Author Archives: Joseph Pater

Festschrift event for Tom Roeper

A surprise gathering was held on Monday to present a Festschrift (reference below) to Tom Roeper. The program can be found at this link. Congratulations Tom, and thank you to all who contributed to this lovely celebration of Tom’s work!

Hollebrandse, Bart, Jaieun Kim, Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, and Petra Schulz, eds. 2018. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics (UMOP) 41, T.O.M and grammar (Thoughts on Mind and grammar): A festschrift in honor of Tom Roeper. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Graduate Linguistics Student Association.

Commentaries and blog discussion for Pater 2019

From Joe Pater

I’ve set up a discussion blog post with links to the final (pre-copyedited) versions of my paper “Generative Linguistics and Neural Networks at 60: Foundation, Friction and Fusion” and the commentaries here: https://websites.umass.edu/cogsci/2018/10/12/discussion-generative-linguistics-and-neural-networks-at-60/. Direct links to the commentaries are also below. The paper and commentaries will appear in the March 2019 volume of Language.

Iris Berent and Gary Marcus. No integration without structured representations: reply to Pater.

Ewan Dunbar. Generative grammar, neural networks, and the implementational mapping problem.

Tal Linzen. What can linguistics and deep learning contribute to each other?

Lisa Pearl. Fusion is great, and interpretable fusion could be exciting for theory generation.

Chris Potts. A case for deep learning in semantics

Jonathan Rawski and Jeff Heinz. No Free Lunch in Linguistics or Machine Learning.

 

Pratas in Hispanic Linguistics Weds. Oct. 9 at 1:30

“Temporal Meanings in Two Varieties of Capeverdean”
Fernanda Pratas – University of Lisbon
Wednesday, Oct 10 at 1:30 in Herter 301

ABSTRACT:
In Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole, there seem to be no dedicated tense morphemes, with past, present and future situations being rather expressed by aspect and mood, combined with the linguistic context and pragmatic inferences.
In the variety spoken in the island of Santiago, the postverbal morpheme -ba seems indeed associated with a tense value: past. However, the picture gets more complicated when we look at complex sentences where this morpheme marks what seem infinitival verbs within the scope of modal expressions. These wider contexts clearly point to this morpheme as a temporal concord/agreement marker, and this is the proposal to be defended here.

If this analysis for Santiago -ba is on the right track, it is even more adequate to the case of the (much younger) variety spoken in São Vicente: here we have rather slightly different preverbal forms for present and past progressives and habituals, as well as, for past perfect, a suppletive form of the Portuguese auxiliary tinha ‘had’ + suppletive participle forms.

Jacobs in Cognitive Brown Bag Weds. Oct. 9

The cognitive brown bag speaker this week will be Cassandra Jacobs, of UC Davis (https://cljacobs.net/) on “What memory for phrases can tell us about memory and phrases” (abstract below).  As usual, the talk will be on Wednesday, 12:00-1:15, Tobin 521B. All are welcome.

Abstract. Language is full of regularities and formulaic language. We reuse familiar words and phrases and combine them in novel ways to express new ideas. Most research has focused on words, but recent psycholinguistic research suggests that we also represent phrases like “psychic nephew” and “alcoholic beverages” in long-term memory, typically arguing that frequent phrases are easier to process because they are represented and retrieved from memory as unanalyzed wholes, effectively just like words (e.g. Jansen & Barber, 2012; Arnon & Cohen Priva, 2013; Goldberg, 2003). In my research, I have questioned whether this is true by asking how phrases are represented in episodic memory. In two recognition memory and free recall experiments, I will show that phrases are fundamentally composed of words, and are not represented as unanalyzed, word-like units in long-term memory. I propose that simple mechanisms can be used to explain phrase frequency effects without needing to posit the existence of phrases per se. I will then describe a verbal model of memory that can explain phrase frequency effects in recognition and free recall.

 

Alrenga colloquium Friday Sept. 28th at 3:30

Pete Alrenga, our Semantics guru, will present the first talk in this year’s GLSA colloquium series. It will take place at 3:30 in ILC N400, and a reception will follow.

Title: Implicature Suspension and Ignorance:  When Redundancy Isn’t Enough

Abstract. According to the classical neo-Gricean view,  scalar upper-bounding inferences such as (1) are conversational implicatures driven by the maxim of Quantity.

(1)    a.  Paws ate some of his dinner.
         Inference:  Paws did not eat all of his dinner.
    b.  This semester, I will enroll in Semantics or Phonology.
         Inference: I will not enroll in both Semantics and Phonology.
The ensuing theory of scalar implicatures, elaborated in pioneering work by Horn and Gazdar, was for many years viewed as a success story par excellence of neo-Gricean pragmatics.  According to a more recent view, the so-called grammatical view, these inferences do not arise via pragmatic reasoning, but are instead calculated as a part of these sentences’ truth-conditional meanings, via the presence of a local strengthening operator.  One of the most compelling arguments for the grammatical view comes from the contrast between (1a) and (2).  Informally, the underlined disjunct in (2) serves to call off, or “suspend”, the scalar not all-inference that usually accompanies (1a).  Instead, (2) serves to convey the speaker’s ignorance regarding exactly how much Grover ate (perhaps just some, but perhaps more than that).

(2)    Paws ate some or (even) all of his dinner.

Beneath this contrast lurks an intriguing question:  how is it that truth-conditionally equivalent sentences, such as (1a) and (2), may nonetheless give rise to differing scalar inferences?  In the first part of the talk, I will review the answer to this question that has emerged from the grammatical view.  I will then show that this same question arises across a variety of “suspension” devices, such as those in (3).

(3)    a.  Grover ate at least some of his dinner.
    b.  This semester, I will enroll in Semantics or Phonology, if not both.
    c.  This semester, I will enroll in Semantics and/or Phonology.

A welcome feature of the grammatical view is that its account of the speaker ignorance conveyed by (2) readily generalizes to the sentences in (3), as I will also show.

An even more recent line of work seeks to derive the difference between (1a) and (2) from considerations of structural complexity.  The idea is (roughly) this:  given that (1a) and (2) are truth-conditionally equivalent, the second disjunct in (2) appears to be semantically redundant, since the speaker could have conveyed the same information using the first disjunct alone.  The ignorance conveyed by (2), as well as the local strengthening that facilitates this, can then be made to follow if this sort of redundancy is in fact penalized.  In the second part of the talk, I will argue that this proposal, appealing though it is, does not readily generalize to the sentences in (3).  Finally, I will offer some (programmatic) suggestions for what might instead account for the difference between (1) and (2)/(3).


 

Barbara Partee to be awarded British Academy medal

Barbara Partee will be awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal on September 24th in a ceremony in London. She will be the fifth recipient of this prestigious recognition of “lifetime achievement in the scholarly study of linguistics”. Previous recipients include Noam Chomsky and William Labov. The award was established in 2013 by Professor Neil Smith, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at University College London. Barbara will also give an invited talk the following day at UCL.

Congratulations Barbara!