Author Archives: bhatt

Imke Driemel and Jelena Stojkovic visit UMass from Leipzig

Jelena Stojkovic and Imke Driemel are PhD students at Leipzig University (IGRA) and they are visiting UMass for much of the Spring of 2018.

Imke is interested in agreement, coordination, information structure, and non-assertive speech acts. Her earlier work has focused on the information structure of exclamatives and their internal syntactic structure. She currently works on resolution agreement in person mismatch coordinations, split conjuncts in German, pseudo-coordination in Norwegian, and focus strategies in Limbum (Grassfield Bantu). She hasrecently become interested in pseudo-incorporation.

Jelena’s primary research interests are in phonology, more specifically in the interactions of prosody (stress, tone and accent) with other morpho-phonological phenomena, such as deletion, vowel reduction, language games, phonologically conditioned allomorphy, morphological classes. So far she has worked on various dialects of Serbo-Croatian and other South Slavic languages, also Afar, Lendu and Tiv (soon). She also has a syntactic side, which has resulted in work on DP-Exfoliation (removal of structure via syntactic operations).

Imke and Jelena are currently working together on two projects, one is concerned with vowel raising chain shifts in parallel OT and the other project investigates agreement alternations with quantified noun phrases in Serbo-Croatian.

Kimberly Johnson in Syntax Workshop, Friday, March 23, 2.30pm

Kimberly Johnson will speak in the Syntax Workshop on Friday March 23 at 2.30pm.

Title: Muskogee Creek: A Case of Too Many Options

Abstract: Muskogee Creek has a case system that is unusual in two ways. First, there are two cases, /-t/ which marks only subjects, and /-n/ which marks all non-subject nominals including adjunct-like nominals such as temporal adverbs and locations. Second, case is largely, but not entirely optional. This talk presents a formal analysis that attempts to capture the wide distribution of non-subject case, as well as to constrain optionality. I show that presence-absence of case is structurally constrained along two lines, and argue that both point to a Dependent Case analysis.

 

Practice Talk by Jyoti Iyer, Wednesday March 7, 5.15pm, N458

Jyoti Iyer will a practice talk entitled, “The presuppositional objects of restitutive ‘again'”. The talk will be on Wednesday at 5:15pm (Kyle’s seminar will end at 5:10pm, and we will stay in the same room, N458).

This talk exploits the necessarily low attachment of restitutive ‘again’ to build an argument for object shift in Hindi-Urdu: the adverb is low enough that short movement of the direct object is visible in the overt syntax. Shifted objects are presuppositional, and unshifted objects are non-referential. The overt visibility of this semantic distinction in Hindi-Urdu is analogous to German scrambling indefinites, shedding new light on the empirical observation that restitutive is incompatible with non-referential objects, specifically showing that low attachment alone cannot fully determine the details of restitutive meaning.

Feedback is welcome and necessary, all are invited to attend.

The talk is a practice talk for a talk on 23 March in Recife, Brazil, at Adjuncts 2018, the third international thematic workshop of GETEGRA (Grupo de Estudos em Teoria da Gramática). [https://adjuncts.wixsite.com/adjuncts2018]

Michael Wilson in Syntax Workshop, Friday Feb. 23, 2.30pm

Michael Wilson will speak to us in the syntax workshop tomorrow at
2.30pm, the usual place. Here’s a short abstract:

Title: The Dative Illusion

Abstract: I provide evidence from my first GP that people fail to
notice thematic role restrictions on goal arguments of dative verbs
(e.g., give, send) when the goal argument is extracted. However, this
failure only occurs if the verb has an alternative argument structure
compatible with the extracted argument, despite the fact that
participants showed no evidence that they were unconsciously
correcting such sentences. I discuss how these results bear on
different theories of argument structure, arguing for an approach
where restrictions on dative verb goal arguments are encoded in the
verb.

 

Sakshi Bhatia in Hyderabad

Sakshi Bhatia presented a poster at AMLaP Asia: Forgetting Effects in a head-final language: Evidence from Hindi. (with Samar Husain). Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Asia (AMLaP-Asia). Hyderabad Central University, India. February 1, 2018.

 

Sakshi also gave an invited talk on causatives, instruments and argument structure in Hindi-Urdu at EFLU, which is one of the premier centers for generative linguistics in India: Using Instruments to diagnose argument structure. English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. February 4, 2018.

The first Lingle of the semester

The first Lingle14513666_10103842373240112_606005278_o of the semester took place on the evening of Thursday the 29th. This being the second year of the Lingle, there were many Lingle regulars. There were also many new faces. We made plans for future Lingles, which are to focus on applying for internships, applying for grad school, and applying for jobs. The next Lingle will be in early November. The highlight was Andrew Lamont getting everyone excited about the Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) through puzzles on Maori and Japanese.  Brian Dillon and Rajesh Bhatt made sure the pizza arrived on time. 14572738_10103842373235122_2079290743_o 14572099_10103842373245102_235329739_o 14522063_10103842373230132_1611264121_o 14536742_10103842373280032_1310232888_o