NYU Linguistics

We have five people going to ACAL this year, including one undergraduate. Shupamem was the language in Chris Collins's field methods course last year.

Verb Focus in Shupamem
Chris Collins and Laziz Nchare

The Definite Interpretation of Shupamem Numerals
Violeta Vázquez Rojas Maldonado

Spatial Expressions in Shupamem
Arhonto Terzi and Laziz Nchare

Contour Tones on Short and Long Vowels in Shupamem
Corey Silverstein

The Syntax of Agreement/Definiteness in Shupamem DP and Greenberg’s Universal 20
Laziz Nchare

Davidson, Lisa and Kevin Roon. 2008. Durational correlates for differentiating consonant sequences in Russian. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38:2, 137-165.

Adamantios Gafos, Hoole, P., Roon, K., Zeroual, C. Variation in timing and phonological grammar in Moroccan Arabic clusters. Laboratory Phonology 10: Variation, Detail and Representation, Ed. Cécile Fougeron (Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin/New York).

Gregory R. Guy and Ana M.S. Zilles, Sociolingüística Quantitativa: Instrumental de Análise, São Paulo: Parabola Editorial, 2007.

Singler, John Victor. 2008a. [with Silvia Kouwenberg] The handbook of pidgin and creole studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Singler, John Victor. 2008b. The sociolinguistic context of creole genesis. In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, ed. by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler, 332-358. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Singler, John Victor. 2008c. [with Silvia Kouwenberg] Introduction. In The handbook of pidgin and creole studies, ed. by Silvia Kouwenberg and John Victor Singler, 1-16. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Richard S. Kayne, “Some Preliminary Comparative Remarks on French and Italian Definite Articles”, in R. Freidin, C.P. Otero and M.L. Zubizarreta (eds.) Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Essays in Honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 291-321. 2008.

Richard S. Kayne, “Expletives, Datives, and the Tension between Morphology and Syntax” in T. Biberauer (ed.) The Limits of Syntactic Variation, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 175-217. 2008.

Richard S. Kayne, “Some Silent First Person Plurals”, in J.M. Brucart, A. Gavarró and J. Solà (eds.) Merging Features. Computation, Interpretation, and Acquisition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 276-292. 2009.

Richard S. Kayne, “A Note on Auxiliary Alternations and Silent Causation”, in L. Baronian and F. Martineau (eds.) Le français d’un continent à l’autre. Mélanges offerts à Yves Charles Morin, Presses de l’Université Laval, Québec, 211-235. 2009.

The syntax brown bag by Oussama Haddad has been rescheduled for May 1st.

One of our senior linguistics majors, Andy Canariato, just got accepted to the Ph.D. program in linguistics at Stony Brook. Congratulations, Andy!

Jason Shaw, Temporal evidence for syllabic structure in Moroccan Arabic: data and model. Phonology, 2009 [with A. Gafos, P. Hoole,C. Zeroual].

Jason Shaw, Compensatory lengthening via mora preservation in OT-CC: theory and predictions. NELS 38, 2009.

Maria Gouskova and Kevin Roon, Interface Constraints and Frequency in Russian Compound Stress, to appear in the proceedings of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 17: The Yale meeting.

Tom Leu, The Internal Syntax of Determiners. PhD Dissertation, 2008. Groninger Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik vol. 47.

Chris Barker, Wild Control Operators, Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, 2009, ACM 978-1-60558-379-2/09/01, 152--152.

Chris Barker, Clarity and the grammar of skepticism, 2009, Mind and Language.

Chris Barker, Reconstruction as delayed evaluation. In Erhard Hinrichs and John Nerbonne (eds), 2009, Theory and Evidence in Semantics, CSLI Publications.

Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan, Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding, 2008, Semantics and Pragmatics, 1.1: 1--46.

Jon Brennan will be giving a talk on "Irish pronouns and inflection" at Yale on April 17.

Vincent Chanethom is giving a colloquium talk entitled "Acquisition of English aspiration: a longitudinal study" on April 17 at Syracuse University.

Txuss Martín is presenting a poster on "The internal structure of dative clitics" at the Colloquium on Generative Grammar, to be held in Vitoria, Basque Country, April 1st - 3rd.

Anna Szabolcsi is giving a colloquium on "Raising verbs as quantifiers" at MIT on March 20.

Friederike Moltmann will be giving a syntax brown bag on Friday, March 27th at 1:30 in The Linguistics Conference Room (726 Broadway, 7th Floor)

Title: Reifying Terms

Abstract:

Yoad Winter (Technion and Utrecht University)

"Typicality Effects and the Logic of Reciprocity"

Friday, March 27th at 4pm
Silver Center, Room 705
Followed by a reception at 726 Broadway, 7th floor

Abstract:

Joint work with Nir Kerem and Naama Friedmann

This talk will introduce a significant revision of the Strongest
Meaning Hypothesis on reciprocal expressions like "each other" and
"one another" (Dalrymple et al 1998). A more powerful hypothesis
will be presented, connecting the logical semantics of reciprocals
to the meaning of everyday concepts in natural language.
The talk will report experimental results supporting the proposed
generalization.

We argue that the logical semantics of reciprocals are directly
derived by the *relational concept* within their scope: the
concept representing the meaning of the relational expression
combining with the reciprocal, e.g. a transitive verb.
We make new observations on typicality effects (cf. Osherson and
Smith 1997) with verbs, and extend the SMH into a new principle,
called the Maximal Typicality Hypothesis (MTH).
This principle respects meanings of verbs like "know", "pinch" or
"hug" better than Dalrymple et al's assumptions, and accounts for
their effect on the reciprocal meaning.

We report on experiments testing typicality with relational
concepts, and its correlation with the interpretation of reciprocal
sentences that refer to these concepts. The observed correlations
are unexpected by the SMH but systematically support the MTH.

Selected References
Dalrymple et al. 1998: "Reciprocal expressions and the concept of
reciprocity", L&P 21.
Osherson & Smith 1997: "On typicality and vagueness", Cognition 64.

We are happy to announce that Stephanie Harves will be joining the faculty of the departments of Linguistics and Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU beginning Fall 2009.