticut.

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology — of various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.

7:00PM Workshop Dinner at Chang's Garden - REGISTRATION REQUIREDThe Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) Research Group is pleased to announce that it will be hosting its second annual interdisciplinary workshop this November on "Expressive Language: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Origins", to be held November 19-20, 2015 at the University of Connecticut.

The workshop will explore theoretical analyses — offered from a variety of perspectives (such as metaethics, philosophy of language, psycho- and socio- linguistics, and cognitive psychology — of various systematic ways in which language is used to express emotions and other attitudes — through, e.g. slurs, pejoratives, laudatives, exclamatives, and evaluative terms.