NYU Linguistics

Daniel Kaufman will be giving a Syntax Brown Bag on Friday April 3 at 1:30 in the Linguistics Conference room.

Title: v-free predication in Austronesian and its consequences, from root to clause

Abstract:

Jessica Coon will be giving a brown bag on Friday April 17th at 1:30 in the Linguistics department conference room.

Title: Predicate Fronting and its Consequences: Ergativity in Chol

Abstract:

Friday April 10th will be the first NYU linguistics QP mini-conference. All 3rd year students have been invited to present a qualifying paper of their choice in the format of a 15 minute talk, followed by a 5 minute for questions or comments.

The conference will be held in Waverly 431 from 10am to 2pm. Light refreshments and beverages will be provided.

Scheduled to present:

Maria Gouskova is going to the Center of Advanced Studies in Theoretical Linguistics in Tromsø, Norway to give two talks: "The prosodic and morphological structure of compounds in Russian" and "A non-representational theory of ghost vowels." The talks will be on April 30.

Congratulations to Elika Bergelson, Simon Charlow, and Rachel Flamenbaum on receiving NSF Graduate Fellowships in 2009! Simon is currently a first-year graduate student at NYU. Elika graduated from NYU in 2007 with a BA in Language and Mind, and Rachel's 2007 BA is in Anthropology and Linguistics. For a full list of awards, see the NSF website.

Jairo Nunes will be giving a colloquium talk on Friday April 17th at 4pm in the Silver Building, room 509. Reception to follow in the Linguistics Department.

Title: Phi-defectiveness in Finite Clauses and Inflected Infinitivals in Brazilian Portuguese: Consequences for A-movement

Abstract:

The Sociolinguistics Working Group is hosting a talk by Ronald Beline Mendes of the Universidade de São Paulo this Friday, April 17, on "Language change from within: from auxiliary verb to prefix in Brazilian Portuguese".

Time: 11 AM - 12:30 PM.
Place: NYU Linguistics Dept. Classroom, 726 Broadway, 7th floor

Please join me in wishing good luck to Hanna Gelfand, who is going to continue her studies in the Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders at San Diego State University (SDSU) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) next fall. Hanna is graduating in May with a Bachelor's in Linguistics.

Maria Gouskova is going to UMass Amherst on April 17 to give a talk on "Unexceptional Segments: A Non-Representational Theory of Yers".

Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado is giving a talk at SULA5 (Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas) on "Case Marking and Semantic Incorporation in Tarascan", May 15-17.

Hanna Gelfand is also the co-captain of NYU's equestrian team and is off to the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association's National Championship -- see more here.

Chris Barker is going to teach a six-week course in semantics at the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute (UC Berkeley).

Elisabeth Selkirk and Angelika Kratzer of UMass Amherst will be giving a colloquium talk on Friday April 24th at 4pm in Silver room 509.

Title: Distinguishing contrastive, new and given information

Abstract:
The question of how linguistic theory should break down the dimension of “information structure” that includes contrastiveness, newness and givenness continues to be a subject of debate. This paper defends the three-way distinction between given, new, and focus of contrast originally proposed in Chafe 1976. Phonological and phonetic data are presented from English which support this three-way contrast. The paper argues that the status of a constituent as new is unmarked in the grammar, while constituents which are given or are a focus of contrast are marked as such in the syntactic representation which mediates between sound and meaning. This proposal echoes a recent proposal by Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006.

We will show that a system which gives morphosyntactic representation to focus of contrast (FoC-marking) and to givenness (G-marking) but which leaves newness morphosyntactically unmarked has the right consequences for theories of the interfaces of syntax with sentence prosody on the one hand and semantics on the other. On the semantics side, renditions of the Rooth 1992 theory of alternatives focus and the Schwarzschild 1999 theory of givenness
are combined with a set of syntax/semantics interface constraints to provide the interpretation and distribution of sentences whose constituents are FoC-marked, G-marked, and/or unmarked for either. On the phonology side, it is shown that all-new sentences receive a phonological interpretation that is based on general phonological principles, without any appeal to the morphosyntactic feature make-up of the sentence.

We will also explore some of the typological predictions of our proposal: whether FoC-marking or G-marking are expressed in sentence prosody varies (independently) from one language to the next. Some languages show no prosodic reflexes of these morphosyntactic contrasts at all, instead defaulting to the types of unmarked sentence prosody found in all-new sentences.

Liina Pylkkanen is presenting two papers in May, and Hugh Ragliabati is presenting a third one co-authored with Liina and Hanna Gelfand, this week:

The Anterior Midline Field: Progress Report. Maryland Mayfest: Moving Beyond Truth Conditions: The Computation of Meaning. University of Maryland, College Park, MD. May 8-9, 2009.

Event coercion in brain and development. Events across categories: Theoretical and experimental approaches to event structure. Madrid, Spain. May 27-29, 2009.

Hugh Rabagliati, Hanna Gelfand, Gary Marcus & Liina Pylkkänen: The acquisition of ontological shifts and the process of lexical semantic development. XPrag, April 23-25, Lyon, France.

Oussama Haddad will be giving a syntax brown bag on Friday May 1 at 1:30 in the Linguistics department conference room.

Title: The Silence of the NOUNS: Alternate Agreement in Lebanese Abstract Nominal Constructions

Abstract:

Jeroen Groenendijk will be giving a talk on Inquisitive Semantics and Pragmatics this Wednesday, 29 April, 2009, Linguistics department, 7th floor, 726
Broadway, New York, at 12:00 Noon.

**Please note that the starting time is noon.**

Gaja Jarosz (Yale) will be presenting a talk on Friday, May 1st at 2:30 in the Linguistics Department Library.

Title: Learning of Phonology: Integrating Developmental and Computational Perspectives

Abstract:

The editors of NYU Working Papers in Linguistics are happy to announce that the second volume of NYUWPL is now online at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/nyuwpl/.

NYUWPL Volume 2, Spring 2009: Papers in Syntax