How do Spanish-learning infants discover morphological suffixes? (UBC Talk) Suffixes like English -s, -ed and -ing, and Spanish -a and -o are the basic building blocks of syntax. In this talk, I will first identify the mechanism by which English-learning infants find suffixes. To do so, I will use modeling to evaluate various mechanisms for affix discovery against...

Syntactic variables and semantic minimality Ethan Poole (joint work with Zahra Mirrazi) We argue that when two syntactic variables are "related" and stand in a c-command relationship at LF, a ¾-pattern emerges: free/free, bound/bound, bound/free, and *free/bound. Several otherwise-disparate puzzles are shown to fall under this pattern: Dahl’s Puzzle, SCO effects, the Nested DP Constraint,...

Reimagining the Semantics of Narratives and Counterfactuals We propose a semantics for narratives and counterfactuals that explicitly connects them to cognitive models of temporal / causal inferences in narrative discourse...

“Cross-linguistic differences in coarticulation in two Australian languages”

Under standard Phase Theory, the locality constraint deriving successive cyclicity is the PIC (Chomsky 2001), which requires movement to proceed via the edge of phases. For example, a CP phase...

Structure building in language production Language production is one of the two primary ways in which we use our grammatical knowledge. However, compared to our understanding of how comprehenders parse...