Author Archives: Michael

Kusliy’s defense a success

We’re extremely proud to share the news that on January 31st, 2020, Petr Kusliy successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “The Emptiness of the Present: Fronting Constructions as a Window to the Semantics of Tense.” Petr’s dissertation is the first to offer an in-depth study of the semantics of tense within fronted constituents, the features of which are argued to show that (among many other things) (i) English present tense can receive a ‘vacuous’ interpretation, and (ii) subordinate CPs when combining with attitude verbs have a semantics similar to that of weak indefinites.
The attached photo shows Petr triumphantly raising the departmental fish, alongside committee members Rajesh Bhatt, Barbara Partee, Kyle Johnson, Seth Cable (chair), and Alejandro Pérez Carballo.

Sundaresan colloquium Friday February 14 at 3:30

Sandhya Sundaresan, Universität Leipzig, will present “Indexical Shift and the grammar of intensionality” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 14. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
In classic cases of indexical shift, attested in languages like Amharic, Zazaki, Nez Perce, Turkish, and many others, a sentence like “Jill said that I am sick”, uttered by Marie, can actually be a statement about Jill’s sickness rather than Marie’s. I.e. the reference of the indexical pronoun ‘I’ is context-shifted, such that it doesn’t refer to Marie (speaker of the utterancecontext) but to Jill (speaker of the context associated with the matrix speech event).
In this talk, I will present two types of evidence that show that the landscape of indexical shift is far more nuanced than is typically assumed:
(i) exceptions to Shift Together (the restriction that all shiftable indexicals in a local domain must shift together) in Tamil, Korean and potentially other languages including Late Egyptian, which crucially co-exist with Shift Together holding as a robust restriction in many languages; and
(ii) evidence, from dialectal microvariation in Tamil (based on personal fieldwork) and crosslinguistic variation from 28 languages, which shows not only that indexical shift is subject to considerable selectional variation, but also that such variation is implicationally structured, privileging speech predicates over all others (making indexical shift an embedded root phenomenon).
I show that current theories of indexical shift cannot handle these challenges and develop a new syntax and semantics of this phenomenon, which does. This new theory derives indexical shift without overwriting the utterance-context but also makes such shift sensitive to Relativized Minimality; it also redefines the contextual operator or “monster” that effects shift as a special type of intensional complementizer, merged at different heights along the clausal spine, reflecting differences in the nature of the embedded attitude. The new model also makes several testable empirical predictions which are fulfilled:
a. that indexical shift cannot obtain in structures that lack a complementizer;
b. that it can obtain in the absence of attitude verbs; and
c. that it interacts with other embedded root phenomena (like allocutivity).
Through it all, we will see that the new theory also has the welcome consequence that it demystifies indexical shift: this is no longer an esoteric phenomenon that applies to “exotic” languages. Rather, all languages are indexically shifting in some way, with variation simply being relegated to which contextual coordinates are shifted, and which indexicals are shiftable, in a given structure or language. Indexical shift can thus be fruitfully deployed as an empirical lens to diagnose the structures involved in intensionality and finiteness across dialects and languages.

Bjorkman colloquium Tuesday February 11 at 4:00

Bronwyn Bjorkman, Queen’s University, will present “Realizing Syntax” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 4:00pm Tuesday Feb. 11. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract

This talk looks at interactions among linearization, prosody, and vocabulary insertion, focusing on cases of verb doubling that appear to be motivated not by syntactic movement, but by the need for an otherwise-unsupported clitic to have a host.

Drawing on examples of verb doubling in Ingush (Nakh-Dagestanian) and Breton (Celtic), I argue first that the linearization of syntactic structures is accomplished via the interaction of ranked and violable constraints, as in OT, rather than via a deterministic linearization algorithm of the type often assumed in syntax. Second, I argue that linearization and prosodification proceed in parallel, allowing verb doubling as a trade-off between prosodic well-formedness (the need of a clitic for a host) and optimal linearization—but that this evaluation occurs prior to both Vocabulary Insertion and the subsequent competition of segmental phonology.

The final sections of the talk discuss the implications of this model for doubling more generally, and more particularly for our ability to explain the fact that certain movement configurations appear to lead to doubling in some languages but not in others. I discuss verb doubling in predicate focus, clitic doubling, and several other instances of apparent multiple realization.

Charlow colloquium Friday December 6 at 3:30

Simon Charlow, Rutgers University, will present “Givenness and local contexts” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday December 6. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
Givenness plays a central role in the licensing of anaphoric reduction phenomena like deaccenting and ellipsis. I argue that Givenness is assessed compositionally, in a local context. In other words, I give evidence for anaphoric Givenness operators in syntax, and I argue that such operators are sensitive to local manipulations of the context (specifically, the assignment). This gives a theory of the syntax-semantics of Givenness intermediate in a sense between the systems of Schwarzschild and Rooth, and converges with conclusions reached in recent work by Kratzer & Selkirk.
I show how this approach leads to significant simplifications in the theory of reduction licensing, allowing us to dispense with otherwise necessary stipulations (e.g., Heim’s prohibition of “Meaningless Coindexing” or Sag’s non-standard definition of alphabetic variance), and making it feasible at last to treat the relationship between an elided phrase and its antecedent as one of strong semantic identity.
I consider several consequences of my proposal for the formulation of Givenness operators, arguing that it compels us to take their dynamic, anaphoric character seriously. I argue that Givenness domains are maximized, and against the notion that any non-F-marked node must be Given. And, time permitting, I explore some consequences of these moves for restrictions on antecedent-contained deletion and the puzzling phenomenon of focused bound pronouns.

Boston University Child Language Development Conference

At the BU Child Language Conference Nov8-10, there were posters and presentations by many students, visitors, and former students, and LARC members:
Bart Hollebrandse
Ana Perez, Rong Yin, Michael Wilson
Dulcie LI, Jessica Kotfila, Jennifer Spenader, Petra Schulz, Tom Roeper and Jill deVilliers,
on topics ranging from Quantification to Aspect to Recursion.

Pictured: Dinner with UMass folks Bart Hollebrandse, Petra Schulz, Jill deVilliers, Dulci Li, Jennifer Spenader, and visitors Professor Yang, Merle Weicker
 

LAWNE Fall 2019

The Language Acquisition Workshop Northeast (Lawne) met for the first time at MIT on November 17th with presentations from Smith, MIT, UMass, and UConn. Jill deVilliers, Diego Lopez, Alex Santos, Joonkoo Park, and Tom Roeper gave four of the nine presentations.

Stanton colloquium Friday Nov 15 at 3:30

Juliet Stanton, New York University, will present “Learning Complex Segments” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday Nov 15. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
Languages differ in the status of sequences such as [mb, kp, ts]: they can pattern as complex segments or as clusters of simple consonants. We ask what evidence learners use to figure out which representations their languages motivate. We present an implemented computational model that starts with simple consonants only, and builds more complex representations by tracking statistical distributions of consonant sequences. We demonstrate that this strategy is successful in a wide range of cases, both in languages that supply clear phonotactic arguments for complex segments and in languages where the evidence is less clear. We then turn to the typological parallels between complex segments and consonant clusters: both tend to be limited in size and composition. We suggest that our approach allows the parallels to be reconciled. Finally, we compare our model with alternatives: learning complex segments from phonotactics and from phonetics.

David Smith talk, Monday Nov 18

David Smith (https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/people/david-smith/) will present “Textual Criticism as Language Modeling: Viral Texts, Networked Authors, and Computational Models of Information Propagation” at 4 pm Monday Nov. 18th in ILC N400. An abstract is below.

This presentation is to a joint meeting of the Initiative for Data Science in the Humanities, and the Data Science tea. If you have any questions, contact Joe Pater at pater@umass.edu. David will be available for half hour meetings from 1 – 3:30 in the Linguistics department – sign up here.

Abstract

The era of mass digitization seems to provide a mountain of source material for scholarship, but its foundations are constantly shifting. Selective archiving and digitization obscures data provenance, metadata fails to capture the presence of texts of mutable genres and uncertain authorship embedded within the archive, and automatic optical character recognition (OCR) transcripts contain word error rates above 30% for even eighteenth-century English. The condition of the mass-digitized text is thus closer to the manuscript sources of an edition than to a scholarly publication. On the computational side, models that treat collections as sets of independent documents fail to capture the processes by which new texts are generated from existing ones.

In this talk, I will discuss several aspects of our work on “speculative bibliography” with computational methods. Starting from a simple model of the composition of historical newspaper pages, with applications to text denoising, I describe models of how texts transform their sources, applied to modern science journalism, medieval Arabic historians, and the generically hybrid forms in nineteenth-century newspapers. I conclude by discussing methods for inferring network structure and mapping information propagation among texts and publications.

This is joint work with Ryan Cordell, Rui Dong, Ansel MacLaughlin, Abby Mullen, Ryan Muther, and Shaobin Xu.

German Network Grant

Leah Bauke, a former UMass Visitor, received a substantial German grant (DFG Network grant) for 7 European Scholars  from Germany (Hopp, Wegner, Kupisch, Bauke), Austria (Rankin), Norway (Westergaard) and the US (Roeper) to study Optionality and Variation in Multilingual Syntax.