a CAS graduate workshop @ the University of Chicago
| Day | Time | Speaker | Title | Room |
| 27 Apr | 3pm | Alan Nussbaum, Cornell University | Syntactically Aided Semantic Development: *“painstaking pants” etc. and the etymology of Greek ἀκρῑβής ‘accurate’ | Rosenwald11 |
| 4 May | 3pm | Brady Clark, Northwestern University | Rosenwald11 | |
| 18 May | 3pm | Petia Alexieva, University of Chicago | Rosenwald11 | |
| 1 Jun | 3pm | Carissa Abrego-Collier,University of Chicago
|
Rosenwald11 |
Posted in schedules.
– 6 October 2011
Friday, June 03 @12:30 p.m., Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research
Language contact in the Polish-American community in Chicago
Abstract:
Heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in a home where a language other than the dominant language of a given society was spoken. Heritage speakers are to some extent bilingual in both the language of their home and the dominant language. Only recently have linguists started examining heritage languages, languages that have not been completely acquired (Polinsky 2007). In this talk, I focus on features of heritage Polish spoken by “fluent” bilinguals from the Chicago area. A special focus is put on lexical and structural features that differ from standard Polish as described by grammars of Polish. I demonstrate that the Polish language undergoes reduction in nominal morphology and displays different patterns of verbal morphology. Structural innovations are modeled on English structure; however, new independent phenomena are also observed. Additionally, I address the problem of baseline language and heritage speakers’ non-standard features of Polish which some Poles in Poland associate with being uneducated.
Posted in language contact, student talks.
– 3 June 2011
Friday, May 27 @ 3pm, Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research
“Modeling variation and change in radoppiamento sintattico“
Abstract:
The external sandhi phenomenon of raddoppiamento sintattico (RS) in Italian has been a prominent topic in phonology for decades. While the existing theoretical literature treats RS as a regular phonological process, recent research has found that there is considerable variation in the realization of RS in two different domains: across dialects, due to diachronic change (Loporcaro 1996, 1997, 2001), and within dialectics, due to phonetic conditioning factors (Campos-Astorkiza 2004; Hajek et al. 2007; Stevens et al. 2002; Stevens and Hajek 2004, 2005, 2006). This talk seeks to a) demonstrate that these two sources of variation are in fact interrelated, and that any analysis of one without the other is necessarily incomplete; and b) propose a new constraint-based analysis in which the phonology is crucially conditioned by phonetic factors. Specifically, I argue that a model of partially ordered constraints (Anttila 1997, Anttila and Cho 1998) successfully predicts variation in individual grammars while simultaneously capturing the attested path of diachronic sound change between grammars. To account for the facts concerning variation in the phonetic implementation of RS, I argue that the constraints themselves can be formulated as contextual markedness constraints based on the availability of perceptual cues, in the spirit of Licensing-by-Cue (Steriade 1997). Thus, without sacrificing theoretical simplicity, this model is able to capture the empirical facts about RS far more successfully than prior analyses.
Posted in computational, historical, sound change, student talks.
– 24 May 2011
Friday, May 13 @ 3pm, Karen Landahl Center for Linguistics Research
“Sociolinguistic variation and implicit associations”
Abstract:
Sociolinguistic cognition is a long-understudied domain that is currently undergoing a flurry of exciting research. Technological, methodological and theoretical developments in formal linguistics, sociolinguistic variation, linguistic anthropology and social cognition have combined to facilitate the exploration of a host of interesting questions regarding the cognitive processes underlying sociolinguistic language practices. One such question is how individuals mentally represent the indexical relationships between linguistic forms and social structures posited by the “third wave” approach to sociolinguistic variation (Eckert, 2005, 2008). A specific instance of indexing uses a linguistic form linked to social information and may be presuppositional, indicating shared or agreed-upon situational context, or creative, invoking and thereby introducing previously unrealized contextual features. In creatively updating the interactional context, speakers and listeners are able to pursue social goals, such as identity construction (Half Moon Bay Style Collective, 2006) or stancetaking (Johnstone and Kiesling, 2008) in complex ways.
While indexicality is well theorized from an interactional perspective (Ochs, 1992; Silverstein, 2003), the cognitive processes involved in learning and using indexical relationships are much less well understood, although evidence is mounting that social and linguistic representations do influence one another (e.g. Hay and Drager, 2010; Staum Casasanto, 2008). In particular, the social reasoning speakers can perform may seem too complex to occur in the course of real-time linguistic processing. Here we turn to social cognition research, particularly the recent advances in understanding a variety of implicit processes (e.g. Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 2005). In this talk, I present two adaptations of the Implicit Association Task (IAT) (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998) to address related questions regarding the mental representations of sociolinguistic variation and social meaning. In the first, the IAT measures the relationship between sociolinguistic variables (e.g. (ING)) and other socially meaningful categories (e.g. North/South), while in the second approach, the IAT serves as a metric for speaker implicit awareness of two regional variables (TRAP raising/diphthongization and LOT fronting) in central and northern Ohioans. The results suggest that the construct of implicit association, and the IAT itself, hold promise for developing models of sociolinguistic cognition.
Posted in invited talks, social variation.
– 8 May 2011
Friday, April 01 @ 3pm, Cobb 301
Origins of Metathesis in Batsbi
Abstract:
Blevins and Garrett (1998) investigate in detail the origins of CV/VC metathesis in a number of languages and identify two types of metathesis and a “pseudometathesis”. For them, “pseudometathesis” is a synchronic process that does not originate through the historical process of metathesis. They analyze languages in which “pseudometathesis” originates through epenthesis and deletion (1998) or through reinterpretation and generalization of other processes in the language (Garrett and Blevins 2009). I argue here that metathesis in Batsbi originates as a result of grammaticalization, together with regular phonological processes. When a function word, such as an auxiliary, grammaticalizes as an affix on a base, affixes trapped between the base and new affix are often lost (Harris and Faarlund 2006). However, in Batsbi some trapped affixes were not immediately lost, and I argue that this is the source of the variable position of the present tense marker, and that its variable position was reanalyzed as metathesis. I argue further that the reanalyzed process is true metathesis synchronically, inasmuch as it spreads beyond the environment in which it originally occurred.
Posted in historical, invited talks, sound change.
– 1 April 2011
Friday, March 04 @ 3 pm, Harper 148
Looking Beyond: What Indirect Evidence Can Tell Us About Universal Grammar
Abstract:
One of the most controversial claims in linguistics is that children learning their native language face an induction problem: the data in their input are insufficient to identify the correct language knowledge as rapidly as children do. If this is true, then children must bring some helpful learning biases to the language acquisition problem – and the nature of these biases is often debated. For example: Are they innate or derived? Are they domain-specific or domain-general? Are they about what to learn or how to learn? Induction problems are often used to motivate innate, domain-specific knowledge about language (sometimes called Universal Grammar), but there are clearly other kinds of learning biases that might be used. In this talk, I look at the case study of English anaphoric one, an induction problem that has received considerable recent attention, particularly in the computational modeling literature. I will consider whether indirect evidence leveraged by a probabilistic learner from a broader data set could be effective, and what this tells us about the nature of the necessary learning biases. By doing so, I will be able to offer a concrete proposal about the content of Universal Grammar (for this linguistic phenomenon) as well as shed light on the acquisition trajectory for anaphoric one.
Posted in computational, invited talks.
– 1 March 2011
