Colloquium Talk - Dave Cayado Mar 5 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Location: La Kretz Hall 120

Four short investigations of short duration. I will present four interconnected investigations regarding the effects of short duration in the context of phonetics, phonology and sound change. I’ll start with the observation that durational shortening appears to be a crucial causal factor in at least three unrelated languages (Ennever, Meakins, and Round 2017; Katz and...

Colloquium Talk - Kelsey Sasaki Mar 10 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Location: La Kretz Hall 120

Colloquium Talk - Jack Duff Mar 12 @ 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm Location: La Kretz Hall 120

Testing weak and strong definites experimentally across languages Schwarz (2009) proposed a distinction between weak and strong definite articles, reflected in Standard German in the presence or absence of contraction of the article with certain prepositions (e.g., vom vs. von dem). Semantically, the analysis took the former to be a situationally restricted uniqueness article, and the latter an anaphoric article bearing...

Rethinking classifier languages Classifier languages have long been of interest to formal semanticists. That such languages do not allow nouns to be modified directly by numerals have lead researchers to propose a significant degree of cross-linguistic variation between classifier and non-classifier languages in either noun meaning (e.g. Chierchia 1998) or numeral meaning (e.g. Krifka 1989,...

Lessons about clausal embedding from long-distance wh-dependencies  Abstract: In this talk I argue with the data from Georgian that syntax and semantics of long-distance wh-dependencies provide support for the view that many embedded clauses are adjuncts (syntactically) and modifiers (semantically) rather than arguments of verbs they combine with (Elliott 2017, Bochnak & Hanink 2021, Bondarenko...

Position-sensitive transparency in vowel harmony: The role of prosodic gestures and locality A recent crosslinguistic study of positional privilege in vowel harmony observed that vowels in a stressed syllable may asymmetrically block harmony, but they are never singled out to be transparent (Kaplan & Walker 2024). This typological gap is not predicted under traditional theoretical...

Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries Some 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved...

Being pragmatic about anankastic conditionals (joint work with Jingyi Chen) So-called ‘anankastic conditionals’, like (1), have vexed standard accounts of modals and conditionals, by presenting an apparent non compositionality problem. Indeed, (1) seems to express that going to Harlem requires taking the A train, rather than the mere desire to do so, a reading standard...