Category Archives: Uncategorized

9/23 7:30 p.m. PRG meeting

From Coral and Ivy:

This semester’s first meeting of PRG will be on Wednesday 23 September at 7:30pm. PRG is an informal gathering to talk about half-baked ideas, interesting papers, works-in-progress, or anything else. PLEASE EMAIL US IF YOU WILL BE COMING! The current plan is to meet downstairs in Haymarket (in Northampton), but if enough people RSVP we will host the meeting somewhere else.

9/25 3:30 Ashwini Deo colloquium

Ashwini Deo (Yale) will give the department’s first colloquium of the semester this Friday, September 25, at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title and abstract of her talk follow.

Title: The Semantic and Pragmatic underpinnings of Grammaticalization Paths

It is a well-established fact that meanings associated with functional linguistic expressions evolve in systematic ways across time. But we have little precise understanding of why and how this happens. We know even less about how formal approaches to the meanings of functional categories like tense, aspect, negation can be reconciled with the typologically robust findings of grammaticalization research. In this talk, I will take a first step towards such an understanding by analyzing a robustly attested semantic change in natural languages — the progressive-to-imperfective shift.

The facts can be described as follows: At Stage 0, a linguistic system L possesses a single imperfective or neutral aspectual marker X that is used to express two contextually disambiguable meanings ? and ?. At Stage 1, a progressive marker Y arises spontaneously in L in order to express ? in some contexts. At Stage 2, Y becomes entrenched as an obligatory grammatical element for expressing ? while X is restricted in use to expressing ?. At Stage 3, Y generalizes and is used to express both ? and ?. X is gradually driven out of L. Stage 3 (structurally identical to Stage 0) is often followed by another instantiation of Stage 1, with the innovation of a new progressive marker Z. The trajectory to be explained is thus cyclic. The analysis I provide has a semantic component that characterizes the logical relation between the progressive and imperfective operators in terms of asymmetric entailment. Its dynamic component rests on the proposal that imperfective and progressive sentences crucially distinguish between two kinds of inquiries: phenomenal and structural inquiries (Goldsmith and Woisetschleger 1982). The innovation and entrenchment of progressive marking in languages is shown to be underpinned by optimal ways of resolving both kinds of inquiries in discourse given considerations of successful and economic communication. Generalization is analyzed as the result of imperfect learning. The trajectory — consisting of the recruitment of a progressive form, its categorical use in phenomenal inquiries, and its generalization to imperfective meaning — is modeled within the framework of Evolutionary Game Theory.

9/24 11:30 Psycholing: AIMM3 Prep

This week in the psycholing workshop we’ll be prepping for the third convening of the American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM3), which will be hosted in the linguistics department October 2-4. In particular, we’ll be discussing a paper relevant to Harald Baayen’s plenary talk, “Doing it without morphemes: A discriminative perspective on morphology and morphological processing”.

Below are two papers relevant to this discussion. The first (Baayen, Hendrix, & Ramscar 2013) is an application of the authors’ own model (Naive Discriminative Learning) to reported word-level n-gram frequency effects in processing. This paper is reasonably approachable, and, I think, a good starting point for a discussion of the reductionist approach Baayen will be pushing in his talk.

I’ve included the second paper (Baayen et al. 2011) only for the curious and ambitious. This paper presents in gorier detail the actual model discussed in the 2013 paper, and is a somewhat more difficult read.

Discussion on Thursday will focus on the 2013 paper, so come ready with comments and questions! See you there!

Shayne

Baayen, Hendrix, & Ramscar 2013

Baayen et al. 2011

Phonology grant 9/24 4 p.m. – Pearl paper

Leave a reply

On Sept. 24 at 4 p.m. in rm. N451, the phonology grant group will meet to discuss Pearl et al. (2015). Title and abstract follow.

An argument from acquisition: Comparing English metrical stress representations by how learnable they are from child-directed speech

Lisa Pearl, Timothy Ho, & Zephyr Detrano

University of California, Irvine

Abstract

One (often implicit) motivation for a theory of knowledge representation (KR) comes from an argument from acquisition, with the idea that language acquisition is straightforward if children’s hypothesis space is defined by the correct KR. Acquisition is then the process of selecting the correct grammar from that hypothesis space, based on language input. To compare KR theories, we establish quantitative acquisition- based metrics that assess learnability from child-directed speech data. We conduct a learnability analysis for three KR theories proposed for metrical phonology and evalu- ate them on English, a language that is notoriously irregular with respect to metrical phonology and therefore non-trivial to learn. We find that all three KR theories have similar learnability potential, but the proposed English grammars within each theory are not the grammars able to account for the most English child-directed speech data. This suggests learnability issues exist for the proposed English grammar in all three theories if a learner is attempting to learn a grammar that accounts for as much acqui- sitional intake data as possible. We discuss ways a learner may still be able to learn the English grammar from English child-directed speech by incorporating (i) additional useful linguistic knowledge about English metrical phonology interactions and (ii) bi- ases to selectively learn from the input. We additionally discuss which aspects of the proposed English grammars are hurting learnability, observing that small changes in parameter values or constraint rankings lead to significantly better learnability results.