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,...