The American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM) is intended to provide an American equivalent to the renowned International Morphology Meeting, thereby providing morphologists and morphology students in North America with a venue to present new and developing research.

The AIMM will meet on every even-numbered year, and so will not overlap with the IMM, which is held on every odd-numbered year. The first American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM) will take place September 21-23, 2012 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It is anticipated that the second meeting of AIMM will take place at the University of California, San Diego, and that thereafter it will alternate between the east and west coasts.

One of the main purposes of the American International Morphology Meeting is to provide a forum for young investigators to present work in morphology, and both students and recent PhDs are especially encouraged to submit abstracts.

The keynote speaker is Gregory Stump (University of Kentucky).

Please see the website for more information.

Relative clauses in African American are distinct from those used in Standard English. The purpose of this study is to give a description of the observed patterns and to discover the principles at work which explain why these distinct patterns exist in both African American and Standard English. Pesetsky & Torrego’s (2003) (P&T) analysis of relative clause subject-nonsubject asymmetry accounts for zero object relatives while restricting zero subject relatives. However, an analysis that restricts zero subject relatives poses a problem for African American English (AAE), where zero object relatives and zero subject relatives occur. I argue P&T’s (2003) analysis can still account for zero subject relatives if we considered other move operations in AAE.

Speaker: Jérémy Pasquereau Title: "Language description & endangered/understudied languages: an apprentice's view from the Caucasus." RSVP: jccahill@student.umass.edu Jérémy writes: "My presentation will have two main parts: one about linguistic diversity and obsolescence and another one about 'my personal experience.'" For more on Jérémy's work: http://blogs.umass.edu/jpasquer/ All are welcome. Antonio's pizza will be provided.

Two phonological phenomena in Israeli Hebrew (IH) will be introduced, pre-tonal lengthening (PTL) and i > e centralization (CENT), both of which had precedents in Ancient Hebrew. Both have recently been observed in IH in generally-similar environments, but their scope of application is limited to certain colloquial registers and to some groups of speakers, and even then the processes involved are not applied consistently. Still, the motivation for each could be similar, at least in part, to what it was in ancient Hebrew. Historical PTL was probably intended to distinguish Hebrew lexical items from comparable Aramaic ones among the predominantly-bilingual population; in IH it may signal a general rhythmic change, but may also constitute an attempt to avoid opacity-causing qualitative vowel reduction (as in English). CENT was and is just an “ease of articulation” phonetic process. Since PTL generally applies in open syllables, and CENT in closed ones, a single possible explanation is suggested in terms of syllable structure that can account for both.

This talks provides a look at the capabilities of deep linguistic natural lanuguage processing in the context of ParGram, an international effort at building grammars for languages as diverse as English, French, Welsh, Wolof, Georgian, Urdu, Japanese, Indonesian, Arabic and Murrinh-Patha. The aim is to build these grammars using not only the same theoretical assumptions (based on Lexical-Functional Grammar) but also the same computational methods. While the process of computational grammar devleopment is, of course, inherently interesting, we will also discuss the broader uses of computational grammars, for example in systems like IBM's Watson and Powerset's information retrieval system. The underlying development platform XLE/XFR (used by Powerset and in the ParGram effort) was developed at PARC over a number of years. The talk will focus on the various powerful analysis possibilities this system allows for, including a version of Optimality Theory and an integration of statistical information to constrain and inform both parsing and generation. The talk will also touch on the assumptions about the underlying grammar architecture that are made, e.g., with respect to the morphology-syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.

In Bobaljik (2012) [Universals in Comparative Morphology. MIT Press], I provided an extended argument, from the morphology of comparative and superlative formation, for abstract hierarchical structure in words, prior to the rules of vocabulary insertion that map this structure to phonological exponents. The key evidence is drawn from suppletion (good-better-best). I argue that in suppletion - by definition the most irregular of morphological phenomena - there are a number of (near) universal patterns that emerge across large, cross-linguistic samples. For example, (virtually) no language has a suppletive pattern of the sort: *good-better-goodest or *good-gooder-best -- if either the comparative or the superlative is suppletive (w.r.t. to the positive), then so is the other. The explanation of these patterns, I submit, requires (hidden) structure, in this case, a structure in which the superlative always properly contains (is derived from) the comparative, and is never directly attached to the adjective. Thus, forms like English tall-est must have a hidden comparative. The results from the study of comparatives and superlatives, if correct, should extend beyond this morphological domain and provide a test for abstract structure in morphology much more generally. After summarizing the work on comparatives and superlatives, I report on the current state of efforts to go further and investigate the generalized predictions in other suppletive domains, including suppletion for verbal number and pronominal case.

Ubiquitous in the study of cognition is the need to reconcile discrete combinatorial structure (as in linguistic representations) with continuous or ‘gradient’ structure. For example, this arises in psycholinguistics both empirically — in relating grammar to observables — and theoretically — as in partial ‘activation’ of competing alternatives. This reconciliation is also required for reducing discrete combinatorial grammatical computation to neural computation over continuous activation patterns. A general approach to this integration is Gradient Symbolic Computation, in which representations are combinatorial but consist in weighted blends of symbolic constituents. I will introduce a general cognitive architecture based on optimization, in which markedness, faithfulness and correspondence relations play central roles within and between all cognitive components. Of primary concern are computations in which symbolic blends are transient states between (nearly) discrete input and output states. I will discuss the relation between (i) faithfulness between symbolic representations and (ii) continuous similarity of the activation patterns realizing those representations, illustrating with general patterns in speech errors. I will close with speculations about potential roles of non-transient symbolic blends in syntactic competence and performance.

This talk presents a family of computer models that are intended to capture syntactic aspects of incremental human sentence comprehension. These algorithmic models build on the Garden Path Theory of Frazier, Clifton & colleagues as well as the seminal work of Rick Lewis. However, they go beyond these classic approaches by introducing experience as a key element of the control strategy. The talk assesses the implications of this move by looking at attachment ambiguities and garden path sentences. Along the way, we re-encounter some classic questions about the inter-relationships between learning, grammar and cognitive architecture that can be answered, at least provisionally, by expressing the model within Soar 9, where reinforcement learning is applicable at all levels of abstraction. This demonstration illustrates one way that grammar might fit into the rest of cognition.

What do infants learn when they begin to discover their language? Cognitive psychologists considering phonological development generally favor perceptual-learning, "bottom up" accounts of phonetic category learning, and tend to identify such categories with phonological categories. Clinicians generally view the lexicon as more important and hold that much of the developmental action takes place after the first year. I will argue for a hybrid in which the lexicon is important, but right from the beginning. Young infants learn words and sounds at the same time--but take a long time to figure out how phonological categories should be interpreted. I will discuss possible solutions to the problem of phonetic category discovery, and experiments on phonetic interpretation in word learning and word recognition.

Children seem to lack a full understanding of verbs like 'think' until their fourth birthday, but show no such difficulties with verbs like ‘want’. A common explanation for this asymmetry links it to conceptual development. Under this view, children lack the ability to attribute beliefs to themselves and others (theory of mind) until age 4. On the other hand, the concept of desire is held to develop much earlier. Thus, children do not have the same difficulties with verbs reporting desires than with those reporting beliefs. However, several issues cast doubt on this conceptual development hypothesis. This talk explores an alternative, semantic explanation for the asymmetry in children's understanding of think and want, which doesn't rely on a fundamental change in conceptual structure.