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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240426T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240426T130000
DTSTAMP:20240417T180541Z
CREATED:20231005T173719Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240417T180541Z
UID:137306-1714129200-1714136400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Ryan Bennett: Anticipatory nasalization in A’ingae
DESCRIPTION:  \nAnticipatory nasalization in A’ingae: Language-specific phonetics\, not incomplete neutralization (Joint work with Scott AnderBois\, Shen Aguinda\, and Hugo Lucitante) \n  \nCross-linguistically\, vowels often undergo contextual nasalization in [VN] and [NV] sequences. In English\, vowel nasalization in [VN] appears partial rather than categorical. Cohn (1990\, 1993) influentially argued that vowels in [VN] contexts in English are phonologically unspecified for nasality (= [ø nasal])\, and undergo gradient coarticulatory nasalization during phonetic implementation\, differentiating them from true [+nasal] vowels (as in e.g. French /Ṽ/). In contrast\, Solé (1992\, 1995) argued that contextual nasalization is so extensive\, controlled\, and systematic in English [VN] that these vowels should be treated as phonologically [+nasal]. Phonetic differences in the extent of nasalization in English [VN] vs. French /Ṽ/ could then reflect the distinction between derived (predictable) vs. underlying (contrastive) [+nasal] vowels — in other words\, incomplete neutralization. \n  \nIn this talk\, I approach this debate with nasal airflow data from A’ingae\, a language isolate spoken in the Ecuadorian and Columbian Amazon. A’ingae has a /V Ṽ/ contrast\, and a phonological process of left-to-right nasal spreading in /NV/ → [NṼ]. A’ingae also has extensive\, but nonetheless partial nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] sequences. Nasalization before [N\,ⁿD] is phonetically distinct from nasalization on contrastive /Ṽ/\, and on nasal vowels derived by left-to-right spreading. Consequently\, partial nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] cannot reflect a distinction between derived and underlying nasal vowels (= incomplete neutralization)\, because not all derived nasal vowels have the same phonetic profile. I also argue that nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] does not have the phonetic profile expected for phonological nasal spreading to sub-segmental units. The overall conclusion is that partial nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] sequences reflects underspecifed nasality [ø nasal] on vowels\, along with an articulated system of language-specific phonetic realization. \n  \nLocation: Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-ryan-bennett/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240419T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240419T130000
DTSTAMP:20240417T180353Z
CREATED:20231005T173641Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240417T180353Z
UID:137304-1713524400-1713531600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Edward Flemming - Generating and parsing f0 contours using a model of f0 production
DESCRIPTION:  \nI 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. \nThe 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 a functional model of f0 production that maps time-aligned tone targets to f0 contours. These two components work in parallel: the constraints that determine tone targets evaluate properties of the resulting f0 contour. \nIn addition to generating f0 contours\, the model of f0 production can also be fitted to observed f0 contours to infer the underlying f0 targets\, effectively parsing the f0 contour. This proves particularly valuable when analyzing tones with targets that are difficult to locate because they correspond to a turning point in the f0 contour that is not a local maximum or minimum (often referred to as ‘elbow’ targets). \nThe framework will be illustrated through analyses of two tonal phenomena that involve elbow targets: (i) the timing of the L- phrase accent in English H*L- intonational melodies\, and (ii) realization of the Mandarin rising tone. \nLocation – Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-edward-flemming/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240405T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240405T130000
DTSTAMP:20240405T145931Z
CREATED:20231005T173610Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240405T145931Z
UID:137302-1712314800-1712322000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Jeff Lidz
DESCRIPTION:Location – Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-jeff-lidz/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240308T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240308T130000
DTSTAMP:20240131T184400Z
CREATED:20240131T184400Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240131T184400Z
UID:251070-1709895600-1709902800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Chris Kennedy: Pragmatic Indecision
DESCRIPTION:Pragmatic Indecision \n\n\n\nVague 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 in which there are exactly two salient objects A and B\, which are clearly but only slightly different in length\, it is infelicitous to use “the long one” to refer to the longer of the two; we must say “the longer one.” This despite the fact that the presuppositions of the definite article and the lexical semantic features of ‘long’ that underwrite a compositional account of the comparative ought to allow for such a use. In this talk\, I will do three things.  First\, I will argue that no existing account of vagueness — neither epistemic nor expressivist nor contextual nor semantic nor cognitive nor distributional — provides a satisfactory explanation for why tolerance persists in examples like the one above.  Second\, I will show that attempts to eliminate the challenge presented by these kinds of examples through appeal to a grammatical decomposition of positive form adjectives into a non-vague root and a vague “pos” morpheme are also unsatisfactory\, because they fail to generalize to other kinds of examples that manifest exactly the same behavior but cannot plausibly be analyzed in this way.  And finally\, I will outline an alternative\, pragmatic account of vagueness\, in which  application of a vague predicate constitutes a “vote” for a particular resolution of linguistic indeterminacy\, and tolerance emerges from a normative constraint treating such votes as subject to principles of social choice. This account is consistent with a transparent compositional relation between positive and comparative (in which the latter is derived from the former)\, and generalizes to non-adjectival cases of vagueness as well. \n\nLocation: Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-chris-kennedy-pragmatic-indecision/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240301T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240301T130000
DTSTAMP:20240220T182551Z
CREATED:20231005T173535Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240220T182551Z
UID:137300-1709290800-1709298000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Amy Rose Deal
DESCRIPTION:Dependent case by Agree: Ergative in Shawi (joint work with Emily Clem\, UCSD)Ergative and accusative behave as dependent cases insofar as their appearance on a nominal depends on the presence of another nominal in the same domain. Recent work on case theory has taken the phenomenon of case dependency to challenge the idea that case is assigned via the operation Agree. Focusing on the Shawi language (Kawapanan; Peru)\, we show not only that patterns of case dependency can be captured via Agree\, but also that doing so opens up a new way of understanding the typology of global case splits. Ergative in Shawi appears when the subject is at least as high as the object on the person hierarchy—a global split pattern—and can be accompanied by explicit realization of the object’s features on the subject nominal (“object agreement on the subject”). We propose that ergative arises in Shawi when a probe on v Agrees with both the object and the subject\, transferring object features to the subject; these features are spelled out as ergative case and as object agreement. In general\, we show that dependent cases\, both ergative and accusative\, can be seen as a morphological outcome of syntactic Agree between a probe and a second goal\, realizing features on that goal that were transferred from a previous goal in an earlier step of Agree. \n  \nLocation – Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-amy-rose-deal/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240223T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240223T130000
DTSTAMP:20240212T181313Z
CREATED:20231005T173440Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240212T181313Z
UID:137298-1708686000-1708693200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Viola Schmitt: Distributivity is Complex
DESCRIPTION:In this talk I show (based on joint cross-linguistic work with various collaborators) that distributive  — i.e.\, `classical’ — meanings for the universal part of the language (connectives and DP-internal quantifiers) correspond to bigger morpho-syntactic structures while the corresponding smaller structures have a weak (plural) meaning. This\, I will argue\, raises a problem for a number of current theories of scalar implicatures\, as the `classical’ universal expressions required as alternatives are structurally too complex to be accessible. To tackle this problem\, I will tentatively suggest an adjustment to the algorithm via which scalar implicatures are derived. \nLocation – Royce Hall 362
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-viola-schmitt/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240209T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240209T130000
DTSTAMP:20240201T185311Z
CREATED:20240117T183052Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240201T185311Z
UID:237545-1707476400-1707483600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Shengyun Gu: When the phonological mind meets another modality: Two-handed articulation in Shanghai Sign Language " (See below for abstract)
DESCRIPTION:Location – Royce Hall 362 \nThe department tour slot is still open. You can sign up here (same link). \nWhen the phonological mind meets another modality: Two-handed articulation in Shanghai Sign Language \nAbstract:\nTo what extent are the phonological systems of languages\, spoken or signed\, structured similarly if we assume that they both draw on the same linguistic capacities\, and to what extent is sign language phonology different due to the visual-manual modality it is transmitted through? One striking difference in sign languages is that two identical articulators (i.e.\, hands) are available for linguistic expressions. This talk will address the above two overarching questions through the lens of two-handed articulation in Shanghai Sign Language. I will present evidence from complex word formation and phonological processes such as non-dominant hand spread (‘stability’ of the non-dominant hand across different signs) and weak drop (i.e.\, deletion of the non-dominant hand) to show that the phonological principles in the organization of a word and a prosodic domain in relation to the non-dominant hand transcend modality differences. I will also discuss the relevance of considering the aspects of simultaneity and iconicity in sign language grammar. I argue that each of these two modality-related properties\, i.e.\, an increase in simultaneous complexity and a prevalence of lexical iconicity\, shape sign language phonology. Finally\, by comparing deaf signers and hearing non-signers in their processing of weak drop\, I reveal that knowledge of a sign language mediates not only the way iconicity is leveraged\, but also almost all levels of the phonology of the non-dominant hand\, including lexical representation\, phonological repairs\, and phonetic implementation. Synthesizing these findings\, I support the view that a sign phonological system includes a mixture of properties that are modality-independent and others that are modality-specific. Crucially\, I highlight that the integration of these properties is specialized and mediated by the knowledge of a sign language.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-shengyun-gu/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240205T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240205T180000
DTSTAMP:20240131T182120Z
CREATED:20240117T183038Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240131T182120Z
UID:237544-1707148800-1707156000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Connor Mayer: Are scalar models of sonority enough? Insights from L2 acquisition of English complex onsets
DESCRIPTION:Languages vary in their phonotactics: how sounds are allowed to be sequenced into words. For example\, although English\, Spanish\, and Farsi all have the sounds /p l s/\, English allows the complex onsets /sp/ and /pl/\, as in ‘speech’ and ‘play’\, Spanish only /pl/\, as in ‘playa’\, while Farsi allows no complex onsets at all. Learners of a second language (L2) often struggle with producing complex onsets that are banned in their first language (L1) and will commonly repair them using epenthesis: the insertion of a vowel to break up an illegal sequence. There is a robust asymmetry in repair strategies for complex onsets across languages: sC onsets are more typically repaired by epenthesizing before the cluster (prothesis; as in ‘stop’ → ‘estop’) while other onsets are repaired by epenthesizing into the cluster (anaptyxis; as in ‘please’ → ‘pelease’). One analysis of this asymmetry has been in terms of sonority\, the overall resonance of a sound: this proposal suggests that there is a pressure to avoid sonority rises across syllable boundaries (Vennemann 1988\, Gouskova 2001\, 2004). A second analysis suggests that speakers choose epenthesis locations that maximize perceptual similarity to the unepenthesized form (Fleischhacker 2001\, 2005\, Flemming 2008). \nIn this talk\, I will compare the predictions of these two theories against new empirical data from L1 Farsi/L2 English speakers. In the first part of the talk\, I will present the results of a corpus study and an experimental study\, which consist of recordings of speakers of varying English proficiency reading English passages. The results of these studies confirm previous observations that (a) sC onsets almost categorically undergo prothesis\, while other onsets undergo anaptyxis; (b) overall rates of cluster repair decrease as English ability increases; and (c) sC clusters are repaired more frequently and acquired more slowly than other clusters. In the second part of the talk\, I will present a maximum entropy optimality theory model of the experimental data. First\, I will show that constraint scaling can be used to model the effects of L2 proficiency on epenthesis paterns\, providing a starting point for more nuanced modeling of\nL2 acquisition. Second\, I will demonstrate that when the models are extended to encode the increased difficulty of sC clusters\, the perceptual account of epenthesis asymmetry beter predicts the data than the syllable contact account. Although the perceptual model makes errors in the overall rates of epenthesis\, it consistently predicts the correct type. The syllable contact model\, on the other hand\, fails to predict both the rate and type of epenthesis of many clusters. I will close by arguing that models that treat sonority as a scalar value\, such as the syllable contact account or the more recent NAP model (Albert & Nicenboim 2022)\, are ultimately insufficient to deal with the wide range of sonority-related phenomena observed in speech. I suggest instead that further study of the articulatory and perceptual reflexes of sonority will be important to ensure our models are both empirically and explanatorily adequate. Specifically\, I will suggest that the concept of ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ variability (e.g. Latash 2012) from the motor control literature may provide a principled way to relate the perceptual and articulatory properties of sC clusters. – Connor Mayer
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-connor-mayer/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240129T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240129T180000
DTSTAMP:20240123T234228Z
CREATED:20240117T183015Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240123T234228Z
UID:237543-1706544000-1706551200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Sam Zukoff: Morpheme Ordering Happens in the Phonology
DESCRIPTION:Location – Math and Science 5200 \nTitle: Morpheme Ordering Happens in the Phonology \nAbstract: The determination of the order of morphemes within words has traditionally been modeled using cyclic concatenation\, the one-by-one attachment of affixal morphemes to the root\, guided by morphosyntactic constituency via the “Mirror Principle” (Baker 1985). In this talk\, I propose an alternative\, parallel model of morpheme order that locates morpheme concatenation in the phonological component of the grammar. This model\, couched within Parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004)\, generates morpheme order through the interaction of two pieces of the grammar. The first is “articulated alignment”\, which posits that every morpheme has its own alignment constraint (McCarthy & Prince 1993) which prefers it to be as close as possible to a specified edge. The second is the “Mirror Alignment Principle” (Zukoff 2023)\, a novel property of the phonology-morphology interface that dynamically determines the ranking of alignment constraints based on the morphosyntactic structure\, in a way that derives the Mirror Principle. This approach allows for transparent interaction between phonological factors and morphological/morphosyntactic factors in a single input-output mapping. I will demonstrate that this approach is necessary to properly explain the generalizations underlying ordering alternations in two atypical morphological systems. The first is mobile affixation in Huave (Huavean; Kim 2008)\, where phonological and morphological properties interact to trigger prefix/suffix alternations. The second is root-and-pattern morphology in Arabic (Semitic; e.g. McCarthy 1979)\, where phonological and morphosyntactic properties interact to trigger prefix/infix alternations\, which themselves inform alternations across far-flung components of the grammar. This adds to the body of research arguing for a parallel model of the phonology-morphology interface.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-sam-zukoff/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240126T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20240126T130000
DTSTAMP:20240123T001020Z
CREATED:20240117T182950Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240123T001020Z
UID:237542-1706266800-1706274000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Jonah Katz: Prosodic structure\, timing\, and fortition-lenition patterns
DESCRIPTION:Location – Royce Hall 362 \nTitle: Prosodic structure\, timing\, and fortition-lenition patterns \nAbstract: This talk reviews cross-linguistic evidence that certain common lenition processes such as spirantization\, intervocalic voicing\, and flapping take place in a component of grammar that governs the fine-grained temporal dynamics of speech sounds and their interaction with prosodic structure. I argue that these lenition patterns are different from other processes sometimes referred to as ‘lenition’; that they do not manipulate phonological features; that they lie on a broader continuum of prosodically-driven phonetic variation; and that they are implemented primarily through subphonemic adjustments to duration and the temporal separation between prosodic units. With data from Campidanese Sardinian\, I illustrate a schematic approach to modeling lenition as a language-specific property of phonetic implementation\, operating on prosodic structure and the output of narrow phonology.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-jonah-katz/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231208T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231208T130000
DTSTAMP:20231202T002941Z
CREATED:20231005T173356Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231202T002941Z
UID:137284-1702033200-1702040400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Alexis Wellwood: Temporal constitution in language and mind
DESCRIPTION:Location – Dodd 146 \nTemporal constitution in language and mind \nSemanticists posit at least two categories of dynamic entity—event and process—in their explanations of the semantic properties of different classes of verbs and verb phrases. I consider the event-process distinction as a case study in the interface between linguistic and extralinguistic cognition. In a series of experiments\, we tested whether different sorts of subtle differences in “temporal shaping” across different types of dynamic displays would be sufficient to predict preference for resolving a novel verb as event-y or process-y. For example\, a circle moves continuously back-and-forth across the screen\, with movement broken up into equi-sized temporal portions separated by brief pauses (event-y) or not (process-y). In forced choice tasks\, we asked whether people would differentially choose deverbal count syntax (The circle did some gleebs) versus mass (The circle did some gleebing) to describe such scenes. In quantity estimation tasks\, we tested whether they would differentially track natural number versus some continuous dimension for verbal comparatives (The circle gleebed more than the square did). Indeed\, we found preference for count syntax and number-based quantification with event-y scenes\, but no categorical preference for process-y scenes. In the talk\, I suggest how to make sense of such findings on the linguistic and nonlinguistic sides. Specifically\, I suggest that semantic description combines (linguistic-)syntactic and conceptual(-syntactic) information\, with functional meanings directing binding relations across distinct core knowledge domains.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-alexis-wellwood/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T130000
DTSTAMP:20231117T232420Z
CREATED:20231005T172622Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231117T232420Z
UID:137281-1701428400-1701435600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Morgan Sonderegger: New perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies
DESCRIPTION:Location – Dodd 146 \nNew perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies \nI present two studies which aim to understand the structure and sources of variability in speech production\, enabled by novel quantitative methods. I also discuss several open-source tools for automatic analysis of speech which enable such large-scale studies by speeding up or replacing manual processing. \nThe first study asks how much “the same” phonetic effects vary across languages\, and what their distributions can tell us. It is well known that vowel F0 tends to be higher for high vowels compared to low vowels (VF0) and F0 following voiceless obstruents tends to be higher than F0 following voiced obstruents (CF0). These “intrinsic F0” effects have been extensively investigated\, but largely in lab speech in individual languages\, making it difficult to settle the long-standing questions of to what extent they are “automatic” versus “controlled”\, and whether cross-linguistic variation can be systematically explained (e.g. smaller VF0/CF0 in tone languages). We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across 20 languages\, using large corpora of read speech. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are robust across languages in terms of effect direction\, but that languages vary greatly in VF0 and CF0 effect size. Most of this variability appears to be unexplained by phonological properties of the language (e.g. tone). Finally\, we find that the CF0 effect is larger than the VF0 effect in almost every language\, and the CF0 effect is more variable across languages. These patterns suggest a possible explanation for the cross-linguistic tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change (“tonogenesis”) much more often than VF0 effects. (Joint work with Connie Ting & Meghan Clayards) \nA second study is part of the SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project\, which examined existing datasets of Old World (British) and New World (North American) English spanning 100+ years\, to gain an improved understanding of stability and variation in a spoken language across space and time. We consider variability in English sibilants in 5k speakers from 27 geo-social-ethnic regions. We analyse spectral peak measures using a Bayesian statistical model which explicitly models token\, speaker\, and region- level variability. Following previous phonetic and sociolinguistic research we expected English /s/ to be more variable than /sh/\, and for both sounds to look broadly similar across dialects. The results\, however\, differ according to the level at which we consider variability — for example\, /s/ is more variable within-speaker than /sh/\, but not more variable across  regions. Our results likely reflect physical and social-indexical sources of variation\, and connect to basic issues in sociolinguistics and sound change. (Joint work with Jane Stuart-Smith\, Jeff Mielke)
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-morgan-sonderegger/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231027T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231027T130000
DTSTAMP:20231016T172853Z
CREATED:20231005T172540Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231016T172853Z
UID:137279-1698404400-1698411600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Meredith Tamminga: Language users' expectations shape phonetic flexibility
DESCRIPTION:  \nLocation – Dodd 146 \n\n\nLanguage users’ expectations shape phonetic flexibility \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLanguage users show considerable flexibility in their phonetic perception and production. Phonetic flexibility phenomena such as convergence and perceptual learning are of broad interest because of their connections to questions in language learning\, sociolinguistic variation\, and diachronic change. In this talk I will present two case studies on how phonetic flexibility is influenced by language users’ expectations. The first case study is on expectation-driven convergence\, which is when speakers converge toward a regional accent feature that they expect\, but crucially do not hear\, from an interlocutor. In work with Lacey Wade and Dave Embick\, we show that people with different dialect backgrounds exhibit expectation-driven convergence triggered by different kinds of sociolinguistic expectations. The second case study is on cross-talker generalization in perceptual learning\, which is when listeners shift a perceptual category boundary based on input from one talker and then\, under some circumstances\, extend that expectation to a different talker. In work with Wei Lai\, we propose that perceptual learning involves learning both a bias toward identifying a particular phonological category and a new phonetic boundary between two phonemes\, and that listeners will generalize the shift only when those two aspects of what they have learned match. I conclude with reflections on the thematic parallels between these two case studies and potential implications for understanding larger-scale phenomena like language change.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-meredith-tamminga/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230526T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230526T130000
DTSTAMP:20230601T211837Z
CREATED:20220919T182031Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230601T211837Z
UID:38403-1685098800-1685106000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Ellen Lau
DESCRIPTION:Representing individuals\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk I will consider what is known about how the human mind and brain represents individuals non-linguistically\, and what the implications are for our theories of linguistic interpretation. In standard model-theoretic semantics\, individuals are simply taken for granted as part of the world model; and I too will assume that the world itself contains individual entities. But if we take seriously the goal of developing a theory of the natural language semantics that is instantiated in the human mind\, we need to know something about how the mind manages to *approximate* the world in mental representation\, because it is this mental representation of the world to which natural language has to be mapped. As Bach (1989) noted\, this is as challenging for individuals as for anything else. Although cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy\, today some rough outlines of how the brain represents individuals are becoming clearer. There appear to be multiple\, redundant\, non-linguistic representations of individuals in circuits that evolved for different purposes and which differ in format and temporal continuity. Some of our representations of individuals are fleeting\, serving the purpose of helping us to accurately represent the structure of a current situation or interaction while it is happening. Others\, supported by different brain circuits\, are designed to last a longer period of time\, allowing us to re-identify a recently encountered individual and successfully integrate new knowledge about them with prior knowledge. Yet a different form of representation for known individuals is included within the semi-permanent long-term knowledge base that also supports generalized knowledge. Evidence from neuropsychological patients implies that we cannot rely on introspection to tell us which of these circuits we are drawing on in any given instance of thought or reasoning. The diversity of individual representation formats suggested by cognitive neuroscience raises new and interesting questions for semantic theory about what we should take to be the internal world-model in which sentences are interpreted\, and can inspire new ideas about how human language was shaped by its interface with these pre-existing representational formats.\n\nLocation: Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/ellen-lau/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230519T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230519T130000
DTSTAMP:20230517T220847Z
CREATED:20220919T182704Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230517T220847Z
UID:38414-1684494000-1684501200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Xin Xie
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220 \nWhat is “adapted” in adaptive speech perception? \nThe acoustic-phonetic realization of the same linguistic categories (e.g.\, phonemes\, syllables\, or words) can vary considerably both within and across talkers. This variability poses a challenge for listeners\, who must be able to perceive speech accurately despite these changes. Empirical data suggest that listeners adapt to cross-talker variability. Exactly how this adaptivity is achieved remains unknown. Three hypotheses have been proposed: (1) low-level\, pre-linguistic signal normalization\, (2) changes in linguistic representations\, or (3) changes in post-perceptual decision-making. However\, no study has directly compared these hypotheses. \nI will present a computational framework for adaptive speech perception (ASP for brevity) that implements all three hypotheses and use it to derive predictions for experiments on perception. We find that the signature results of influential experimental paradigms do not distinguish between the three hypotheses\, highlighting the need for new research methods. I will then discuss new approaches for investigating how these mechanisms—together and separately—guide the impressive adaptivity in human speech perception.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/xin-xie/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230512T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230512T130000
DTSTAMP:20230509T160242Z
CREATED:20230306T173208Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230509T160242Z
UID:41073-1683889200-1683896400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Jennifer Kuo
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220 \nWhen phonological learning is not statistical: how learning biases have reshaped Malagasy paradigms \nOne view of phonological learning is that it is driven by a domain-general bias towards frequency-matching\, and therefore predictable from statistical distributions of the language (Albright 2002; Ernestus & Baayen 2003; Nosofsky 2011). A competing view is that learning is influenced by various linguistically-motivated biases\, such as a bias towards less complex patterns. One way to tease apart these effects is to look at how learners behave when presented with conflicting data patterns––they do not always replicate the language they hear from their parents\, and their errors (such as goed instead of went) can be informative\, telling us about what biases are present in learning. Such errors can be adopted into speech communities and passed through generations of speakers\, resulting in reanalysis of a data pattern. \nIn this talk\, I look at reanalyses over time in Malagasy and show that reanalysis is not entirely predictable from statistical distributions. Instead\, I argue that Malagasy reanalysis is sensitive to both frequency-matching and a markedness bias\, using an iterated version of Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky 1986; Goldwater & Johnson\, 2003) that simulates the cumulative effect of reanalyses across generations of speakers. I further propose that the markedness effects active in reanalysis are restricted to those already present in the language as a phonotactic tendency\, and show that this is the case for Malagasy. These results demonstrate how findings from language change over time\, combined with quantitative modeling\, can give us insight into phonological learning.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-jennifer-kuo/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230428T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230428T130000
DTSTAMP:20230425T224415Z
CREATED:20220919T182552Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230425T224415Z
UID:38412-1682679600-1682686800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Erik Zyman
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220 \n\n\n\nOn the Symmetry Between Merge and Adjoin\nA crucial task for syntactic theory is to determine what syntactic operations are made available by the human capacity for language\, what their properties are\, and why they have the properties they do. This talk aims to bring us closer to that goal by pushing forward our understanding of adjunction. It is argued that a minimal extension of the system developed in Zyman to appear—building on\, but modifying\, ideas from Bruening 2013\, a.o.—makes possible an analysis of adjunction that is simple\, explanatory\, and empirically successful. On this analysis\, there are two structure-building operations—Merge and Adjoin—whose definitions are similar but not identical\, differing primarily in which of the two operands projects. This approach puts us in a good position to tackle two related questions: 1) why Merge and Adjoin both exist\, and 2) why their definitions are similar but not identical. The answer that is offered to both questions is that Merge and Adjoin are “fillings-in” (elaborations) of a more elementary ur-operation Combine that does not incorporate projection/labeling. (Precise proposals are made as to both 1) why Combine was “filled in” and 2) why it was “filled in” in such a way as to yield Merge and Adjoin specifically.) Contrary to a widespread consensus\, then\, the statement in the definition of Merge to the effect that what selects projects is not an arbitrary\, unexplained stipulation\, but rather one-half of the double/symmetric “filling-in” just mentioned. Finally\, the approach to Merge and Adjoin developed leads to the expectation that there should be no A-over-A Condition. Some apparent empirical problems for that conclusion are shown to be just that: only apparent. Overall\, then\, the goal of the talk is to bring us a step closer to fully understanding the seemingly recalcitrant phenomenon of adjunction\, as well as its relationship to Merge.\n \nReferences\nBruening\, Benjamin. 2013. “By Phrases in Passives and Nominals.” Syntax 16.1: 1–41.\nZyman\, Erik. To appear. “On the definition of Merge.” Syntax.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/erik-zyman/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230414T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230414T130000
DTSTAMP:20230321T211934Z
CREATED:20220919T182410Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230321T211934Z
UID:38408-1681470000-1681477200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Robert Henderson
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/robert-henderson/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230407T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230407T130000
DTSTAMP:20230321T211957Z
CREATED:20220919T182316Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230321T211957Z
UID:38406-1680865200-1680872400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Maziar Toosarvandani
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/maziar-toosarvandani/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230217T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230217T130000
DTSTAMP:20221114T161203Z
CREATED:20220919T181848Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221114T161203Z
UID:38400-1676631600-1676638800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Georgia Zellou
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/georgia-zellou/
LOCATION:Haines A25
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221014T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20221014T130000
DTSTAMP:20221003T161231Z
CREATED:20220919T181613Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221003T161231Z
UID:38397-1665745200-1665752400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Modeling early phonetic learning from natural speech- Naomi Feldman\, University of Maryland
DESCRIPTION:Theories of language acquisition have typically been developed using an idealization of the phonetic learning problem.  For example\, phonetic category learning models have used input that is much less variable than the speech children hear and have assumed that learners already know which dimensions of the speech signal to pay attention to.  In this talk\, I use a series of modeling studies to argue that taking seriously the complexity of children’s speech input has major implications for theories of phonetic learning. \nWe have worked to create models that work on naturalistic speech after finding that phonetic learning models that were developed on simplified data fail when trained on more realistic data.  Our first strategy has been to question theories of what is being learned: perhaps infants are acquiring a language-specific perceptual space during their first year of life\, rather than a set of phonetic categories.  Our second strategy has been to question theories of the learning mechanism: perhaps rather than looking for distinct acoustic clusters of sounds corresponding to phones\, learners can use statistical information that is more reliable in naturalistic speech.  In each case\, we have found that the models that succeed in phonetic learning on naturalistic speech differ in important ways from previous theories.  This work raises new questions about what young infants know about the sounds of their language and underscores the need to take into account the complexity of the data that children hear when building theories of language acquisition. \nThis is joint work with Kasia Hitczenko\, Thomas Schatz\, Stephanie Antetomaso\, Xuan-Nga Cao\, Yevgen Matusevych\, Kouki Miyazawa\, Emmanuel Dupoux\, Micha Elsner\, Sharon Goldwater\, and Reiko Mazuka.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/naomi-feldman/
LOCATION:Haines Hall A25
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220930T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220930T130000
DTSTAMP:20220930T005947Z
CREATED:20220912T180152Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220930T005947Z
UID:38306-1664535600-1664542800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Some Half-Truths and Interim Conclusions about Liaison- Anne-Michelle Tessier\, UBC
DESCRIPTION: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? \nThis 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 main goal is to assess the predictions that different analyses make about (i) how exceptional nouns resist liaison\, and (ii) how productive liaison should be with novel nouns. I report the results of an adult production + acceptability study\, primarily with L1 speakers of Laurentian French in Quebec\, which find liaison to be somewhat intermediate in its application as compared with regular vs. exceptional nouns. I also discuss computational simulations and child corpus studies that try to understand how learners eventually reach the knowledge state of our adult participants.  The overall picture is one in which learners and speakers are making really interesting generalizations about their lexicons and their grammars\, including some more abstract than almost any model might predict?… but which also require substantial individual variation.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/anne-michelle-tessier/
LOCATION:Haines A25
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220603T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220603T150000
DTSTAMP:20220602T220028Z
CREATED:20220404T170337Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220602T220028Z
UID:35793-1654261200-1654268400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Canaan Breiss's student colloquium talk
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/canaan-breisss-student-colloquium-talk/
LOCATION:Public Affairs 1222
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220520T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220520T140000
DTSTAMP:20220519T213031Z
CREATED:20220219T160109Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220519T213031Z
UID:35170-1653044400-1653055200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Athulya Aravind (MIT) - semantics\, acquisition
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/athulya-aravind-mit-semantics-acquisition-2/
LOCATION:Haines 118
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220429T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220429T130000
DTSTAMP:20220428T210112Z
CREATED:20220404T170337Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220428T210112Z
UID:35792-1651230000-1651237200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Maura O'Leary's student colloquium talk- It's About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tense
DESCRIPTION:It’s About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tenseMaura O’Leary (UCLA) \nIt 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 distribution; it seems that they need not overlap the tense’s reference time\, nor even the utterance time – leading some to conclude that nouns\, unlike all other predicates\, are altogether unaffected by tense (e.g.\, Enç 1981\, 1986; Musan 1995\, 1999; Tonhauser 2002\, 2006\, 2020). In this talk\, I show that the property times of nouns actually are defined relative to the time argument introduced by the nearest scoping lambda abstractor\, arguing that this fact has been obscured over the years by the existence of two nominal lexical aspectual classes\, which each derive their property time from their time argument in a unique way. With this confound accounted for\, I propose a single locality constraint which accounts for the binding of the time arguments of all predicate types. (This content\, which is only meant to account for predicates introducing novel referents\, comprises 2/3 of my dissertation – the remaining 1/3 accounts for the property times of nouns used in longer discourses to refer to familiar referents.)
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/maura-olearys-student-colloquium-talk/
LOCATION:Haines 118
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220422T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220422T140000
DTSTAMP:20220422T175408Z
CREATED:20220122T141559Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220422T175408Z
UID:34831-1650625200-1650636000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Lisa Davidson (NYU) - phonetics
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/lisa-davidson-nyu-phonetics-2/
LOCATION:Haines 118
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220408T121500
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220408T130000
DTSTAMP:20220408T171641Z
CREATED:20220404T151830Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220408T171641Z
UID:35779-1649420100-1649422800@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Nominee's Minority Status
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-nominees-minority-status/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220401T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220401T130000
DTSTAMP:20220331T213105Z
CREATED:20220328T212535Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220331T213105Z
UID:35663-1648810800-1648818000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium Speaker-Bob Frank (Yale)
DESCRIPTION:computational\, syntax
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-speaker-bob-frank-yale/
LOCATION:Haines 118
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220401T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20220401T130000
DTSTAMP:20220328T213936Z
CREATED:20210818T174443Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220328T213936Z
UID:31694-1648810800-1648818000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Bob Frank (Yale) - computational\, syntax
DESCRIPTION: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 remarkable success raises the question of whether these models do in fact exhibit productivity of the sort human speakers are capable of\, even in the absence of abstract grammar. In this talk\, I will explore this question from two perspectives. First\, I will discuss a line of work that investigates this question in the context of large pre-trained language models that have been at the forefront of contemporary NLP.  We ask whether these models show evidence of productive knowledge of selectional restrictions that cut across variation in syntactic context (deriving from argument structure alternations like dative shift or syntactic “transformations” like passivization). For the second part of the talk\, I will drill down to the properties of the neural network models themselves\, and consider what kinds of biases they exhibit when they learn: how do they perform in the face of ambiguous data\, and how do their biases differ from human generalization? To conclude\, I will consider the viability of different approaches to fostering linguistic abstraction in these models\,  by modifying the structure of model itself or the way in which training takes place.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/bob-frank-yale-computational-syntax/
LOCATION:Haines 118
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211112T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20211112T140000
DTSTAMP:20211112T101656Z
CREATED:20210818T173539Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211112T101656Z
UID:31687-1636714800-1636725600@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Jess Law (UC Santa Cruz) - semantics
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/jess-law-uc-santa-cruz-semantics/
LOCATION:TBA\, 395 Wythe Avenue\, NY\, 11249\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR