Interface Research Group
Projects
South Slavic Clitics
In language, speakers are frequently presented with situations that have the appearance of options – pairs of closely related sentences (having identical lexical items) that appear to be similar or even identical in meaning. One such instance is that of second
position clitics in Serbian, in which the “second position” may be after the first phrase (1P), or after the first word (1W). Are these two truly interchangeable options? Or is there a linguistically significant difference between them, perhaps conditioned
by information structure? What role does intonation play? If the placement of the clitic is pragmatically conditioned, how do the modules of syntax, phonology/morphology and semantics/pragmatics interact? What must the overall structure of the grammar look
like? In our study we are analyzing corpora from several Slavic languages in addition to Serbian (Croatian, Slovenian and Czech) to determine the frequency and distribution of second position clitics in written texts of various registers. For all three languages
we are conducting psycholinguistic experiments to collect production and grammaticality judgment data from native speakers. Further intonation studies will be done to establish correlations between structural and information structure properties with prosody.
(Diesing, Zec)
Turkish Stress and Prosodic Structure
My current work focuses on Turkish stress. I am working on an account that would thoroughly explain the irregular stress patterns which have received a lot of attention in the literature. I also work on case and agreement, and in this respect I examine Kapampangan,
an ergative-absolutive language spoken in the Philippines. Other research interests of mine include Turkish and Hungarian causative constructions and nominalization.
(Kesici)
Word Order and Information Structure in Serbian
I am investigating (as my dissertation research) the relationship among word order, prosody and information structure, focusing on Serbian, which has the so-called free-word order. I aim to give a systematic classification of Serbian word order data, arguing
for a revision of an earlier approach that is based on a focus projection algorithm (i.e. Godjevac (2000, 2006)). In my approach, the notion of focus has a different and a less central role. I intend to show how word order and prosody interact to directly
achieve certain semantic/pragmatic goals such as relative scope and topichood. I test some of the major ingredients of the proposal experimentally. Part of my project is dedicated to so-called discontinuous constituents, and I propose an interface solution
to the phenomenon, which accounts for its puzzling syntactic and information-structure properties. My dissertation will also include some of my work on 2nd-position clitics, another interface phenomenon in Serbian.
(Predolac)
The Left Periphery in ASL
The focus of this dissertation research is the structure of relative clauses in American Sign Language (ASL). Relative clauses are common examples of embedded structures in natural language and as such are important illustrations of the recursivity and complexity of human language grammar. Such structures in ASL were first described in the late 1970's. This early work identified a set of non-manual markers (facial expressions and head tilts) which were claimed to always co-occur with relative clause utterances. Since then however, there has been little further work done on these forms in ASL, and there is still debate within the field as to whether or not the structures originally identified as relative clauses might not be better described as conjoined sentences and thus not true relative clauses. Determining the actual form and distribution of relative clauses in ASL is therefore crucial to understanding the nature of both embedded and non-embedded structures in ASL.
Consequently, the objectives of the study are to identify ASL utterances which qualify as clear examples of relative clauses, to determine exactly which signs or non-manual expressions are required in such utterances and under what conditions, and to use these discoveries to support an analysis of the syntactic structures involved. The research will also identify several additional subtypes of relative clauses not previously identified. Natural language data will be collected from native speakers of ASL in the areas of Rochester, NY and Washington, DC through one-on-one interviews designed to elicit relative clause structures in a variety of syntactic positions. These interviews will be recorded with high-definition video equipment to allow for the most accurate transcription of subtle but grammatically important non-manual markers.
Also collaborating:
Diane Lillo-Martin, Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut
Funded by NSF DDRIG #0951626: The Morphology and Syntax of Relativization in American Sign Language
(Galloway)
Cross-Linguistic Study of Intonation
As an undergraduate participant in the Rawlings Cornell Presidential Research Scholars program, I am interested in the phonetic correlates of focus and the effects of intonation on truth-conditionality, particularly in tonal languages. I am currently researching both the phonetic and syntactic correlates of focus in Cantonese and hope to begin studies with native speakers in the near future.
(de Kleer)