Agree is considered one of the fundamental operations of Minimalist Syntax, responsible for establishing long-distance dependencies (e.g. agreement, wh-movement). Various models of Agree have been suggested over the last few...

Towards predicting phonetic drift in heritage speakers

From Points to Polygons: Modelling Spatial Correlation, Practice Talk for Evolang

The Factative Effect in Avatime The Factative Effect (Welmers 1973) is a phenomenon found in many African languages whereby a single aspectual category, often labeled the factative, seemingly has a past perfective usage with dynamic predicates and a present imperfective usage with stative predicates. Despite its prevalence, this pattern has received little theoretical attention. In...

Gradience, phonology and individual variation Research over the last few decades has consistently questioned the sufficiency of abstract/discrete phonological representations based on putative misalignments between predictions from such representations and observed experimental results. Here, I’ll first suggest that many of the arguments ride on misunderstandings of the original claims from generative phonology, and that the...

Pragmatic effects can be hard to pin down in reading time measures. I'll talk about a garden-path-like effect resulting from eager causal inferencing in English discourses, which has been found once in eye-tracking (Hoek et al. 2021), but which I've failed to find in self-paced reading or Maze latencies (Duff 2023). Drawing on Clifton (2013),...