Get acquainted with members of the department, including faculty, students and visitors. We'll take a department photo as well.

Undergraduate Linguistics majors are invited to meet with Professor Demolin in a more relaxed setting and talk to him over pizza.

Sponsored by the Syntax-Phonology Interface group (SynPhonI).

Discussion of:

Emily Elfner will present joint work with Ryan Bennet, Andrew Dowd, and Jim McCloskey (of UC Santa Cruz)

We suggest that due to the difference in modality, sign language can bring fresh insights to the semantics of pronouns. Focusing on ASL (and in some cases LSF), we start by (re-)establishing that sign language pronouns ('indexes') share some non-trivial formal properties with spoken language pronouns, and in particular that they give rise to interesting binding-theoretic effects (e.g. Strong and Weak Crossover effects). We then show that the distinct morphology of sign language is helpful in two domains. First, it was argued in Anand 2006 that 'shifted' first person pronouns in Zazaki should be analyzed via a context-shifting operator that is optionally prefixed to embedded clauses. We suggest that some uses of 'Role Shift' in ASL might be the morphological realization of Anand's operator, and we show that Anand's specific predictions are borne out in that language. Second, there has been a lively debate about the possibility of having binding without c-command ('donkey anaphora'); we argue that data from American and French Sign Language provide morphological evidence in favor of the conclusions of dynamic semantics, and against some versions of E-type approaches.

In this talk I will be concerned with general principles governing the relationship between what speakers say and what they are taken by their interlocutors to believe. My starting point is Grice's maxim of Quality (“Try to make your contribution one that is true”), which is standardly assumed to underlie implications about the speaker's propositional attitude toward the content of her contribution. If the speaker is meeting the demands of Quality, as interlocutors normally presume, then addressees can infer that the speaker believes what she is saying and (believes she) has sufficient evidence for it. Although this standard picture has much to recommend it, it has long been recognized that Quality operates somewhat differently than the other maxims, with Grice himself being the first to remark on its exceptional nature. I will focus on the differences in the first part of the talk, summarizing and adding observations about its special character. The conclusion is that Quality is not just an unusual sort of maxim, it is a different sort of beast altogether. In the second part of the talk I translate the observations into a set of requirements for the implementation of Quality, and sketch one such implementation.

An understudied aspect of the world’s phonologies are word-based sound patterns in which a particular segment or segment type is strongly preferred at the edge of a word. Several examples of these patterns are illustrated, with a more in depth study of the synchronic distribution and diachronic origins of word-edge velar nasals in Palauan. A restrictive theory of phonetically-based consonant-epenthesis, like that proposed within Evolutionary Phonology, narrows the hypothesis space for diachronic developments, leading to a reconsideration of morphological origins.

In Richards 2010, I proposed a universal condition on the prosody of wh-questions, the purpose of which was to predict whether a given language would move its wh-phrases or leave them in situ. In this talk I will modify that proposal slightly, and then generalize it to condition relations between Probes and Goals more generally. We will see that the condition derives a number of effects classically assigned to conditions on head-movement.

joint work with Kathleen O'Flynn and Kaeli Ward Stress is normally predictable in Tongan (Polynesian). However, data from consultation with three Tongan speakers shows that secondary stress in loans is influenced by whether a vowel in the loan correspond to a stressed vowel in the English source word, to an unstressed vowel, or to nothing (i.e., is etymologically epenthetic). Tongan phonotactics normally forbid consonant clusters in careful speech, but allow some to result through variable vowel deletion. In our corpus of loans, vowel deletion is again influenced by whether the vowel is etymologically epenthetic. This means that Tongan speakers must be able to perceive certain contrasts that fall outside of L1, and encode them in representations of loanwords. We discuss this finding in light of recent research on L2 perception and loan adaptation (e.g., Peperkamp 2004). We also consider the mechanics of how these loan-only contrasts could be encoded in lexical entries. Treating certain loans as pseudocompounds is attractive (see Schütz 2001), but runs into problems with long vowels and does not address vowel deletion. It seems instead that some lexical entries of loans must include information that is not normally contrastive in the language. In addition, the information must be encoded at the level of the segment rather than at the level of the entire morpheme, narrowing down the theories of lexical exceptionality that could work for this case. works cited in abstract Peperkamp, Sharon. 2004. Lexical exceptions in stress systems: arguments from early language acquisition and adult speech perception. Language 80. 98-126. Schütz, Albert J. 2001. Tongan accent. Oceanic Linguistics 40(2). 307-323.