Yearly Archives: 2017

Jessica Coon colloquium Friday April 14th at 3:30

Jessica Coon of McGill University will be presenting “Building verbs in Chuj: Consequences for the nature of roots” in the Linguistics colloquium series Friday April 14th at 3:30, in ILC N400. All are welcome!

Abstract: The suffix -w in Chuj (Mayan) is found in two contexts: (i) attached to transitive roots to form what have been called “incorporation antipassives” and (ii) attached to nominal and positional roots to form unergatives. In both contexts, the result is an intransitive verb with a single, agentive external argument. In this talk I provide a unified analysis of these constructions in which -w is a v/Voice head that attaches to a root and introduces an external argument, but does not assign ergative case. Intransitivity is indirectly ensured through the limited availability of licensing heads. This has important implications for the status of certain antipassives. In Chuj, I argue that the incorporation antipassive formed with -w does not convert a transitive verb into an intransitive verb, but rather, both transitive and “antipassive” stems are formed directly from the root.

This detailed look at Chuj verbal morphology sets the scene for a broader question: when it comes to verb-stem formation, what information is contributed by the root, and what is contributed by the functional heads? I argue first that roots in Chuj are not acategorical, but must be grouped into categories based on their stem-forming possibilities. Root category does not map directly to surface category, but does determine which functional heads are possible. Second, I show that while licensing, agreement, and the introduction of the external argument are all governed by higher functional heads, the presence or absence of an internal argument is dictated by the root. Specifically, transitive roots in Chuj always combine with an internal argument, whether it be a full DP, a bare pseudo-incorporated NP, or an implicit object. The internal argument cannot be fully omitted or suppressed, regardless of higher functional material.

Recent Research Achievements by Linguistics Undergrads at UMass

We’ve had an exceptional year for undergraduate research in linguistics. Given that a major goal of our department has to been increase research opportunities for undergraduates in linguistics, we’re extremely proud of the fact that a number of our students are presenting work at major workshops and conferences:

– Jack Duff is presenting work at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, a major international conference in the field.

– Anthony Yacovone (2016) is also presenting work at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing; this is research that Anthony carried out while he was an undergraduate at UMass last year.

– Amanda Doucette is presenting work at the Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics conference in Spain

The fact that three (current and recent) undergraduates are presenting research at major professional conferences is quite exceptional. In addition – and no less noteworthy – two of our undergraduates are presenting work at major undergraduate conferences and workshops in linguistics:

– Alicia LeClair is presenting work at both the Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium (CULC) and the Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics (GLEEFUL), two major national venues for undergraduate research in linguistics.

– Andrew Wang (Computer Science) is presenting work at the Canadian Linguistics Annual Undergraduate Symposium (CLAUS).

Finally – and again no less noteworthy – three of our undergraduates will be presenting their work at the 23rd Massachusetts Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference, to be held in Amherst on April 28, 2017:

– Vishal Sunil Arvindam will be presenting work on the use of singular “they” in different populations

– Emma Merit will be presenting her work on the role of Mandarin classifiers on the classification of objects.

– Jack Duff will be presenting work on the identification and processing of perspective in so-called ‘free indirect discourse’.

In addition to all this, two of our undergrads will be participating in prestigious linguistics summer programs. Alicia Eclair will be one of the participants in this year’s Guatemala Field School, organized by the University of Maryland, and Jack Duff has been offered a summer internship at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) Summer Program at Stanford.

We’re extremely proud of the successes of our undergrads, and wish them the best in these presentations and events!

PhoNE 2017 @ UMass

PhoNE 2017 will take place at UMass on Saturday, April 8th, 2017. The talks, breaks, and lunch will all take place in/around N400 in the Department of Linguistics, which is in the Integrative Learning Center (650 N. Pleasant St). It is the building directly north of the pond on the map here.

Parking is free on weekends at most university parking lots (all those not circled on the map as 24hr enforced). I would suggest lots 62, 63, or 64 for proximity to the department.

Please see below for the schedule.

SCHEDULE

11:30-12:00 Martín Fuchs (Yale) “Antepenultimate stress in Spanish: in defense of syllable weight and grammatically-informed analogy”

12:00-12:30 Luca Iacoponi (Rutgers) “Surface Correspondence as I/O Correspondence”

12:30-1:30 LUNCH

1:30-2:00 Coral Hughto (UMass) “Generating gradient typological predictions with an interactive learning model”

2:00-2:30 Gašper Beguš (Harvard) “Bootstrapping Historical Probabilities”

2:30-3:00 BREAK

3:00-3:30 Chikako Takahashi (Stony Brook) “No metathesis in Harmonic Serialism”

3:30-4:00 Benjamin Storme (MIT) “A theory of phonologically-derived environment effects”

4:00-4:30 BREAK

4:30-5:00 Brandon Prickett (UMass) “The Effect of Complexity on Generalization”

5:00 Business meeting

Andries Coetzee colloquium Friday April 7th at 3:30

Andries Coetzee of the University of Michigan will be presenting “Individual and Community Level Differences in the Perception and Production of Coarticulatory Speech” in the Linguistics colloquium series Friday April 7th at 3:30, in ILC N400. All are welcome!

Abstract. Individual speakers can differ in the extent to which they overlap articulatory gestures. Similarly, listeners can differ in how much they rely perceptually on coarticulatory information. In this presentation, I will explore the ways in which this kind of community level variation is structured at the level of the individual. Specifically, I will investigate the extent to which the coarticulatory production patterns of an individual correspond to that individual’s reliance on coarticulatory information during speech perception. Most theories of speech production and perception (including theories of sound change) assume a link between the perception and production repertoires of individuals, although there is limited evidence to date for the existence of such a link.

The focus in this presentation will be on the perception and production of anticipatory nasalization. In the studies that will be discussed, nasal airflow was used to identify the onset of anticipatory nasalization during speech (at what point during the vowel does nasal airflow initiate in the production of a word like scent), and eye-tracking was used to measure the perceptual reliance on anticipatory nasalization (when presented with an auditory stimulus scent, do listeners fixate on the target scent rather than the competitor set based on the anticipatory nasalization during the vowel, or do they wait for the disambiguating information contained in the consonant following the vowel).

I will discuss two studies that explore this phenomenon, in American English and in Afrikaans, respectively. These two languages are similar in terms of the observed inter-speaker variation in the reliance on anticipatory nasalization during both production and perception. The social structure of the variation is different between the two speech communities, however. In American English, the extent of nasalization is socially relatively unmarked, while the degree of nasalization is strongly correlated with the difference between so-called “White Afrikaans” and the socio-ethnic minority variety of the language known as “Kleurling Afrikaans”. I will show that there is evidence for the correlation between perception and production repertoires of speakers in both American English and in Afrikaans, and explore some of the differences that arise from the different social embeddedness of anticipatory nasalization in these two speech communities.