September 24, 2019

Research Groups: Week of September 23-27

Wednesday, September 25, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM in SS2116: Morphology Reading Group
Paper discussion led by Ross Godfrey (Ph.D.): Roberts, Ian (2017). The Final-Over-Final Condition in morphology. In Michelle Sheehan, Theresa Biberauer, Ian Roberts, and Anders Holmberg (eds.), The Final-over-Final Condition: A syntactic universal, 323–345. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Friday, September 27, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM in SS560A: Psycholinguistics Group
Nayoun Kim (postdoc): "Hold, release, and retrieve: The study of Wh-Filler-Gap Dependencies and ellipsis."

This talk is concerned with how components in memory structures and online structure building processes interact by investigating the online processing of Wh-Filler-Gap Dependencies (WhFGD) and ellipsis constructions. Resolving long-distance dependencies involves linking the dependent element to the controlling element. In the case of Wh-gap dependency formation, the wh-element is linked to the gap. In the case of ellipsis resolution, the ellipsis site is linked to the antecedent. In the processing of long-distance dependency resolution, I point out that two component processes are involved: the storage/maintenance component and the retrieval component. A series of studies on WhFGD formation reveals that the sentence processing mechanism involves maintenance component on top of the retrieval component. Studies on ellipsis constructions further reveals that when the antecedent is retrieved, detailed grammatical structural information should be retrieved, thus grammatical and structural information must be encoded in memory. Based on the results of these studies, I specifically argue for the following points: (i) the filler is released from memory, depending on the grammatical requirement of the filler; (ii) given that information associated with the filler being retrieved reflects the extent to which the filler is maintained, the parser retrieves grammatical information associated with the wh-filler; and (iii) the parser is sensitive to grammatical distinctions at the ellipsis site in contrast to the processing of anaphoric one and pronoun it. These studies provide evidence that both the maintenance and retrieval process are heavily constrained by grammatical information associated with the elements that engage in dependency formation.

Friday, September 27, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM in SS560A: Syntax Group
Guest talk by Amy Rose Deal (University of California, Berkeley).

Friday, September 27, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM in SS560A: Fieldwork Group
Julianne Doner (Ph.D. 2019), reporting on her fieldwork in Guatemala this past summer.

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