Summer 2018 our regular meeting time is Tuesday 10:30-12, and we will meet sometimes in room DS-3470at UQAM (Pavillon J.-A.-DeSève: 320, rue Sainte-Catherine Est) and sometimes in room 117 at McGill (1085 Dr Penfield). Check the schedule below. Please email Jurij Božič to be added to the email list, or if you wish to present some work.
All are welcome!
Please note, upcoming meetings below are subject to modification.
SUMMER |
2018 |
DS-3470 UQAM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Discussion leader | Topic | Readings |
| Tues, June 19 Rm 117 at McGill | Heather Newell and group | Discussion on modularity, bracketing paradoxes, infixation, and reduplication | rough draft |
| Tues, June 12 Rm 117 at McGill | Heather Newell |
There are no Bracketing Paradoxes, or How to be a Modular Grammarian |
rough draft |
| Tues, June 5 10:45 at Rm 117 at McGill | Heather Goad and Lisa Travis | A phonological solution to a morpho-syntactic problem in Athabaskan | |
| Tues, May 29 | Richard Compton | Inuit φ-markers as the exponence of agree: Evidence from granularity, default forms | |
| Tues, May 22 | No meeting | MfM Fringe in Manchester | |
| Tues, May 15, 1:30-3 | Ievgeniia Kybalchych | Japanese Particles | Vances, Timothy J. 1993. Are Japanese Particles Clitics? |
WINTER |
2018 |
DS-3470, UQAM | |
| Date | Discussion leader | Topic | Readings |
| Tues, April 17 | Mathieu Paillé | Algonquian agreement | Oxford, W. (2013) Multiple Instances of Agreement in the Clausal Spine: Evidence from Algonquian |
| Tues, April 10 | Nadia Ziani | Non-obligatory Agreement | Kayne and Pollock (2012) Locality and agreement in French hyper-complex inversion. |
| Tues, April 3 | Richard Compton | Non-obligatory Agreement, cont. | Preminger, O. (2014) Agreement and its features Ch. 4 |
| Tues, March 27 | Isabelle Marcoux | Non-obligatory Agreement | Preminger, O. (2014) Agreement and its features Ch. 1-3 |
| Tues, March 20 | Clint Parker | Agreement and clitics in Shugni | Kramer, R. (2014) Clitic doubling or object agreement: the view from Amharic |
| Tues, March 13 | Johnatan Nascimento | The syntax of clitics and agreement | Nevins (2011) Multiple agree with clitics: person complementarity vs. omnivorous number. |
| Tues, March 6 | Matthew Schuurman | Person Case Constraint and Agree | Bejar and Rezac (2009) Cyclic agree. . |
| Tues, Feb 20 | The Group | Person Case Constraint | Elena Anagnostopoulou (2005) Strong and Weak Person Restrictions. |
| Tues, Feb 13 | Heather Newell | For Clitic Groups | Vogel (2009) The status of the clitic group |
| Tues, Feb 6 | Heather Newell | Against Clitic Groups | Booij (1996) Cliticization as prosodic integration: the case of Dutch |
| Tues, Jan 30 | Heather Newell | Clitics in the Prosodic Hierarchy | Nespor & Vogel (1986) Prosodic phonology. chapter 5 |
| Tues, Jan 23 | Meeting cancelled (no metro) | ||
| Tues, Jan 16 | Tom Leu | Clitics vs. inflection | Zwicky and Pullum (1983) Cliticization vs. inflection: English n’t. |
| Tues, Jan 9 | Heather Newell | Term topic: Clitics vs. Agreement | Newell et al. (2017) The structure of words at the interfaces: Introduction |
FALL |
2017 |
||
| Date | Discussion leader | Topic | Readings |
| Friday, Dec 8, 1-2:30 | Tim O’Donnell |
Inducing phonological rules: Perspectives from Bayesian program learning,
Kevin Ellis & Tim O’Donnell
|
How do linguists come up with phonological rules, how do kids learn artificial grammars, and how does one acquire pig latin? The solutions to these problems share a common representation, which we show can be modeled as a program, and the corresponding learning problems modeled as program induction. This framing lets us apply ideas from Bayesian Program Learning to induce grammars, which combines program synthesis techniques with a compression-based inductive bias. This lets the models capture phonological phenomena like vowel harmony or stress patterns and learn synthetic grammars used in prior studies of artificial grammar learning. Going beyond individual grammar learning problems, we consider the problem of jointly inferring many related rule systems. By solving many textbook phonology problems, we can ask the model what kind of inductive bias best explains the attested phenomena. |
| Friday, Dec 1, 1-2:30 | Máire Noonan | The R in R-pronouns – a decompositional approach | |
| Friday, Nov 24, 1-2:30 | Nico Baier | Impoverishment and the internal organization of phi-features | |
| Friday, Nov 17, 1-2:30 | Tim O’Donnell | Productivity and Reuse in Language | A much-celebrated aspect of language is the way in which it allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This property is made possible because language consists of several combinatorial systems which can be used to productively build novel forms using a large inventory of stored, reusable parts: the lexicon.For any given language, however, there are many more potentially storable units of structure than are actually used in practice — each giving rise to many ways of forming novel expressions. For example, English contains suffixes which are highly productive and generalizable (e.g., -ness; Lady-Gagaesqueness, pine-scentedness) and suffixes which can only be reused in specific words, and cannot be generalized (e.g., -th; truth, width, warmth). How are such differences in generalizability and reusability represented? What are the basic, stored building blocks at each level of linguistic structure? When is productive computation licensed and when is it not? How can the child acquire these systems of knowledge?I will discuss a theoretical framework designed to address these questions. The approach is based on the idea that the problem of productivity and reuse can be solved by optimizing a tradeoff between a pressure to store fewer, more reusable lexical items and a pressure to account for each linguistic expression with as little computation as possible. I will show how this approach addresses a number of problems in English inflectional and derivational morphology, and briefly discuss its applications to other domains of linguistic structure. |
| Friday, Nov 3, 1-2:30 | Tom Leu | Debating morphemes and the lack thereof | Some morphemes are more prevalent than is traditionally assumed, while others are less so. In this talk I will suggest that the definite article belongs to the former, while 3SG inflection belongs to the latter, essentially replacing the latter by the former, at least in some cases. More concretely: English verbal inflection is strange in having a 3SG -s which contrasts with zero in all other persons and which is absent in the past. The German 3SG verbal inflection -t is also strangely absent in the past. In fact, 3SG is strange in and of itself, if it is correct that 3rd person is really absence of person, and singular is really absence of number, i.e. 3SG is simply not. But if there is no such thing as 3SG, English -s and German -t cannot be strange variants of 3SG morphemes. In fact, I will discuss the possibility that they are, instead, a sort of present tense morphemes, anchoring the clause in the utterance situation. I will further suggest that there is some plausibility to the idea that they are variants of the definite article. If correct, there are two variants of the definite article in the clausal spine, one affixed to the finite verb and one in the left periphery. […] |
| Friday, Oct 27, 1-2:30 | THE GROUP | Mini Workshop on Person | Bring some data on complex pronominal systems to discuss! |
| Friday, Oct 20, 1-2:30 | Gabe Daitzchman | Daniel Harbour | Harbour, Daniel. (2016). Impossible Persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. |
| Friday, Oct 13, 1-2:30 | Gabe Daitzchman | Ackema and Neeleman | Ackema, Peter, and Neeleman, Ad. (2013). Person features and syncretism. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 31(4). 901-950 |
| Friday, October 6, 1-2:30 | Lisa Travis | Malagasy augmented pronouns | Zribi-Hertz, Anne and Liliane Mbolatianavalona. 1999. Towards a modular theory of linguistic deficiency: Evidence from Malagasy personal pronouns. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17: 161–218. |
| Friday, September 29, 1-2:30 | Tom Leu | Déchaine and Wiltschko | ‘Decomposing Pronouns’ by R-M. Dechaine and M. Wiltschko (2002; Linguistic Inquiry 33(3), p.409-442) |
| Friday, Sept 22, 1-2:30 | No meeting | Manitoba Person Workshop | |
| Friday, Sept 15, 1-2:30 | All members | Organizational meeting | |
WINTER |
2017 |
Rm 117, McGill | |
| Date | Discussion leader | Topic | Readings |
| Friday, May 12, 8h30-17h | Colloque à l’Association francophone pour le savoir, ACFAS 85. Université McGill, Rutherford 114, 3600 rue University. | Le mot : syntaxe, morphologie et phonologie Programme ici | |
| Friday, April 28 | Heather Goad and Lisa Travis | The role of phonology in Mirror Principle violations: the case of Navajo & Chilcotin (continued) | |
| Friday, April 7 | Heather Goad and Lisa Travis DIFFERENT ROOM: DS-3459 | The role of phonology in the Navajo Mirror Principle problem | Harley, H. 2010. Affixation and the Mirror Principle. In R. Folli & C. Ullbricht (eds). Interfaces in Linguistics, Oxford:OUP, 166-186. |
| Friday, March 31 | Peter Guekguezian (University of Southern California) | Toward a Typology of Prosodic Word Structure Effects of Morphosyntactic Phases. | Templates as the Interaction of Recursive Word Structure and Prosodic Well-formedness.
|
| Friday, March 24 | No meeting (MOT is happening at UQAM) | ||
| Friday, March 17 | No meeting (Half of group at GLOW) | ||
| Friday, March 10 | Meeting cancelled | ||
| Friday, March 3 | No meeting (Study Break at UQAM and McGill) | ||
| Friday, Feb. 24 | Jurij Bozic and Lisa Travis |
|
|
| Friday, Feb. 17; 10:30-11:30 | All | Meeting with Boris Harizanov |
|
| Friday, Feb. 10 | Máire Noonan and Lisa Travis | Revisiting Long Head movement |
|
| Friday, Feb. 3 | All | Head movement in syntax and morphology? | Gribanova, V. & Harizanov, B. (2016): Whither Head Movement (the manuscript) |
| Friday, January 20 | All | Head movement in syntax and morphology? | Two handouts from the Workshop on the Status of Head Movement in Linguistic Theory (Stanford University, Sept. 16-17, 2016):
Gribanova, V. & Harizanov, B. (2016): Whither Head Movement Harley, H. (2016): What Hiaki stem forms are really telling us |
| Friday, January 13 | Organisational meeting | Discussion on the upcoming ACFAS workshop |
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