The following articles by Liina Pylkkänen, Jon Brennan (NYU PhD 2010), and Hugh Rabagliati (NYU PhD 2010) are now published online, ahead of print:
Brennan J, Pylkkänen L. (2012). The time-course and spatial distribution of brain activity associated with sentence processing. Neuroimage. Jan 9. epub
Rabagliati H, Pylkkänen L, Marcus GF. (2012). Top-down influence in young children's linguistic ambiguity resolution. Developmental Psychology. Jan 9. epub
Maria Gouskova's article on “Unexceptional segments” has just appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30:1, pp. 79--133. See the pre-publication version here.
We celebrate our PhD alumni who defended and filed their dissertations during the calendar year 2011 or in January 2012. The dissertations can be accessed at their homepages and at the (pdf) links below.
Sonya Fix
"Dark-Skinned White Girls": Linguistic and Ideological Variation Among White Women with African American Ties in the Urban Midwest pdf
Daniel Lassiter
Measurement and Modality: The Scalar Basis of Modal Semantics pdf
Txuss Martín
Deconstructing Catalan Object Clitics pdf
Abdoulaye Laziz Nchare
The Grammar of Shupamem pdf
Laura Rimell
Nominal Roots as Event Predicates in English Denominal Conversion Verbs pdf
Marcos Rohena-Madrazo
Sociophonetic Variation in the Production and Perception of Obstruent Voicing in Buenos Aires Spanish pdf
Having ‘Need’ and Needing ‘Have’, co-authored by Stephanie Harves and Richard Kayne has appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Linguistic Inquiry.
You may enjoy the comparative reading of three NYU semanticists' views on what it takes to do justice to quantification, in "Formal Semantics And Pragmatics: Discourse, Context And Models," the online proceedings of the eponymous 2010 Riga conference,
Quantification and negation in event semantics, by Lucas Champollion
Quantifiers and variables: insights from sign language (ASL and LSF), by Philippe Schlenker
Certain verbs are syntactically explicit quantifiers, by Anna Szabolcsi
and in "Linguistics and Philosophy" online first,
Donkey anaphora: the view from sign language (ASL and LSF), by Philippe Schlenker .
Cheers to Txuss Martin, who successfully defended his dissertation on "Deconstructing Catalan Object Clitics." His committee consisted of Richard S. Kayne (chair), Mark Baltin, Cedric Boeckx (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Stephanie Harves, and Alec Marantz.
Philippe Schlenker has new articles on presuppositions: "DRT with local contexts" and "The Proviso Problem: a note", both in Natural Language Semantics 19/4, and "Presupposition Projection: Two Theories of Local Contexts, Parts I and II" in Language and Linguistics Compass 5/12.
Maria Gouskova's article on "Grounded constraints and the consonants of Setswana," with co-authors Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown) and One Tlale Boyer (Georgetown), is published in Lingua 121 (2011). See a pre-publication version here.
Gillian Gallagher's paper "Acoustic and articulatory features in phonology – the case for [long VOT]" has appeared in print in The Linguistic Review. See a prepublication version here.
Cheers to Laura Rimell, who successfully defended her dissertation on "Nominal Roots as Event Predicates in English Denominal Conversion Verbs". Her committee consisted of Chris Barker, Richard Kayne, Alec Marantz (co-chair), Anna Szabolcsi (co-chair), and Bert Vaux of Cambridge.
Stephanie Harves and Richie Kayne received the Chiasmus of the Month award for their paper Having Need and Needing Have (to appear in Linguistic Inquiry, 43:1, 2012).
Despite the name, this prestigious prize apparently does not get awarded every month, so double congratulations, Stephanie and Richie!
Tuuli Morrill, a 2010 Ph.D. alumna, has just published her paper Acoustic Correlates of Stress in English Adjective–Noun Compounds in Language and Speech.
We are pleased to announce the publication of NYU Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 3. The volume can be accessed for free online at: http://linguistics.as.nyu.edu/object/linguistics.grad.nyuwpl .
Jim Wood and Neil Myler
Editors, NYUWPL 3
Contents
Mark Baltin - The copy theory of movement and the binding-theoretic status of A-traces: You can’t get there from here
Satarupa Das - Bengali imposters
Stephanie Harves and Richard S. Kayne - Having Need and Needing Have in Contemporary Indo-European
Daniel Lassiter - Anaphoric Properties of which and the Syntax of Appositive Relatives
Inna Livitz - Incorporating PRO: a Defective-Goal Analysis
Neil Myler - Come the pub with me: Silent TO in a Dialect of British English
Laziz Nchare - The Syntax of Agreement in the Shupamem DP and Greenberg’s Universal 20
Teresa O'Neill - The Syntax of ne...que Exceptives in French
Violeta Vazquez-Rojas - Definite and indefinite numeral phrases in Shupamem
The editors of the Philosopher's Annual select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year. We are delighted to announce that the 2010 selection contains three NYU philosophers, our very own Global Distinguished Professor Philippe Schlenker among them. See the full selection and their articles here.
“Attention and Mental Paint”
Ned Block
from Philosophical Issues 20 (2010), 23-63
“Towards a Theory of Part”
Kit Fine
from Journal of Philosophy 107 (2010), 559-589
“Presuppositions and Local Contexts”
Philippe Schlenker
from Mind 119 (2010), 377-391
Lisa Levinson (NYU PhD 2007) has just published "Possessive WITH in Germanic: HAVE and the Role of P" in the journal Syntax (for an early view, see DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00159.x) and a review of "Lexical semantics, syntax, and event structure" in Language 87/2, DOI: 10.1353/lan.2011.0029.
Cheers to Abdoulaye Laziz Nchare, who successfully defended his dissertation entitled "The Grammar of Shupamem" today. His committee chair was Chris Collins; committee members Ray Dougherty, Jeff Good (SUNY Buffalo), Greg Guy, Richard Kayne, and Anna Szabolcsi.
Shupamem is a Grassfields Bantu language; Laziz's mother tongue. After a general introduction, the dissertation focuses on the syntax of the DP, the Tense-Aspect-Mood system, negation, questions and focus, and body part expressions and the binding theory.
Lisa Davidson's article "Phonetic and Phonological Factors in the Second Language Production of Phonemes and Phonotactics" was featured in the March 2011 issue of Language and Linguistics Compass.
Cheers to Dan Lassiter, who successfully defended his dissertation on "Measurement and Modality: The Scalar Basis of Modal Semantics". His committee chair was Chris Barker; committee members Seth Yalcin, Chris Kennedy, Philippe Schlenker, and Anna Szabolcsi.
Liina Pylkkanen has two new papers out with recent PhD alumni Suzanne Dikker and Hugh Rabagliati:
Dikker, S. & Pylkkänen, L. (2011). Before the N400: effects of lexical-semantic violations in visual cortex. Brain and Language. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2011.02.006 here
Rabagliati, H., Marcus, G. F. & Pylkkänen, L. (2011). Rules, Radical Pragmatics and Restrictions on Regular Polysemy. Journal of Semantics, 1–27. doi:10.1093/jos/ffr005 here
Lisa Davidson's paper "Phonetic, phonemic, and phonological factors in cross-language discrimination of phonotactic contrasts" has just appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. (Vol 37(1), Feb 2011, 270-282).
Two of our faculty have books in print:
Paul M. Postal, Edge-Based Clausal Syntax, The MIT Press, 2010.
Anna Szabolcsi, Quantification, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
The journal Language and Cognitive Processes has a special issue on the cognitive neuroscience of semantics, and it features an article by three NYU linguists:
Pylkkänen, L., Brennan, J. & Bemis, D. K. (2010) Grounding the Cognitive Neuroscience of Semantics in Linguistic Theory. Language and Cognitive Processes. DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2010.527490.
Maria Gouskova's article on "The Phonology of Boundaries and Secondary Stress in Russian Compounds" has just appeared in The Linguistic Review 27:4 (2010), pp. 387-448.
Gillian Gallagher's article Perceptual distinctness and long-distance laryngeal restrictions has been published in Vol. 27 of Phonology.
Cheers to Chris Collins and Paul Postal, whose book ms. entitled "Imposters" has been accepted for publication by The MIT Press.
Cheers to Jen Nycz, who has defended her dissertation on "Second Dialect Acquisition: Implications for Theories of Phonological Representation". Committee: Gregory R. Guy (chair), Lisa Davidson, Adamantios Gafos, John Singler, and Gerry Docherty (Newcastle University).
Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman's article on Diachrony and AAE: St. Louis, Hip-Hop, and Sound Change outside of the Mainstream is published in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of English Linguistics.
A number of NYU folks were published in the September 2010 issue of English Today (guest-edited by Renee Blake):
Amy Wing-mei Wong -- New York City English and second generation Chinese Americans
Vincent Chanethom -- Influence of American English on second generation Lao immigrant speakers
Renee Blake and Cara Shousterman -- Second generation West Indian Americans and English in New York City
Lisa Del Torto (NYU BA alumna) -- ‘It's so cute how they talk’: Stylized Italian English as sociolinguistic maintenance
Congratulations to Simanique Moody on the successful defense of her PhD dissertation on "Language Contact and Regional Variation in African American English: A Study of Southeast Georgia". The committee was Renee Blake (chair), Chris Collins, Lisa Green, Gregory Guy, and John Singler.
Chris Barker's article on Free choice permission as resource-sensitive reasoning has just appeared in the online journal Semantics and Pragmatics, Vol. 3.
Mark Baltin's paper on "The Nonreality of Doubly Filled Comps" (Linguistic Inquiry - Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2010, pp. 331-335) is one of the top 20 most downloaded full-text pdfs in the journal. The list spans some ten years of publication.
"The internal syntax of jeder ‘every’ " by Tom Leu has appeared in Linguistic Variation Yearbook 9. This is an extension of Tom's 2008 NYU dissertation on the internal syntax of determiners.
Cheers to Erez Levon (NYU PhD 2007), whose book entitled Language and the Politics of Sexuality: Lesbians and Gays in Israel has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.
A selection of recent articles by Richie Kayne, entitled Comparisons and Contrasts is published by Oxford University Press. Congratulations!
Jim Wood's article "Short-a in Northern New England" in the Journal of English Linguistics has just been published. It's downloadable from Sage's "online first" publications: http://eng.sagepub.com/pap.dtl.
Jim Wood
Short-a in Northern New England
Journal of English Linguistics
first published on May 11, 2010 as doi:10.1177/0075424210366961
Shifting senses in semantic development by Hugh Rabagliati, Gary Marcus, & Liina Pylkkänen is now in press in Cognition.
... and, fittingly, some new papers by Liina and colleagues:
Pylkkänen L, Okano K. (2010) The Nature of Abstract Orthographic Codes: Evidence from Masked Priming and Magnetoencephalography. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10793. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010793 here
Dikker S, Rabagliati H, Farmer TA, Pylkkänen L. (2010) Early occipital sensitivity to syntactic category is based on form typicality. Psychological Science 1;21(5):629-34. here
Brennan J, Nir Y, Hasson U, Malach R, Heeger DJ, Pylkkänen L. (2010) Syntactic structure building in the anterior temporal lobe during natural story listening. Brain and Language. May 14. [Epub ahead of print] here
Brennan, J., Pylkkänen L. (2010) Processing Psych Verbs: Behavioral and MEG Measures of Two Different Types of Semantic Complexity. Language and Cognitive Processes. DOI: 10.1080/01690961003616840. here
Cheers to Suzanne Dikker, who has defended her dissertation entitled "Predicting and Parsing Language in Time and Space". Her advisor is Liina Pylkkanen.
Abstract:
This dissertation asks how prediction might help explain effects of seemingly high-level factors of language processing that occur as early as 100 ms after the presentation of a word. I propose a Sensory Hypothesis to explain such findings, predicting that they reflect mismatches with form-feature predictions derived from contextual predictions for syntactic categories or lexical-semantic representations. Consistent with this hypothesis, the set of experiment presented here are the first to demonstrate that early visual responses to word forms can be influenced by prior linguistic context, affected by both syntactic and lexical-semantic predictions. An exploratory investigation into the neural correlates of predictive language processing in prestimulus time-windows suggests that the generation of predicted form representations associated with lexical-semantic predictions is initiated in ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, flowing downstream via occipito-temporal regions, to (the vicinity of primary) visual cortex. Importantly, the same brain areas were more active for words that violated lexical-semantic expectations than for words that satisfied predictions, but in reverse order. As such, this research might get us a step closer to elucidating the mechanisms by which prediction allows rapid language processing.
Cheers to Jon Brennan, who has defended his dissertation entitled "Incrementally Dissociating Syntax and Semantics". His advisor is Liina Pylkkänen.
Continue reading "Jon Brennan dissertation in neurolinguistics" »
Cheers to Kara Becker and Libby Cogshall, whose paper on "African American English Speakers and their Participation in Local Sound Changes: A Comparative Study," has appeared in Publication of the American Dialect Society 94.
Arguments for pseudo-resultative predicates by Lisa Levinson (NYU PhD, 2007) has appeared in the 28/1 issue of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. Cheers, Lisa!
Dan Lassiter's “Where is the conflict between internalism and externalism? A reply to Lohndal and Narita (2009)” will appear in the next issue of Biolinguistics. A preprint is available on his website. It is a response to their paper "Internalism as Methodology", which appeared in Biolinguistics 3:4 (2009). That paper, in turn, is a response to Dan's "Semantic Externalism, Language Variation, and Sociolinguistic Accommodation", published in Mind and Language 23:5 (2008) -- see also on Dan's website.
Unbounded Dependency Recovery for Parser Evaluation by Laura Rimell, Stephen Clark, and Mark Steedman appeared in Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 813–821, Singapore, 6-7 August 2009. ACL and AFNLP. Laura is working in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge while finishing her dissertation at NYU.
In May 2007 NYU and CUNY co-hosted an installment of the International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian. A selection of the papers have been published by John Benjamins as Volume 11 of the Approaches to Hungarian series. The editors are Marcel den Dikken and Robert Vago.
Cheers to Salvador Mascarenhas, who just defended his MSc thesis "Inquisitive Semantics and Logic" in the Logic Program of the University of Amsterdam. The thesis supervisors were Jeroen Groenendijk and Dick de Jongh.
Anna Szabolcsi's book "Quantification" is set to appear in the Research Surveys in Linguistics series by Cambridge University Press. You can see the table of contents and the introduction here [PDF].
Cheers to Eytan Zweig (PhD January 2008), whose article on "Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature" has just appeared online in Linguistics and Philosophy; read here; doi: 10.1007/s10988-009-9064-3 .
Co-incidentally, Eytan is in town this week, and tomorrow he is giving a talk related to this article in the Semantics Group (10am -- meet at 9:45 for coffee).
As a reminder, the schedule of the Semantics Group presentations is to be found here.
Cheers to Mike Taylor, whose article with David Eddington on "T-glottalization in American English" has just come out in American Speech 84(3): 298-314 (2009).
Cheers to Kara Becker, whose article on "/r/ and the construction of place identity on New York City's Lower East Side" has appeared in Journal of Sociolinguistics 2009, 13.5: 634-658. Here is the link to the on-line article.
Three cheers to Arthur, who has filed his dissertation entitled "The Microparametric Syntax of Resultatives in Chinese Languages". Committee Co-chairs: Chris Collins and Richard Kayne. Committee Members: Mark Baltin, Alec Marantz and C.-T. James Huang.
The dissertation is posted at Arthur's home page.
Cheers to Suzanne, Hugh, and Liina re: the acceptance of this paper in Psychological Science!
Dikker, S., Rabagliati, H., Farmer, T. A., & Pylkkänen, L. (in press). Early occipital sensitivity to syntactic category is based on form typicality. Psychological Science.
Cheers to Oana Savescu Ciucivara, who has just filed her dissertation entitled "A Syntactic Analysis of Pronominal Clitic Clusters in Romance. The View from Romanian" (chair: Richard Kayne). The dissertation is posted at her home page.
Congratulations to Rahul Balusu on the successful defense of his dissertation, "OCP effects in Telugu." The committee consists of Lisa Davidson, Maria Gouskova, Adamantios Gafos, Gregory Guy, and Adam Albright.
Cheers to Andrea, who is about to file his dissertation entitled "It is all about clitics: The case of a Northern Italian dialect like Bellinzonese" (co-chaired by Richard Kayne and Cecilia Poletto). It can be downloaded from his home page.
The latest issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics contains a paper by Philipp Angermeyer (PhD 2006) on "Translation style and participant roles in court interpreting" and one by Erez Levon (PhD 2007) on "Dimensions of style: Context, politics and motivation in gay Israeli speech".
Paul Postal's book on "Edge-based Clausal Syntax" will be published by the MIT Press. An earlier version is posted at Lingbuzz.
Cheers to Kara and Libby's publication of:
Kara Becker and Elizabeth L. Coggshall, The Sociolinguistics of Ethnicity in New York City, 2009, Language and Linguistic Compass, 3.3: 751-766.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jonathan Brennan, Prepositions in Modern Irish: Agreement and Impoverishment. Proceedings of WCCFL 26, 2008.
Jonathan Brennan, Only Finally. The Proceedings of NELS 37, 2008.
Jon Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen, Processing Events: Behavioral and Neuromagnetic Correlates of Aspectual Coercion. In Brain and Language, 2008.
Suzanne Dikker, Hugh Rabagliati, Liina Pylkkänen, Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex. Cognition doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.09.008
Suzanne Dikker, Spanish prepositions in Media Lengua: redefining relexification, In: Stolz, Thomas, Dik Bakker & Rosa Salas Paloma (eds.), Hispanisation. The Impact of Spanish on the Lexicon and Grammar of the Indigenous Languages of Austronesia and the Americas (EALT 39). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.
Pylkkänen, L., Martin, A. E., McElree, B., & Smart, A. (2008). The Anterior Midline Field: Coercion or Decision Making? Brain and Language, doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.06.006. [pdf]
Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Mismatching Meanings in Brain and Behavior. Language and Linguistics Compass 2/4, 712¬738.
Pylkkänen, L. (2008). Introducing Arguments. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [BOOK]
Eytan Zweig & Liina Pylkkänen, (2008). A visual M170 effect of morphological complexity. Language and Cognitive Processes. DOI: 10.1080/01690960802180420.
[pdf]
Dan Lassiter, Semantic Externalism, Language Variation, and Sociolinguistic Accommodation. In Mind and Language 23/5: 607-633. 2008.
Philippe Schlenker, Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection. Target article in Theoretical Linguistics, 34, 3: 157-212 (with commentaries by D. Beaver, E. Chemla, D. Fox, E. Krahmer, D. Rothschild, U. Sauerland, and R. van der Sandt), 2008.Philippe Schlenker, Presupposition Projection: Explanatory Strategies" (replies to commentaries). Theoretical Linguistics 34, 3: 287-316
Anna Szabolcsi, The Effect of NPIs on Inference Verification (with Lewis Bott and Brian McElree) In Journal of Semantics 25/4: 411-450. 2008.
Anna Szabolcsi,Optionality, Scope, and Licensing: An Application of Partially Ordered Categories (with Raffaella Bernardi ). In Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17/3: 237-283. 2008.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to NYU Linguistics in the Recent Publications category. They are listed from newest to oldest.
NYU Linguistics Jobs is the previous category.
Undergraduate Program News is the next category.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.