Research Groups: Week of March 11-15

Note the irregular meeting time of the Syntax Group this week.

Tuesday, March 12, 2:00 PM-4:00 PM, Innis College 313
Morphology Reading Group
Presentation by Ross Godfrey (Ph.D.): "Syntactic arrangements and phonological processes: A hybrid theory of morphological realization."
Hockett (1954) distinguished between two models of morphological description: the “item-and-arrangement” (IA) model, where complex forms are generated through the combination of morphemes, and the “item-and-process” (IP) model, where derived forms are generated through the application of processes to roots. Many current morphological theories can be considered to belong to the first type of model, particularly those theories which posit a close relation between syntax and morphology. If, as is often argued, sentences consist of “syntactic hierarchical structure all the way down” (SAWD; Halle and Marantz 1994), including within the word, and if complex syntactic structures are built by combination of smaller constituents, then the adoption of an IA model of morphology seems unavoidable. However, simultaneous adoption of a “realizational” approach to morphology, in which a morpheme’s morphosyntactic feature content is separated from its phonological exponent, makes available certain additional options. I review current attempts to handle the existence of apparently “nonconcatenative” morphology within a purely IA approach, and show that they generate undesirable patterns. I then sketch an alternative way of treating nonconcatenative morphology under the SAWD assumption, capitalizing on the opportunities afforded by realizational morphology: morphemes do not spell out as morphs, but instead trigger the application of processes. The proposal differs from previous IP approaches (e.g., Anderson 1992) in recognizing the existence of abstract morphological constituent structure. In this sense, the proposal belongs both to the IA and IP traditions. Using the terminology of Distributed Morphology, one can say that the proposal recognizes readjustment rules while eschewing Vocabulary Insertion (VI). Many objections to readjustment rules lose their force once VI is eliminated; some objections that remain can be handled by reconsidering the relationship between morphology and phonology; and the residual objections hold even of theories that avoid readjustment rules altogether. These matters will be discussed in greater detail in the talk.

Friday, March 15, 10:00 AM-11:30 AM, SS 4043
Psycholinguistics Research Group
Special guest speaker: Ev Fedorenko, a faculty member cross-appointed to the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a neurolinguist interested in linking precise neurological regions to specific language-related processes, mapping the neurological interactions of language and other cognitive functions, and gaining greater awareness of the extent of interspeaker differences in the neurology of language.
Human language surpasses all other animal communication systems in its complexity and generative power. I use a combination of behavioral, brain imaging, and computational approaches to illuminate the functional architecture of language, with the ultimate goal of deciphering the representations and computations that enable us to understand and produce language. I will discuss three discoveries I have made over the last decade. First, I will show that the language network is selected for language processing over a wide range of non-linguistic processes that have been argued to share computational demands with language, including arithmetic, executive functions, music, and action/gesture observation. Next, I will consider the distinction between the lexicon (word meanings) and syntax (the rules for how individual words can combine to create phrases and sentences). Much prior theorizing and empirical work has focused on syntax, and most current proposals of the neural architecture of language argues that syntax is cognitively and neurally dissociable from meaning. I will challenge this view. In particular, I will how that syntactic processing is not localized to a particular region within the language network, and that every brain region that responds to syntactic processing is at least as sensitive to word meanings, including when probed with a high-spatial/high-temporal-resolution method (ECoG). Further, many brain regions show stronger responses to word meanings than to syntactic manipulations, with no regions showing the opposite preference. Finally, I will provide evidence that stimuli that are not syntactically well-formed but allow for meaning composition (operationalized within an information-theoretic framework) elicit as strong as response as intact sentences, suggesting that semantic composition may be the core driver of the response in the language-selective brain regions. Taken together, these results argue against an abstract and domain-general syntactic processing mechnanism, and support strong integration between the lexicon and syntax. They further suggest that the language network is more concerns with meaning than structure, in line with the primary function of language – to share meanings across minds.

Friday, March 15, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM, SS 560A
Syntax Group
TBA

Friday, March 15, 1:00 PM-2:30 PM, SS 560A
Fieldwork Group
Alessandro Jaker (postdoc): "The full ~ reduced vowel contrast in Tetsǫ́t’ıné: Evidence for an 8-vowel system."
Many Dene (Athapaskan) languages, including the reconstructed Proto-Dene language (Krauss 1964), are known to exhibit a contrast between a set of full vowels, which are long, tense, and peripheral, and a set of reduced vowels, which are short, lax, and centralized. In this presentation, I will present evidence that a contrast between full and reduced vowels also exists in Tetsǫ́t’ıné Yatıé, a dialect of Dëne Sųłıné spoken in the Northwest Territories, Canada. In this presentation, I will report the results of a pilot experiment, which show that this dialect has a total of 8 vowels in morphologically non-derived stems: five full vowels a [ɑː], e [ɛː], ı [iː], o [oː], u [ʉː], and three reduced vowels ä [ɐ], ë, [ɘ], and ü [ɵ]. Reduced vowels are both shorter in duration and more centralized than their full counterparts. I will then discuss some of the difficulties that have resulted from trying to write the Tetsǫ́t’ıné dialect using an orthography which is based on a different dialect, which has only 6 vowels, and how much of this confusion can be cleared up by adopting an orthography which is more appropriate to Tetsǫ́t’ıné, and which recognizes 8 vowels.