Two-day conference sponsored by LARC. Organized by Tom Roeper, Luiz Amaral and Barbara Pearson. For more information see, http://www.umass.edu/larc/events/FAHL.html.

We've decided to make last year's launch workshop an annual event, as an opportunity for people working on language across campus to find out about each other's research. The aim of the poster session is to start new cross-disciplinary conversations about research on language, and we need your participation for this to be effective. Please send your title, and list of authors, to icesl@linguist.umass.edu by Wednesday April 4th. Posters will be set up from 2-2:15, and there will be two slots in the program devoted to posters and refreshments (3:45 - 4:30 and 5:15 - 6).
We'll also be hearing talks from Luiz Amaral of LLC (2:15), Jacquie Kurland of Communication Disorders (4:30) and David Smith of Computer Science (3:00).
The schedule is here, and will soon be updated with titles for the talks, and a list of posters:
http://www.umass.edu/linguist/icesl/events/2nd-annual-icesl-workshop-april-6th/
This event is sponsored by the Mellon Mutual Mentoring Initiative.

• 12:00 p.m.: College of Humanities and Fine Arts students wear their caps and gowns to the Recreation Center to assemble with departments while parents are seated. • 1:00 p.m.: Senior Recognition Ceremony begins. More information at http://www.umass.edu/hfa/commencement/2012/

A Career Services advisor will be speaking about internships and job search resources at the Linguistics Club meeting. All undergrads are invited and pizza will be provided.

This time around we'll be able to run more games at once. I'll also bring some IPA cheat sheets and maybe even some real rules. --Jeremy Cahill, Undergrad Linguistics Club President

Sponsored by the Undergraduate Linguistics Club. RSVP (required): jccahill@student.umass.edu

Sponsored by the Undergraduate Linguistics Club. RSVP (required): jccahill@student.umass.edu

Sponsored by the Undergraduate Linguistics Club.

Backward variable binding (BVB) as in (1) has inspired either deviations from surface syntax (Belletti and Rizzi 1988, Pesetsky 1995) or appeals to notions like logophoricity (e.g. Bouchard 1995). (1) Heri new-found fame will make everyi actress rich. I report that: (i) the distribution of BVB is distinct from backward bound reflexives and reciprocals, and not subject to constraints imposed by exempt or ‘logophoric’ reflexives; (ii) Backward bound variables are found in ’containing phrases’ that are situation-denoting (i.e. causers, Pesetsky 1995); (iii) the containing phrase falls in the scope of the binding quantifier and locality conditions on QR limit BVB. These ingredients lend themselves ideally to a D-type analysis (Heim 1990, Elbourne 2005). The semantics of causers supplies a situation variable for resolving the D-pronoun—one that co-varies with respect to the binding quantifier (hence the sensitivity to QR). We then show why these D-type pronouns in causer arguments do not exhibit crossover violations (2a), while D-type pronouns otherwise do (2b) (B ¨ uring 2004). (2) a. Heri mother made every knight who courted a ladyi nervous. (D-type in a causer) b. *Heri mother visited every knight who courted a ladyi. (D-type in an agent) The mere existence of D-type BVB as in (2a) corroborates the analysis of (1) and, incidentally, speaks against recent accounts of BVB in causatives by Larson (Larson and Cheung 2009).

LARC / Acquisition Lab meeting "Semantic/Pragmatic notion of contrastiveness and learnability issues in Japanese-speaking children" Masaaki Kamiya (Hamilton College, Visitor to LARC) Everyone Welcome!

Sponsored by LARC/Language Acquisition Lab meeting

1) A Spanish oral learner corpus for L2 language research. Leonardo Campillos Llanos Universidad Autonoma de Madrid 2) Processing of causative alternation structures by Karaja/Portuguese bilinguals. Marcus Maia Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

"Experimental Ideas on Event and Indirect Causatives" Gustavo Friere "Codeswitching as a possible diagnostic in SLI" Joel Walters Professor at Bar-Ilan University

Katya Pertsova, a visitor this semester from UNC Linguistics, will be presenting a Brown Bag practice talk. Feel free to bring lunch if you'd like.

Computational models of learning with violable constraints have led to significant progress in understanding how learners acquire the complex system of knowledge that is phonology; however, a number of significant challenges remain. This talk addresses one of the major outstanding problems, learning in the face of hidden structure, and examines the challenges this problem poses for successful and efficient learning. The particular kind of hidden structure I focus on in this talk is structural ambiguity, which includes any kind of latent structure assigned when parsing a phonological string, such as metrical feet, (sub)syllabic constituents, and autosegmental representations. I examine Robust Interpretive Parsing (Tesar and Smolensky 1998), a well-known approach to structural ambiguity in OT, and show that its extension to probabilistic constraint-based grammars as first described by Boersma (2003) is problematic. The problem occurs because the proposed formulation fails to take advantage of the rich information contained in the learner's stochastic grammar. I propose two modifications to the learning algorithm, one trivial and another more involved, and show that both lead to improvements in the success rates of Stochastic OT and noisy HG learners. I then examine another important aspect of these algorithms' performance: their efficiency. The results of this second evaluation are complex but indicate an efficiency advantage for the proposed modifications as well. I discuss the implications for the relative merits of OT and HG as well as for the evaluation of computational models of phonological learning more generally.

For a brief period near the end of the 20th century, it seemed possible to distinguish between “syntactic” and “semantic” aspects of human language processing by looking at qualitative differences in patterns of voltage change extracted from scalp-recorded electrical brain activity (i.e., event-related brain potentials or ERPs). It had been found that encounters with syntactic deviance (e.g., He criticized Max’s *of proof the theorem) elicit early (100-250 ms) and/or slightly later (300-500 ms) negative-going shifts over left/anterior regions of the scalp (so-called “E/LANs”; Neville et al. 1991; Friederici et al. 1993), typically followed by positive shifts (600-900 ms) over posterior (parietal) scalp regions, known as P600 effects (Osterhout & Holcomb 1992; Hagoort et al. 1993). In contrast, lexical-conceptual anomalies (e.g., John ate *democracy) were already known to elicit a different sort of pattern: a broad negative-going shift, usually with a central/parietal maximum, peaking around 400 ms (N400 effects; Kutas and Hillyard 1980). Such findings led to the suggested correspondence between “syntax” and the biphasic (E)LAN-P600 pattern, and between “semantics” and the N400. However, subsequent research has made it clear that any simple 1-to-1 mapping of the syntax/semantics distinction to these ERP profiles is unsustainable. The etiology of the better known types of ERP patterns revealed in language processing experiments (e.g., LAN, N400, P600) now appear to be much more plausibly understood in domain general terms. Against this backdrop, the present talk will have two main parts. First, some findings from ERP studies examining cases of logical semantic/pragmatic deviance will be discussed, including violations of the Definiteness Restriction in English existential constructions and cases of unlicensed negative polarity items (Drury & Steinhauer 2009; Steinhauer et al. 2010). Though there are a range of not entirely consistent findings in this small (but growing) literature, one intriguing pattern which has emerged for such cases involves familiar looking ERP responses (LAN- and P600-like effects), but in the opposite temporal order typically seen for “syntactic” violations (i.e., P600-LAN instead of LAN-P600). The question of whether it may be possible to think of both pre- and post-P600 LAN effects as reflecting the same, different, or overlapping underlying processes will then be discussed, focusing on whether or to what extent it might be reasonable to unify a wider array of “LAN-like” ERP-profiles (i.e., in terms of a domain general story about increases in working memory burden). This will lead us to the second part of the talk. Among the array of LAN-like effects that have been documented in the literature, one stands out as potentially “special” – the so-called “early” left anterior negativity or ELAN. This effect plays a critical role in one neurocognitive model of language processing in particular, defended in Friederici (2002, 2011). ELAN findings are critical to the most distinctive aspect of that model (the Phase 1 versus Phase 2 distinction, broadly relevant for “syntax first” models of sentence processing). However, a closer look at the ELAN literature (and some new data) raises a number of serious problems, recently highlighted in Steinhauer & Drury (2012). If the concerns turn out to be valid, then the ELAN may not be “special” after all (a conclusion which turns out to be friendly to the suggested unification bringing all LAN-like ERP effects under a single umbrella). In closing, a broad sketch of how we understand LAN, N400, and P600 effects will be offered along with some related questions of interest for future research.

More details are available at the ICESL website.

Uttering a sentence like “I sharpened my chain saw last night” typically commits the speaker to i) the proposition that they have a chain saw, and ii) the proposition that they sharpened said saw last night. Somewhat curiously, if a negated variant of that sentence is uttered, such as “I didn’t sharpen my chain saw last night”, the speaker is still committed to i) the proposition that they have a chain saw, but not to ii) the proposition that they sharpened said saw last night. Semanticists say proposition i) “projects”, since it survives as a commitment of the speaker when the sentence is negated, but proposition ii) does not. To date, formal semantic/pragmatic theories of projective contents, which include presuppositions like that triggered by the possessive noun phrase “my chain saw”, but also e.g. Potts’ (2005) conventional implicatures, are mainly based on English data gathered by native speaker semanticists through introspection, the primary empirical method for data collection in formal semantic/pragmatic research. However, such theories leave largely unaddressed questions about cross-linguistic and language- internal variation among projective contents and their triggers. In this talk, I illustrate how nonintrospective methods can complement introspection in formal semantic/pragmatic research. Drawing primarily on my fieldwork-based research with linguistically untrained native speakers of Paraguayan Guarani, but also on experimental research and corpus studies, I show how data obtained through such methods can be used to explore questions about cross-linguistic and language-internal variation in the domain of projective contents.

Abstract:

Imperatives, which are prototypically used to issue commands, can also be used to give permissions:

(1) A: May I open the window? B: Sure, go ahead, open it!

Further, imperatives can serve as quasi-conditional antecedents in "left-subordinating conjunctions":

(2) Study hard and you will pass the class.
(3) Ignore your homework and you will fail the class.
(4) Open the paper and you will find 5 mistakes on every page.

We show that these phenomena present severe challenges for all existing theories of imperatives. We lay out desiderata for a successful analysis and speculate on ways of getting there. Along the way we present data from English, German, and pretty much every language spoken on the Mediterranean Rim.

In this talk I will discuss two recent lines of research in the cognitive neuroscience of language processing that started from independent puzzles, but that appear to be converging on a common solution. The first puzzle involves apparent discrepancies in the localization results obtained using fMRI and MEG measures of 'semantic' processing. The same tasks and materials yield conflicting localizations when measured using different tools. The second puzzle involves a recent series of studies that undermine received wisdom about the functional status of ERP components and, more interestingly, challenge the widespread view in linguistics and psycholinguistics that semantic composition is tightly coupled to the syntax of a sentence. The solution to both puzzles involves recognizing that the N400, a neural response component traditionally associated with compositional semantic interpretation, is more closely linked to lexical processes and to word-level expectations.

This also provides an account of the split personality of the N400 - it is sometimes very 'smart', responding to fine details of the compositional semantic interpretation and pragmatic congruity of linguistic input, but at times it is surprisingly 'dumb', sensitive only to the lexical properties of a word and to associative relations among words. I show how it is possible to turn the dumb N400 into the smart N400. I show that rather than undermining widespread assumptions about language architecture, the electrophysiological evidence instead provides finer-grained evidence on how interpretations are computed on-line. The evidence is drawn from studies in English, Spanish, and Chinese.

This talk is sponsored by ICESL.