Congratulations to Professor Alec Marantz who received the Samuel Williamson award for outstanding contributions to the field of biomagnetic research at the Biomag 2008 conference.

Colloquia will be held in Silver 414 at 4pm on Fridays. Reception at the linguistics department follows. Click here for up to date information.

Norma Mendoza-Denton, University of Arizona: Sept. 19
Michael Becker, Reed College: Oct. 10
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University: Oct. 3
Lisa Matthewson, University of British Columbia: Oct. 24
Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland: Oct. 31
Janet Pierrehumbert, Northwestern University: Dec. 5

Syntax brown bags are usually held on Fridays at 1:30 in the Syntax/Semantics lounge (rm. 703, 726 Broadway on the 7th floor) Click here for up to date info.

Sept. 26 Arhonto Terzi
Oct. 24 Gabriela Alboiu
Oct. 29 Ivona Kucerova, (Wed., 5:30pm)
Nov. 14 Svitlana Antonyuk-Yudina

The Department of Linguistics is celebrating the beginning of Fall 2008 with a party in the Department Library (726 Broadway, 7th floor) at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 5. All linguists and friends are welcome to attend!

Jen Hay
Coronal Stop Deletion Revisited
Friday, September 12 @ 4pm
Silver Center 414

Abstract:

Final coronal stop deletion (as in, e.g. jus(t) yesterday or ol(d) man) has perhaps received more attention in the literature than any other sociolinguistic variable. This talk takes a new look at the phenomenon by exploring a data-set drawn from early New Zealand English. We have explored a number of potential predictive factors which are not traditionally considered. This talk focuses on three in particular: lexical frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, and the force exerted by the complete distribution of environments in which a given lexical item tends to occur. The resulting picture lends strong support to exemplar-based models of the lexicon. It also casts important new light on factors which previous studies have identified as robust predictors of deletion rates.

Wednesday, September 17 @ 10:30am
Linguistics department
Talk: Jen Hay
Speech Perception with Attitude: Adventures on a fush/feesh continuum

This talk describes three studies designed to follow up on Niedzielski's (1999) work which seems to show that the perceived dialect area of a speaker can affect a listener's perception of their vowels. Experiment 1 replicates this general effect with New Zealand listeners - the labels 'New Zealander' or 'Australian' on an answer sheet affect vowel perception. Experiment 2 demonstrates that this effect is not, in fact, driven by listeners' overt beliefs about the speaker. It can be replicated by placing stuffed toys in the experiment room (kiwis in one condition, or kangaroos and koalas in the other). Experiment 3 explores the degree to which listener attitudes can affect perception - demonstrating that exposing participants to 'good' facts about Australia shifts their perception in a different direction from exposing them to 'bad' facts about Australia. Together, the results demonstrate subtle but robust effects of sociolinguistic 'style-shifting' in perception, and illustrate that these effects are, in fact, relatively automatic.

Thursday, September 18 @ 11:30am
Linguistics department library
Talk: Jen Hay
Hearing /r/-sandhi

An exploration of the status of linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ via a series of phoneme-monitoring experiments on New Zealand English.

Friday Colloquium Series
Friday, September 19, 2008 @4pm
Norma Mendoza-Denton (University of Arizona)
Silver Building, Room 414

Entrainment in the vocalic system and in speech breathing: Evidence
from conflictive speech.

Entrainment is the phenomenon of synchronization/imitation of action on
the part of separate agents (in the physical sciences:
entrainment=sharing periodicity, either on- or off-phase). For
instance, lexical entrainment means that speakers who routinely talk
about the same topic come to share the same vocabulary for it. This
presentation examines vocalic and speech breathing entrainment in
congressional town hall meetings (THMs) held by Republican Congressman
Jim Kolbe (R-5th district, AZ). Kolbe agreed to be taped as part of a
nonpartisan research project, and allowed the presence of our cameras
at 10 THMs over a period of 14 months during 2000-2001. I focus
specifically on the sociophonetic aspects of entrainment in the context
of face-threatening behavior by constituents. Face-threatening behavior
comes in the form of opinions, challenges or questions that
constituents deliver which threaten Kolbe's control of the structure
of the THM. Gestural, intonational, and vocalic as well as speech
breathing evidence are joined with conversational analysis to address
questions of convergence and divergence in linguistic behavior.

Mid-Manhattan Library welcomes

K. David Harrison DISCUSSING

When Languages Die: The Extinctions of the World’s Languages and The Erosion of Human Knowledge

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

6:30 p.m.
on the 6th floor
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0873

Speakers of thousands of the world’s languages are now abandoning their ancestral tongues at an unprecedented rate. What exactly is lost when speakers of indigenous languages switch to speaking English, Hindi, Russian, or other global tongues? Why should we care if small languages vanish?

Languages are the repository of thousands of years of people’s science and art – from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths. The disappearance of a language is not only a loss for the community of speakers itself, but for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics. In this century, we are facing a massive erosion of the human knowledge base.

David Harrison is assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Elevators access the 6th floor after p.m.
All programs are FREE.

Shinichiro Ishihara

"Independence of Focus from Prosodic Phrasing: Evidence from Japanese"

Focus intonation (FI) in Tokyo Japanese has often been analyzed in terms of prosodic phrasing (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, Nagahara 1994, Truckenbrodt 1995, among others). In this line of analysis, an FI is analyzed
as a large MaP created by manipulating (i.e., inserting and deleting) MaP boundaries.

In this talk, I will present phonetic differences between FI and MaP boundaries, based on an experiment which examines phonetic effects of focus and syntactic boundaries independently. I will propose that MaP and FI are computed according to independent mechanisms: MaP phrasing according to a syntax-prosody mapping principle, and FI according to relative prominence.

The experimental results also indicates that MaP phrasing, which would be assumed to be non-recursive under the Strict Layer Hypothesis, shows recursivity.

Anthi Revithiadou (University of the Aegean)

"Recursivity of the Phonological Word as the Result of the Interface"

Thursday, October 2 at 12:30pm
726 Broadway, 7th floor
Conference room

In this talk, we will address the notion of recursivity (REC) in the
phonological word (PW). We start with the question of whether such a
constituent is necessitated in phonological theory and explore alternatives
that have recently been proposed against recursion (e.g. Vogel?s (2006, in
press) Composite Group). We will also demonstrate that much of the confusion
surrounding the notion of phonological recursion in the literature arises from
the fact that inconsistent arguments have been put forward in support of
PW-REC, in which the burden of proof primarily falls on showing that an element
is not part of a certain prosodic category rather than on establishing its REC
status. Following Kabak & Revithiadou (in press), we will argue that recursion
is not an inherent property of phonology, but rather the by-product of its
interface with morpho-syntax as reflected in two types of structures: (a)
Inherently recursive morphosyntactic structures such as certain types of
compound constructions and (b) certain types of clitics which adjoin to their
host after moving from their base-generated position (Spyropoulos 1999). The
present proposal will be substantiated with empirical evidence from Greek and
Turkish.

Joan Bresnan (Stanford University)

"Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and
Australian varieties of English"

Friday, October 3 at 4pm
Silver Center, 414

Joan Bresnan (Stanford University & Marilyn Ford (Griffith
University, Australia)

Traditionally, linguistic variation within different time scales has
been the province of different disciplines, each with a distinctive
suite of techniques for obtaining and analyzing data. For example,
historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics study
variation between different speaker groups over historical time and
across space, while psycholinguistics, phonetics, and computational
speech recognition and synthesis study the dynamics of producing and
comprehending language in the individual on a scale of milliseconds.
Yet there is evidence that linguistic variation at these different
time scales is linked, even in the domain of higher-level syntactic
choices. This is a primary finding in the present study of dative
constructions, illustrated by (1a,b), in Australian and American English.

1a) Who gave you that wonderful watch? (V NP NP)
b) Who gave that wonderful watch to you? (V NP PP)

We use a very accurate multilevel probabilistic model of corpus dative
productions (Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, and Baayen 2007) to measure the
predictive capacities of both American and Australian subjects in
three pairs of parallel psycholinguistic experiments involving
sentence ratings (Bresnan 2007), decision latencies during reading
(Ford 1983), and sentence completion. The experimental items were all
sampled together with their contexts from the database of corpus
datives, stratified by corpus model probabilities.

We find that the Australian subjects share with the American subjects
a sensitivity to corpus probabilities. But they also show covarying
differences, notably a stronger end-weight effect of the recipient in
the ratings task and the absence of a dependency-length effect of the
theme argument in the decision latency task (cf. Grodner and Gibson
2005). A unifying explanation for these differences is that decision
latencies for `to' are reduced and naturalness ratings are increased
when a PP is consistent with expectation. The Australian group would
then be predicted to have a higher expectation of PP than the US
group. This prediction is borne out by the sentence completion tasks,
which showed that the Australians produced NP PP completions more than
the American subjects in the same contexts. These findings suggest
that subtle variations in the experiences of the dative construction
by historically and spatially divergent speaker groups can create
measurable differences in internalized expectations in individuals
at the millisecond level.

Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina, and R. Harald
Baayen. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In
_Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation_, ed. by G. Boume,
I. Kraemer, and J. Zwarts. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy
of Science, pp. 69--94.

Bresnan, Joan. 2007. Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic?
Experiments with the English dative alternation. In _Roots:
Linguistics in search of its evidential base. Series: Studies in
Generative Grammar_, ed. by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang
Sternefeld, pp. 75--96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ford. Marilyn. 1983. A method for obtaining measures of
local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22: 203--218.