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)...

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”*...

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,...

Location: Haines Hall 220

Location: Haines Hall 220

Location: Haines Hall 220 On the Symmetry Between Merge and Adjoin A 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...

Location: Haines Hall 220 When phonological learning is not statistical: how learning biases have reshaped Malagasy paradigms One 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...