NYU Linguistics

Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern University)

"Northern Cities Vowels and Dialect Contact"

Friday, December 5 at 4pm
Silver Center, Rm 414

Abstract:

The Northern Cities Chain Shift has created substantial differences between the Northern Cities vowels and those in nearby speech communities. Most speakers lack conscious awareness of these differences. However, they have consequences for speech processing. In this talk, I will review recent results (with collaborators Cynthia Clopper and Ken Konopka) on the Northern Cities vowel system in contact with the Midland dialect and the Chicago Mexican Heritage dialect of English. The results indicate that indexical information interacts with phonological information in speech perception, speech production, and phonological acquisition.

Friederike Moltmann
(IHPST, Paris)

"Presentational pronouns"

Friday, December 5 at 1:30pm
726 Broadway, room 703

Abstract:

In this talk I will take a closer look at the syntax and semantics of the pronouns 'this, 'that, and 'it' as their occur in (1a, b, c):

(1) a.This is Mary.
b. That is a wellknown person.
c. It was a student.

'This', 'that' and 'it' in (1) do not have a referential function, but rather occur in the subject position of specificational sentences, exhibiting the same constraints as subject wh clauses, as in (2):

(2) What I saw was a wellknown person.

The occurrences of the pronouns in (1) shed a significant light on the question whether specificational sentences express an identity of (possibly higher-order) meanings, question-answer relations, or function-value relations (with the subject acting as an intensional NP (Romero)). I show that specicational sentences with 'this', 'that' and 'it' in subject position support a question-answer analysis, but at the same time require signficant modications of existing accounts. I will also point out how a proper syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences as in (1) and (2) allows for a re-evaluation of certain philosophically significant sentences that appear to support a view of relative identity.

Congratulations to one of our linguistics majors, Hanna Gelfand, on receiving a Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund grant for her honors project "The Innateness of Speech Perception and the Importance of the Speech Source." She is working on the project under the direction of Athena Vouloumanos of the Psychology Department.

What: Undergraduate Linguistics Holiday Bash!
Where: Linguistics Department, 726 Broadway, 7th floor, Library
When: Friday, December 12th. 5:00 p.m.--on

Come and meet your fellow linguistics majors and relax a little just before finals, or blow off steam from an exam. All linguists welcome.

Food will be provided along with non-alcoholic beverages!