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),...

Epistemic modality as disjunction in Cinyungwe Hannah Lippard I will present a portion of my ongoing dissertation research on polysemous disjunction in the Mozambican Bantu language Cinyungwe. In this talk, I will focus on the lexical items peno and pinango, which have both disjunctive and epistemic modal meanings. As coordinators and as modals, their syntactic...

New time for Phonetics Seminar this week!

The acoustic space of stop laryngeal contrasts

In languages with just first order quantifiers (e.g. English LF a la Heim & Kratzer 1998) whether a sentence is valid (logically true, true in all models) depends on the valence of the lexical predicates in L. If all are one place, P1s, then validity is algorithmic (decidable); this fails once a single lexical two...

Can children use tense and aspect morphology to learn novel verbs? How do children learn how their language marks tense and aspect? How do they disentangle what marks tense and what marks aspect? I consider these questions and present some preliminary results from a study investigating whether English-acquiring children can use tense and aspect morphology...

Two notions of strong equivalence In this talk, I propose two notions of equivalence between grammars and grammar formalisms that are useful for comparing not only which strings can be generated, but also how they are generated. If a sentence is ambiguous in a language, a suitable grammar should derive that sentence in multiple ways....