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...

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...

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...

Sierra Miwwok Templates-, Practice Talk for Prosodic & Segmental Patterns in Morpholog

Internal determiners in Pular relative clauses This talk presents novel data from Pular, an Atlantic language spoken in Guinea. I show that in Pular, it is possible to express the determiner for a relative clause in a clause-internal position, directly after any verb. Based on this, I argue for the following claims. First, Pular provides...

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...

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...