Ling-Lunch is a series of weekly talks, open to all linguistics topics. It is held in an informal setting, and everybody is welcome to present their work, but preference is given to members of the MIT Linguistics Department.
We meet every Thursday from 12:30 to 1:45 pm in room 32-D461.
Meetings and changes in the schedule are announced by email to interested people. If you want to receive the email announcements, want to present something, or have any other comments about Ling-Lunch, email Hrayr Khanjian.
Joseph Perkell
"Movement goals and feedback and feedforward mechanisms in speech production"
Studies of speech motor control are described that support a theoretical framework in which fundamental control variables for phonemic movements are multidimensional regions in auditory and somatosensory spaces. Auditory feedback is used to acquire and maintain auditory goals and in the development and function of feedback and feedforward control mechanisms. Several lines of evidence support the idea that speakers with more acute sensory discrimination acquire more distinct goal regions and therefore produce speech sounds with greater contrast. Feedback modification findings indicate that frequently used sound sequences are encoded as feedforward commands, and feedback control serves to correct mismatches between expected and produced sensory consequences.
Shigeru Miyagawa
Distinguishing A- and A’-movements Without Reference to Case
In GB, A-movement was characterized in two, parallel ways. First, A-movement targets a potential theta position (thus A(rgument) movement) while A’-movement is to a non-theta position. Second, A-movement is Case-driven. The first distinction became obsolete with the advent of the predicate-internal subject hypothesis, which deprives Spec,TP of ever being a theta-position. This leaves only the second characterization for defining A-movement. S. Takahashi (2006) and S. Takahashi and Hulsey (in press, LI) propose an intriguing Case-based analysis for A-movement within MP. In this talk, I will suggest an alternative to Case by exploring instances of A-movement across a number of languages that do not involve Case (e.g., Finnish, Japanese). Based on these cases, I will introduce an entirely different approach to distinguishing A- and A’-movements that takes advantage of the phase architecture of grammar -- what I term the “Phase-Based Characterization of Chains” (PBCC) (Miyagawa, in press). This proposal notes that movements that do not cross a Transfer Domain have A-movement properties while those that cross a Transfer Domain have A’-properties. The analysis provides a straightforward account of not only the familiar A- and A’-movements including scrambling, but it also successfully accounts for more exotic and mysterious types of movements that rely on the notion of“mixed A/A’ position” found in languages such as Finnish (Holmberg and Nikanne 2002).
Miyagawa, Shigeru. In press. Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse Configurational Languages. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 54, MIT Press.
Guillaume Thomas
Incremental comparatives
In this talk I will investigate a form of comparison of superiority that one could call `incremental', as in (1) and (2):
(1) Give me (some) more coffee.
(2) Five customers bought a laptop yesterday, and one more customer bought a desktop this morning.
In its incremental reading, the request in (1) is satisfied even if the quantity of coffee that I receive is inferior to the quantity of coffee that I got before. In the same way, (2) is true even in case only one customer bought a computer this morning. Incremental readings are not attested with all predicates under all conditions, cf. (3) and (4):
(3) Bob was happy right after the talk, and he is going to be happier tonight at the party.
(4) The temperature rose by 4C yesterday afternoon, and it's going to rise some more this afternoon.
(3) entails that Bob will be happier at the party than he was right after the talk — hence, no incremental reading is available. (4) has an incremental reading according to which the temperature might rise by less than 4C this afternoon. And it might even be the case that the temperature fell down during the night, and rose back again before now. However, it has to be the case that the temperature rises from the degree it had reached yesterday afternoon — not from a lower degree. A proper analysis of incremental comparison must capture these restrictions on the availability of incremental readings.
It will be argued that incremental comparison arise from the use of a specific incremental comparison operator. Lexical ambiguity is supported by the absence of incremental comparison in languages that do not lack standard comparison of superiority (eg. German). The incremental comparison operator combines with a property G of eventualities and degrees, and asserts that G is satisfied by an eventuality E to some degree D. It also introduces a presupposition that a specific eventuality E' that is associated with a degree D' precedes E, such that G is satisfied by the sum of E and E', to the degree D plus D'. In other words, the incremental comparison operator asserts that G(E)(D) is true and presupposes that D increments a previous degree D' associated with a previous eventuality E'. It is argued that the reference to a sum of eventualities E+E' in the presupposition suffices to rule out unattested/limited incremental readings with examples such as (3) and (4).
Omer Preminger
Failure to Agree is Not a Failure: phi-agreement and (un)grammaticality
Based on the patterns of phi-agreement with post-verbal subjects in Hebrew, I argue against the idea that failure to establish a phi-agreement relation between a phi-probe and its putative target (e.g., due to intervention) results in ungrammaticality, or a "crash"; at the same time, I argue that phi-agreement also cannot be optional.
At first glance, these claims---that phi-agreement is neither optional, nor does its failure result in ungrammaticality---might seem contradictory. However, I argue that there is a third possibility, which is in fact the only one that can account for the data under consideration: phi-agreement must be attempted by every phi-probe; but if it fails (e.g., due to the presence of an intervener), its failure is systematically tolerated.
Interestingly, this mirrors the behavior of the ruled-based systems of early generative grammar, where rules were composed of a Structural Description (SD) and a Structural Change (SC). In these terms, the effects of phi-agreement, as far as valuing the features on the phi-probe, could be thought of as the SC; the locality conditions associated with phi-agreement (incl. intervention) could be thought of as the SD.
Finally, I note that these result are in conflict with the idea that Case arises as a result of phi-agreement (e.g., as a result of valuing a full phi-set on a probe; Chomsky 2000, et seq.); I show independent evidence---from empirical domains outside of the ones discussed above---that a theory claiming that Case is dependent on phi-agreement is untenable.
Verner Egerland
Tense in Gerunds
In the unmarked case, the English ing-form expresses a process, that is, a homogenous non-culminated eventuality, simultaneous with that of the main clause:
1. I spent the afternoon sleeping on the couch.
However, exceptions to the simultaneous reading are known to exist. To some extent, gerunds can refer to events following the matrix event (2), or preceding it (3):
2. He entered college at the age of fifteen, graduating four years later at the head of his class. (From Jespersen 1940: 407)
3. Setting sail for the island in the fall of 1740, he reached his destination in the spring of 1741. (From Stump 1985: 97)
This paper is concerned with the English ing-form, the French present participle, the Italian gerund, and the Swedish present participle. It will be shown that the «tense-shifting» property illustrated in (2) and (3) is attested in English, French, and Italian, but not in Swedish. It will be argued that «tense-shifting» as illustrated in (2)-(3) does not follow from the aspectual properties of gerunds but is in fact linked to grammatical Tense. By assumption, then, grammatical Tense is projected in gerundival clauses in English, French, and Italian. In these languages, we observe that (a) clausal negation may be licensed, (b) copular and auxiliary Vs are allowed, and (c) a subject argument is licensed. Swedish differs systematically from the other three languages in disallowing clausal negation, copular and auxiliary Vs, as well as explicit subject arguments. These observations have consequences for a number of Tense-related issues in generative grammar, such as the theoretical status of Finiteness, the relation between Tense and the Aspect-Event system, as well as the acquisition of Tense.
Kirill Shklovsky
Syntactically-Conditioned Phonology: The Case of Tseltal Vowel Hiatus Resolution.
Tseltal, a Mayan language of southern Mexico, has a strict prohibition against vowel hiatus: all vowel hiatus must be resolved either by deleting one of the vowels or epenthesizing a consonant. The choice of the strategy is not predictable from the nature or quality of the vowels involved. In this talk I will argue that the choice of the hiatus resolution strategy can be accounted for by making recourse to syntactic structure; specifically to the presence or absence of strong phase boundaries between the vowels in hiatus. Building on the work of Marvin 2003, Piggott and Newell 2006, and Michaels 2008 I will propose a set of constraints that favor greater faithfulness to material spelled out in an earlier phase to account for the choice of Tseltal vowel hiatus resolution strategy.
