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September 2022
Colloquium: Some Half-Truths and Interim Conclusions about Liaison- Anne-Michelle Tessier, UBC
A very complicated issue in understanding morpho-phonological alternations concerns those phenomena that are pervasive, frequent, and phonotactically-motivated, and yet exceptionful and lexically-sensitive. To what extent are such processes, that apply idiosyncratically to different morphemes, words and even phrases, represented in a way that generalizes to novel forms? This talk examines this issue via the “well-plowed ground”* of French liaison, specifically those liaison consonants that come and go at the boundary between nouns and the words preceding them (e.g. les [z] amis, ‘the friends’). My…
Read MoreJune 2022
May 2022
April 2022
Maura O’Leary’s student colloquium talk- It’s About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tense
It’s About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tenseMaura O’Leary (UCLA) It has been well established that the property times of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, participle phrases, and relative clauses are all interpreted relative to the time argument introduced by the nearest scoping lambda abstractor (e.g., Abusch 1988, Percus 2000, Ogihara 2003, Keshet 2008) – generally meaning that these property times overlap the reference time defined by sentential tense. However, nominal property times have eluded such a clear-cut…
Read MoreColloquium Speaker-Bob Frank (Yale)
computational, syntax
Read MoreBob Frank (Yale) – computational, syntax
Linguistic Productivity in Neural Networks: Representation and Inductive BiasA fundamental fact about human language is its productivity: speakers are able to understand and produce forms different from those that they have previously encountered. Linguists typically account for this fact by positing abstract grammars that characterize structural representations for an infinity of possible forms. At the same time, recent neural network models have achieved extraordinary levels of performance on practical NLP tasks without any explicit abstract grammar or structured representations. This…
Read MoreNovember 2021
October 2021
Michelle Yuan (UC San Diego) – syntax, fieldwork
We are pleased to welcome Michelle Yuan (UC San Diego) as part of theUCLA Linguistics Colloquium Series. This talk will be given in person.Title: Morphological conditions on chain resolution: Inuktitut noun incorporation revisited Abstract: Previous research on the Copy Theory of Movement has suggested that therealization of movement chains may be regulated by morphological well-formednessconditions governing complex word formation, such as the Stray Affix Filter (e.g. Boskovic2001, Landau 2006, Kandybowicz 2007). This talk provides novel evidence for thisinteraction from noun…
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