Guest speaker: Shota Momma (University of California, San Diego)

We are delighted to welcome Shota Momma, a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2016 and works on psycholinguistics, especially processing and planning. His talk, "Unifying parsing and generation," will be held at 3:00 PM on Friday, February 15, in SS 560A. A reception will follow in the department lounge.

We use our grammatical knowledge in at least two ways. On one hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to say what we want to convey to others. On the other hand, we use our grammatical knowledge to understand what others say. In either case, we need to assemble sentence structures in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of our language. In this talk, I will advance the view that the same syntactic structure building mechanism is shared between comprehension and production, specifically focusing on sentences involving long-distance dependencies. I will argue that both comprehenders and speakers anticipatorily build (i.e. predict and plan) the gap structure, soon after they represent the filler and before representing the words and structures that intervene between the filler and the gap. I will discuss the basic properties of the algorithm for establishing long-distance dependencies that I hypothesize to be shared between comprehension and production, and suggest that it resembles the derivational steps for establishing long-distance dependencies in an independently motivated grammatical formalism, known as Tree Adjoining Grammar.