Co-sponsored by LARC. For more information, contact Luiz Amaral, amaral@spanport.umass.edu.

IPA Scrabble: a game so hardcore, we had to make the playing pieces. Vanilla Scrabble will also be served. And Boggle, and The Word, and anything else you guys want to bring. Pizza as always! RSVP, s'il vous plait! jccahill@student.umass.edu Email me if you have a game you want to bring! We have a locker to store it in! Word, Jeremy Cahill

The University is launching a new "integrative experience" as part of the GenEd program and is asking each department to create a plan that will work for their majors. We'd like to hear your views about what would work for you.

So you are cordially invited to participate in a focus group with pizza on Thursday Nov. 17, at 4pm in the 3rd floor lounge of South College. Prof. Speas and Prof. Green and some people from the Academic Planning office will lead a somewhat structured discussion, but there will also be time to just get together and eat.

Hosted by the Undergraduate Linguistics Club.

Join the Ling Club for a screening of the award-winning indie documentary The Linguists. Enjoy some food, meet a couple people, and learn about the lengths linguists will go to in order to document dying languages before they're gone for good.

Acquisition Lab / LARC meeting Everyone is Welcome!

Acquisition Lab / LARC meeting

The Distinguished Visitors Program of the Center for Latin America, Latino, and Caribbean Studies (CLACLS) presents an afternoon with Professor Montrul, author of four books on linguistic theory and the acquisition of Spanish, with an emphasis on bilingual and heritage language speakers. A much-published author and frequent keynote speaker, Montrul uses psycho-linguistic methods to explore diverse factors about languages and about their speakers that influence learning outcomes.

ABSTRACT

What language-internal and language-external factors contribute to the vulnerability of particular grammatical areas in the weaker language of a bilingual? What do different heritage languages have in common at the structural level? What are their differences? Professor Montrul investigates the linguistic competence of heritage speakers in an aspect of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface by focusing on knowledge of the morphology for differential object marking in Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian. Experimental evidence points to attrition in Spanish, but incomplete acquisition in Hindi and Romanian. She considers how language internal and language external factors contribute to the degree of intergenerational attrition of the DOM marker in these three languages.

The program is co-sponsored by the Language Acquisition Research Center (LARC) of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.

For more information, contact Luiz Amaral: amaral@spanport.umass.edu

Special invited lecture for LINGUIST 720 Semantics seminar

Sponsored by ICESL.

Considering the adversity of the conditions under which linguistic communication takes place in everyday life — ambiguity of the signal, environmental competition for our attention, speaker error, our limited memory, and so forth — it is perhaps remarkable that we are as successful at it as we are. Perhaps the leading explanation of this success is that (a) the linguistic signal is redundant, (b) diverse information sources are generally available that can help us obtain infer something close to the intended message when comprehending an utterance, and (c) we use these diverse information sources very quickly and to the fullest extent possible. This explanation suggests a theory of language comprehension as a rational, evidential process. In this talk, I describe recent research on how we can use the tools of computational linguistics to formalize and implement such a theory, and to apply it to a variety of problems in human sentence comprehension, subsuming both classic cases of garden-path disambiguation and syntactic processing difficulty patterns in the absence of structural ambiguity. In addition, I address a number of phenomena that remain clear puzzles for the rational approach, due to an apparent failure to use information available in a sentence appropriately in global or incremental inferences about the correct interpretation of a sentence. I argue that the apparent puzzle posed by these phenomena for models of rational sentence comprehension may derive from the failure of existing models to appropriately account for the environmental and cognitive constraints — in this case, the inherent uncertainty of perceptual input, and humans’ ability to compensate for it — under which comprehension takes place. I present a new probabilistic model of language comprehension under uncertain input and show that this model leads to solutions to the above puzzles. I also present behavioral data in support of novel predictions made by the model. More generally, I suggest that appropriately accounting for envir onmental and cognitive constraints in probabilistic models can lead to a more nuanced and ultimately more satisfactory picture of key aspects of language processing and of human cognition.

Bayesian mathematics and associated algorithms provide a general solution to the problem of inferring structure from incomplete, ambiguous, and noisy data. In this talk, I apply these methods to the specific problem of learning constraint-based grammars of phonology, focusing in particular on the relative roles of the likelihood -- which depends on the language-specific sound pattern -- and the prior -- which embodies assumptions made by the learner independently of the data. Previous research has proposed a rich set of prior assumptions (e.g., that inputs are identical to outputs in early phonological learning, and that certain classes of constraints are biased to be higher-ranked), which are (approximately) enforced by an increasingly complex battery of learning mechanisms. I argue that the prior can be greatly simplified, perhaps even made completely unbiased, by embracing the learner's uncertainty about the inputs and weightings/rankings that underly the observable data. Formal analysis of an unbiased learner, together with simulations from an implementation that uses Gibbs sampling, suggest that a rich prior is not needed to ensure 'restrictiveness' or other empirically-motivated properties of phonological learning.

Negative polarity items (NPI) such as ever and any are known to be subject to particular licensing conditions, but the exact nature of the licensing condition is still under debate. I will present two sets of studies to investigate the time course of NPI licensing and how the timing information can tell us about the underlying licensing mechanisms. In the first study, we used ERP recording to compare four different grammatical licensors: no, few, only and emotive factives such as glad/amazed. These licensors are different in terms of their downward entailing properties and also their negativity. I will argue that: (i) the critical feature that is being computed in NPI licensing is the negativity of the licensing environment rather than the downward entailment (DE) property, contrary to the long-held assumption (since Ladusaw 1979) that DE is a fundamental semantic property underlying NPI licensing; and (ii) variations among different licensors lie in how “negative” they are and when the negative feature is computed—some computations are carried out early, and some late. The second set of behavioral studies further look at the differences between the early and late stages of NPI licensing, with a focus on the “interference” effect, that is, what happens when an NPI fails to be properly licensed. I will argue that the errors people make in the “interference” cases, such as erroneously accepting sentences like “The documentaries that no network TV stations have played during prime time have ever been very controversial”, arise from the same mechanism that supports the regular NPI licensing in the secondary stage.

Abstract:

Abstract:

The sentence “Jack is more anxious than Jill” is a comparative. We know that because of the presence of “more” as well as the presence of “than”. Across the world’s languages, there are expressions of the comparative that lack a morpheme comparable to “more” (comparative marker) and there are some that lack a morpheme comparable to “than” (standard marker). From this perspective, the comparative seems to be redundantly marked in the English example.

Where is the meaning of the comparative localized, in the more-word? in the than-word? in both? Is there a dependency between the grammar of the than-word in a given language and its use of a more-word (Stassen 1985)? What is the process by which languages acquire a more-word over time?

In this talk, I will be looking at expressions of the comparative in Modern Hebrew. I’ll propose an analysis that makes use of Quantifier Domain Adverbialization. In this analysis, both the more-word and the than-word are meaningful. The phrase headed by the than-word can function as a Quantifier-Domain Adverbial whereby it comments on the domain of the degree quantifier more. I’ll address the questions raised above through the lens of the proposed analysis.

In this talk I explore a quadrant of the system of polarity sensitive items, namely the existential one, that includes items like Italian 'uno qualunque' and 'un qualche', German 'irgendein', Spanish 'algun', Rumanian 'vreun'. The attempt is to identify the generative matrix at the basis of typological generalizations on the behavior of such items. The concept of 'implicature' and a characterization of the ways in which implicatures may get 'grammaticized' through an alternatives based semantics play a key role in this attempt.