Research Groups: Friday, September 18

Note that all groups are meeting online until otherwise indicated; see the emails from group administrators for links and for further details. Also note that subsequent meetings of the Fieldwork Group this semester will be in the afternoon time-slot instead (1 PM - 2:30 PM).

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Jeremy Needle (postdoc): "Two computational studies of lexical knowledge in te reo Māori in NZ."

The two studies presented in this talk demonstrate our efforts with computational and experimental approaches to replicate and extend traditional formal descriptions of te reo Māori. In the first study, we compare wordlikeness ratings for words and non-words to gradient phonotactic scores based on subsets of the lexicon derived from spoken and written corpora. In additional to deriving a gradient probabilistic description of Māori phonotactics which extends prior phonological work, we find that non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders demonstrate wordlikeness knowledge of Māori which suggests form-only familiarity with about 2000 morphemes. The importance of morphology in the lexical model for this study spurred us toward the second study: a quantitative survey of morphological patterns in Māori which combines knowledge from expert informants with machine-learning morphological parsing models. Among our findings, we particularly note that our native-speaker informants do not appear sensitive to the same taxonomy of reduplication patterns that appear in traditional grammars.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Fieldwork Group
Introductions and group discussion of developing elicitation materials.

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Semantics Research Group
1. Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.): "Question tags projecting sourcehood in Italian."

Question tags like isn't it or right? in English can serve the purpose of eliciting confirmation or acknowledgment from the addressee. In Italian, no?, o sbaglio? and vero? have such a function, but there is another tag in its inventory, eh?, which is subject to further restrictions. In addition to elicit the addressee's acknowledgment/confirmation, eh? also conveys evidential meaning. When a tag question hosts eh?, the speaker conveys i) that the addressee is independently committed to the proposition conveyed by the anchor (p), and presupposes ii) that the speaker knows i) from a direct source. That is, a question like Buono, eh? 'It's tasty, EH?', is pronounced felicitously in a context where the speaker directly perceives an event where the addressee has direct evidence for the truth of p (i.e., that whatever the addressee is eating, the addressee finds it tasty). Acknowledging a tag question like Buono, eh? results in registering p as a projected independent commitment of the addressee on the scoreboard of Farkas and Roelofsen (2012).

2. Michela Ippolito (faculty): "Gestures and the semantics of non-canonical questions."

I argue that both the co-speech and pro-speech symbolic gesture MAT (mano a tulipano) used by native speakers of Italian characterizes non-canonical wh-questions. MAT can be executed with either a fast tempo contour or a slow tempo contour. Tempo is semantically significant: descriptively, a fast tempo characterizes a biased but information-seeking non-canonical question; a slow tempo characterizes a rhetorical non-canonical question. I argue that the fast contour is the default tempo of MAT and that it brings about a biased interpretation. Slowing down the movement occurs when the feature [slow] is added: the semantic contribution of this feature is to add the presupposition that the question is resolved in the conversational context. This results in generalizing the speaker's bias to all discourse participants. More generally, I aim to show that both modalities (speech and gesture) can be analyzed and modelled using the same linguistic tools and principles.