21st April 2023 12:10 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

Fengyue will lead discussion of this paper: 

• "Compensation to real-time temporal auditory feedback perturbation depends on syllable position", Miriam Oschkinata and Philip Hoole, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 15 September 2020

21st April 2023 12:30 PM

Dr. Adam Singerman to lecture on Quotation in Tupari Grammar and Discourse

The Linguistics Department Semantics Group proudly presents a talk by Dr. Adam Singerman of Syracuse University - his talk is titled Quotation in Tupari Grammar and Discourse.

Abstract:

In this talk I report on ongoing research into the structure and interpretation of quotative constructions in Tuparí [iso: tpr], a Tupían language spoken in the Brazilian state of Rondônia.

Drawing upon a sizable corpus of conversational and textual data, I argue that a single quotative construction covers a wide range of functions in everyday discourse, including not only speech reports in the narrow sense but also thought reports and descriptions of behavior/attitude.

Non-elicited examples of quotations nested within quotations provides clear evidence that the Tuparí quotative construction constitutes a true case of syntactic recursion, expanding the typology of known recursive structures in the Indigenous languages of the Americas.

More broadly, this talk demonstrates how an immersive fieldwork methodology — one that emphasizes careful participant observation and a focus on how speakers use their language in everyday discourse — can yield interesting findings for both syntactic typology and for descriptive-documentary purposes.

26th April 2023 12:10 PM

PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group

Today's PhonDAWG is cancelled - we'll move the planned discussion topics to Friday's Phonetics Lab meeting.

27th April 2023 04:30 PM

Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Dr. Adrian Stegovec of the University of Connecticut

The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Adrian Stegovec, Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut.  Dr. Stegovec will give a talk titled "A Typological Gap in Person Restrictions and the Un-parameterization of Agree"

Abstract:

In many languages the co-occurrence of pronouns within a clause is allowed or disallowed based on their person value (e.g. the equivalent of “They showed you him” is grammatical while “They showed him you” may not be).

In this talk I present the findings of a large-scale crosslinguistic survey of such restrictions, spanning 106 languages from 26 families and 3 isolates, and discuss its implications for the analysis of person restrictions and syntactic theory more generally.

I establish a number of new typological generalizations, including what defines the class of pronouns that are crosslinguistically subject to person restrictions and, more importantly, a previously unnoticed typological gap that concerns interactions between:

• (i) the strength of the restriction (how many pronoun combinations are disallowed: e.g. only “*They showed him you/me” or also “*They showed me you/you me”) and
• (ii) the arguments involved in the restriction: subject and object pronouns or two object pronouns.

The gap is observed when person restrictions between subjects and objects and restrictions between objects both exist in a language, as in that case the former are never stronger than the latter. I will show that the existence of this gap is surprising from the perspective of recent analyses of person restrictions that model variation in restriction strength via the parameterization of the syntactic dependency (Agree) between the pronouns and funcional heads.

Based on the generalizations established by the survey, I will propose an alternative analysis where variation in restriction strength arises instead from differences in the structural position of the pronouns in relation to functional heads. An immediate consequence of this is that the typological gap follows directly from independently needed assumptions about argument structure.

The key new assumption regarding the source of person restriction phenomena is that they arise with a special class of pronouns that enter syntactic derivations unspecified for a person value, so that person restrictions arise because the sources of person values are scarce: I will argue that they are restricted to phase heads.

Bio:

Dr. Stegovec's research focuses primarily on syntax, semantics, morphology, and the interaction between them, in particular in relation to the problem of linguistic universals and crosslinguistic variation.