Everyone is invited!

Uconn/UMass/Smith Acquisition Workshop

Schedule

10.00 – 10.30 Breakfast

10.30 – 11.10 Jean Crawford (UConn)

The role of telicity and situational aspect in the acquisition of passives

11.10 – 11.50 Liane Jeschull (UMass)

What’s so difficult about inceptive aspect?

11.50 – 12.10 Coffee Break

12.10 – 12.50 Ruth Lopes (UMass)

Ellipses in the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese

12.50 – 1.30 Oksana Tarasenkova (UConn)

Some puzzles in children's acquisition of Russian morphology

1.30 – 2.30 Lunch (provided)

2.30 – 3.10 Misato Hiraga (UMass)

Acquisition of Recursive Verbal Compound Nouns: Results from a New Experiment

3.10 – 3.50 Ting Xu (UConn)

English Children's Negative questions

3.50 – 4.10 Coffee Break

4.10 – 4.50 Lyn Tieu (UConn)

Cross-linguistic influence in the Cantonese-English bilingual acquisition of wh-questions

4.50 – 5.30 Frances Burns, Carly Dragan, Danielle Ducharme, Jennifer Emeka & Kaitlyn Deitrich (UMass)

Past Tense Production in Young African American English Speakers

6.00-ish Dinner at Tom Roeper’s House

A gathering of all the department members, including faculty, students, visitors and staff, to be introduced to each other and take a group photo.

The lecture involves extensive research and data on V2 and wh- in a number of Germanic languages and dialects, as well as original fieldwork, related to theoretical questions about the left-periphery and Phase theory.

There is a long tradition of work in syntax (and to a certain degree in phonology) that makes use of computationally restricted formal systems (such as a class of grammars) to simplify analyses of specific phenomena and provide explanations of general properties of human language. When such work is successful, it lends support to the hypothesis that computational restrictiveness plays an important role in determining the nature of grammar. As far as I am aware, there have not been corresponding efforts in the domain of the syntax-semantics interface, aiming to simplify and explain through computational restrictions. In this talk, I will review a line of research, underway for some time but not well-known in the linguistics community, that attempts to do this. This work makes use of a "synchronous" extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG), a computationally restrictive grammar formalism whose ability to account for and explain facts of syntactic distribution has been the object of previous study. Building on case studies involving reflexive interpretation, scope, and donkey anaphora, I will show that the synchronous TAG formalism allows for the simplification of previous analyses, and I will suggest that this approach holds out the potential for a restrictive theory of mismatches between surface syntax and logical form.

On many theories, numerical quantifiers and scalar quantifiers are interpreted in a similar fashion. First there is an initial semantic analysis which is lower bounded ("some" is interpreted as some and possibly all, "two" as two and possibly more). Second, in some contexts, a scalar implicature is calculated which provides an upper bound for the expression ("some" is interpreted as some but not all, "two" as two and no more). We have explored this hypothesis by examining the interpretation of scalar and numerical quantifiers in young children and the moment-to-moment processing of these terms in both children and adults. The findings strongly support the conventional analysis of scalar quantifiers. Adults rapidly access the lower-bounded interpretation of "some" but are slow to calculate the scalar implicature. Children typically fail to do so. However, these findings suggest that the interpretation of numerical quantifiers involves a very different process: adults immediately access the upper bound of a number and children reliably infer that numerically-quantified phrases are exact by three years of age. We suggest that the previously-observed parallels between numerical and scalar quantifiers reflect their common logical properties rather than a common mechanism.

Sometimes it is the oddest facts that provide the best clues to significant properties of language, because their very oddity limits the space in which we are likely to search for possible explanations. In this talk, I argue that the strange behavior of Russian nominal phrases with paucal numerals ('two', 'three' and 'four') provide clues of just this type concerning the syntactic side of morphological case. When a nominal phrase like the Russian counterpart of 'these last two beautiful tables' occupies a nominative environment, the pre-numeral demonstrative and adjective ('these last') bear nominative plural morphology, and the numeral itself is nominative. The post-numeral adjective ('beautfiul'), however, is often genitive plural; and the noun ('table') is genitive singular -- a situation that the illustrious Russian grammarian Peshkovsky (1956) characterized as "a typical example of the degree to which grammatical and logical thinking may diverge". I suggest that the behavior of these phrases is actually entirely logical -- once one adopts a particular structural analysis of the Russian DP. and a particular view of the nature of case morphology. Developing ideas by Richards (2007), I propose that Russian is a covert case-stacking language in which the realization of out case morphemes suppresses the pronunciation of inner morphemes -- with this process restricted, however, by the phonological freezing effect of phase spell-out (Chomsky 1995; 2001). The case affixes themselves — traditionally classified using case-specific sui generis terminology (nominative, genitive, etc.) — are actually instantiations of the various syntactic categories: N, P and V. The interaction of this proposal with the theory of phases and spellout raises at least the possibility that there is no special theory of morphological case.

In this talk, I will discuss work with Lanko Marusic and Bill Badecker that looks at verbal agreement with conjoined noun phrase subjects, such as /erasers-fem.pl and pens-neuter.pl were sold/, in Slovenian, a language with three genders and three numbers. The research consists of four parts: Experiment 1: Effects of Mixing Genders Experiment 2: Effects of Directionality Experiment 3: Effects of Mixing Numbers Experiment 4: The Curious Case of 5&Ups I demonstrate that the grammatical option of agreeing with only a single conjunct -- even in preverbal position -- is robustly attested, and propose that it arises (ontogenetically and phylogentically, so to speak) due to the ambiguity in the paradigm created by syncretisms. This single-conjunct agreement is usually optional, but is (a) impossible when inconsistent with the number of the conjunction as a whole, and (b) forced when the conjunction as a whole has no number, due to the presence of numerically quantified noun phrases, such as "5 cars".

Phonological variation is conditioned by both grammatical and non-grammatical factors. Nearly all models of variation in phonological theory are exclusively grammatical, and do not account for the influence of non-grammatical factors. In this talk, I argue that an adequate theory of phonological variation should account for both grammatical and non-grammatical influences on variation, and I develop a noisy Harmonic Grammar model of variation that can do this. I focus on t/d-deletion in English as an example of a variable phenomenon influenced by both grammatical and non-grammatical factors, and use the influence of usage frequency on this process as an example of a non-grammatical factor impacting variation. The proposal developed in this talk is compared to existing models of phonological variation both form the theoretical phonology tradition, and from variationist sociolinguistics.

Distributed Agreement in Archi and Other Languages