March 26, 2019

Research Groups: March 25-29

Please note that this week's meetings of the Psycholinguistics Group and the Fieldwork Group are cancelled.

Tuesday, March 26, 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM in PT 266
Computational Linguistics Group, Department of Computer Science
Julia Watson (BA 2018): "Identifying the evolutionary progression of colour from cross-linguistic data."
We present a novel statistical analysis of the semantics of colour using a standard method from semantic typology. Our analysis suggests that the semantic space of colour categories has latent dimensions whose order of relative importance matches the evolutionary ordering of emergence of those distinctions. Moreover, we show that the importance ordering of these dimensions holds even when languages are at an evolutionary stage that further partitions the colour space beyond the given distinction. Additionally, we find that the extreme points of the latent colour dimensions correspond well to a small set of 'universal' focal colours shown to occur across languages. Thus our method derives both a consistent match to the evolutionary stages and to the universal focal areas.

Tuesday, March 26, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM in Innis College 313
Morphology Reading Group
Alec Kienzle (Ph.D.): "Agents, paths, and states in the Hebrew middle templates."

Friday, March 29, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Syntax Group
Dan Milway (Ph.D.): "Towards a novel theory of adjuncts."
I review the two competing minimalist theories of adjuncts – Late Adjunction and Pair Merge – and discuss their theoretical flaws. Based on this discussion and the respective strengths of the theories, I sketch a hypothesis which states that host-adjunct structures are, in fact, the result of two parallel derivations which are collapsed at the syntax-phonology interface. I close by discussing the prospects of such a theory.

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