NYU Linguistics

Colloquium: Ed Stabler (Mar. 26)

2010-03-16T21:08:58Z

Edward Stabler (UCLA) will be giving a colloquium on Friday March 26th at 4pm titled "Derivation, scope, and information flow". The colloquium will be held in 10 Washington Place, on the first floor, with a reception to follow on the second floor.

Abstract:

]]> Rewrite grammars, which provided the first definitions of the Chomsky hierarchy, derive languages top-down, rewriting nonterminals until they are all removed. But in several different syntactic formalisms that are recently popular, derivations proceed bottom-up. There are important differences between these kinds of derivations: the recent bottom-up derivations have significant advantages. But then why would languages show top-down scope effects, and why would psycholinguistic evidence suggest that, in typical recognition of speech or text, parsing is top-down and incremental? This paper sketches a simple answer, showing how some bottom-up grammars can be used directly in top-down performance models to compute grammatical analyses simply and exactly (even in the presence of relations established by remnant movement which pose difficulties for naive and informal theories). Then, considering polarity item distributions as an example, the model is extended to accommodate statistical and pragmatic influences in a quantitatively precise way. This approach can be simple because of a basic structural property that is lost if the distinct properties of grammatical factors are ignored.

Upcoming talks by Gregory Guy and Jennifer Nycz

2010-03-12T01:45:12Z

Gregory Guy and Jennifer Nycz will be presenting papers at the 34th International LAUD Symposium (Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language Variation in its Structural, Conceptual and Cultural Dimensions), March 15-18th, in Landau, Germany.

Greg will be speaking on The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables?

Jen will be presenting on
Speaker awareness, differential use of linguistic variables and the expression of identity (with Dom Watt, Carmen Llamas, Gerry Docherty & Damien Hall) and Changing words or changing rules? What second dialect acquisition can tell us about phonological representation.

Anna Szabolcsi to speak at Formal Semantics and Pragmatics, Riga

2010-03-10T13:54:43Z

Anna Szabolcsi is giving one of the invited talks at the Symposium on "Formal Semantics and Pragmatics: Discourse, Context, and Models" in Riga, Latvia, April 23-25. The program is posted at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-1150.html.

Kara Becker accepts tenure track position at Reed College

2010-03-08T19:38:36Z

Kara Becker just accepted an offer for a tenure track job at Reed College. Congratulations, Kara!

Dan Lassiter, Simon Charlow and Chris Barker to present at SALT 20

2010-03-06T13:44:04Z

Three of our semanticists are presenting at Semantics and Linguistics Theory 20 (SALT 20), April 29-May 1, Vancouver:

Papers:

Daniel Lassiter (New York University)
Gradable epistemic modals, probability and scale structure

Raffaella Bernardi (Free University of Bozen/Bolzano) and Chris Barker (New York University)
Principles of interdimensional meaning interaction

Poster:

Simon Charlow (New York University)
De re anaphors

See the abstracts at the conference web site.

Phonology/Experimental Phonetics Lab schedule

2010-03-04T01:44:19Z

The Phonology and Experimental Phonetics Group meeting schedule this semester is as follows. We meet on the 5th floor of 10 Washington place.

February 26--Patrick-Andre Mather
March 12--Lisa Davidson & Tuuli Adams (10:30 am)
March 23 (Tues)--Cathi Best (11 am-1:45 pm)
April 2--Anna Greenwood, Amanda Rysling (2-3:30 pm)
April 16--TBA
April 30--Tuuli Adams (3:00 pm)
May 14--TBA

Syntax Brown Bag: Sophia Malamud (Mar. 5)

2010-03-02T14:43:37Z

This Friday, Sophia A. Malamud of Brandeis will be giving a Brown Bag talk on impersonal pronouns. Snacks will be provided.

Date: Friday, Mar. 5
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Place: 10 Washington Place, Room 103 (conference room)

Download abstract

NYU hosts the 2010 CUNY Conference

2010-03-02T14:39:07Z

NYU is hosting the 2010 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing on March 16-20.

Invited Speakers:

Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (University of Marburg)

Matt Davis (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK)

Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, College Park)

Kuniyoshi Sakai (University of Tokyo)

Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)

Conference website: http://psych.nyu.edu/cuny/

Presentations by locals:

]]> Talks:
"Domain-General Mechanisms in the Construction of Meaning"
Doug Bemis and Liina Pylkkänen

"Mechanisms of sense resolution in young children"
Hugh Rabagliati, Eleanor Chestnut, Rebecca Fine, Leora Petashnick, Liina Pylkkänen and Gary Marcus

Posters:

Teasing apart structure-building and semantic composition during story-reading with MEG
Jonathan Brennan and Liina Pylkkänen

Before the N400: Early visual effects of lexical-semantic predictions in MEG
Suzanne Dikker and Liina Pylkkänen

A difficult mountain: Coercion in the interpretation of Noun Phrases.
Steven Frisson, Martin Pickering and Brian McElree

Assessing the Directionality of N400 and P600 effects with MEG
Christine Boylan and Liina Pylkkanen

Singular Complexity: MEG Evidence that Plurals are Semantically Unmarked
Inna Livitz and Liina Pylkkanen

WGUS Talk: Isabella Buchstaller (April 16)

2010-03-01T20:06:20Z

The Working Group in Urban Sociolinguistics will be hosting a talk by Isabella Buchstaller of the University of Newcastle on April 16th at 4pm (10 Washington Place, room 104).

Anna Greenwood at McGill Undergraduate Conference

2010-03-01T18:32:46Z

Anna Greenwood, a senior linguistics major, will be presenting at McGill's Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates the weekend of March 12, 2010. She will speak about "A study of vowel duration as a function of prevocalic consonantal size and quality in Arabic." The paper originated in Adamantios Gafos's seminar, Phonolab.

Colloquium Schedule, Spring 2010 (updated)

2010-03-01T14:48:12Z

Please save the dates listed below for colloquium lectures this spring. We have a terrific spring lineup!

As usual the lectures will be at 4pm on Fridays in the first floor classroom of 10 Washington Place.

-----------------------------------------------
NYU Linguistics Spring 2010 colloquium schedule
-----------------------------------------------
Marcel den Dikken: January 29
Ben Munson: February 5
Edward Stabler: March 26
Corinne McCarthy: April 2
Abby Cohn: April 9 -- CANCELLED
Pauline Jacobson: April 23

Syntax Brown Bag: Tom Leu (Feb. 25, 12pm)

2010-02-24T21:59:02Z

This Thursday, we are kicking off our semester of Syntax Brown Bag at a special place and a special time. Tom Leu of Yale University will be giving a talk in the Syntax-Semantics lab on the 4th Floor of 10 Washington Place at 12:00 PM. Come by for some snacks and syntax!

Date: Thursday, Feb. 25
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Place: 10 Washington Place, 4th Floor

Generalized x-to-C in Germanic

Abstract:

]]> This talks aims at unifying two distinctly Germanic morphosyntactic surface alterations that have received a lot of attention but have, hitherto, not been related to one another: verb placement and adjectival inflection. First, verb placement in Germanic is characterized by an alternation between a low position, and a left peripheral, i.e. verb second, position. The latter obtains in matrix clauses, the former is typical of embedded clauses. Secondly, Germanic attributive adjectives are characterized by a morphological alternation in that adjectival inflection is sensitive to definiteness. I propose that the two alternations derive from the same underlying process. The lexical head of an extended projection sometimes moves to the left periphery, e.g. V-to-C. When it does not, ``C'' is typically realized as `d-.' This simple generalization captures at once the basic pattern of verb placement and the weak/strong adjectival inflection alternation. It is further responsible, I argue, for the parametric contrast between North- and West-Germanic in the extended projection of the noun, i.e. between a suffixed and a free prenominal definite article.

Neuroscience of Language Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi

2010-02-24T01:35:51Z

Alec Marantz, Liina Pylkkänen and David Poeppel have been awarded a $9 million research award from the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute to establish the Neuroscience of Language Lab (NeLLab) at NYU AD. A new state-of-the-art MEG laboratory should be operational in Abu Dhabi by the spring of 2011.

Chris Barker to speak at CLS

2010-02-21T05:46:32Z

Chris Barker will be one of the invited speakers at the Chicago Linguistic Society's annual meeting. He is speaking at the parasession on "Re-evaluating the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface".

Talk: Claire Bowern (Feb. 23)

2010-02-19T21:33:41Z

Novel Object Naming: Report on a Psycholinguistic
Experience in the Field

Claire Bowern, Yale

February 23rd
2-3:15
Room 104
10 Washington Place

Abstract:

]]>
Field experiments are often problematic, particularly when they
involve working with highly endangered languages. Controlling the
research environment, adequately balancing subject numbers and
producing results under replicable conditions are all difficult at the
best of times, and may be almost impossible in the field. It might
therefore be tempting to avoid such work, especially as current
research practices in documentation have emphasized collaborative
fieldwork which minimizes the roles of "researcher" and "subject". I
argue here that there is a place for experimental methods, even in
collaborative fieldwork on endangered languages. Experimental work
presents an alternative source of data and add to the richness of the
documentation base. I illustrate this with data from a novel object
naming experiment in Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language of North-Western
Australia. Participants were shown pictures of chimaera-like items
(for example, half eggplant, half penguin) and were asked to provide a
Bardi name. In previous studies using these stimuli on more familiar
languages, participants produced a lot of compounds. Since Bardi has
productive compounding, it was expected that compounding would be the
preferred strategy in Bardi too. In fact, compounding was not used at
all; four other strategies (including semblative case, foregrounding
one item, and treating the items as constructed or unblended) were
used.