Pragmatic Indecision Vague predicates are obligatorily tolerant (Wright 1973).  For example, the positive form gradable adjective ‘long’ cannot be used to draw a sharp distinction, even when the facts of the context of utterance and the semantic properties of the sentence in which it occurs otherwise conspire to make such uses possible:  in a context...

Location - Haines Hall 220

  I will present ongoing work aimed at developing a framework for formulating phonetic grammars of tone realization that can derive complete fundamental frequency (f0) contours from phonological specifications. The proposed framework consists of two main components: A set of weighted constraints that select and locate optimal tone targets for a given phonological representation, and...

  Anticipatory nasalization in A’ingae: Language-specific phonetics, not incomplete neutralization (Joint work with Scott AnderBois, Shen Aguinda, and Hugo Lucitante)   Cross-linguistically, vowels often undergo contextual nasalization in and sequences. In English, vowel nasalization in appears partial rather than categorical. Cohn (1990, 1993) influentially argued that vowels in contexts in English are phonologically unspecified for...

LOCATION CHANGE - Campbell Hall 2122A and Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/s/91305505603   In the bilingualism literature, most agree that the bilingual lexicon contains elements from both languages that can be activated non-selectively during processing (Kroll et al., 2013). Popular models of the bilingual lexicon often take an emergentist approach, such as Dijkstra & Van Heuven’s (2002) BIA+...

  Empty morphs are stable units of form that occur without any associated meaning or function, the inverse of zero morphs. Some empty morphs seem to occur for phonological, rather than morphological, reasons. In Ndebele, for example, subminimal words can be augmented either by prefixing yi- or suffixing -na (Sibanda 2004: 113)—the former is plausibly...

  Since the release of ChatGPT but also other large language models (Claude, Bard, LLaMA etc), the internet has been awash in synthetic text, with suggested applications including robo-lawyers, robo-therapists, and robo-journalists. All of these applications present unacceptable risks because language models are nothing more than ungrounded text synthesis machines. In this talk, I demystify...

Location - Franz 1260

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Haines 220