Seminar Series, March 11

A verb-raising analysis of concord on Blackfoot relative clauses.
Sara Johansson

In Blackfoot (Algonquian), relative clauses consist of an optional determiner, an optional head noun, and a verbal complex, all three of which are marked with nominal number and gender agreement morphology. In this paper, I demonstrate that the verbal complexes within relative clauses are in fact verbal in nature, rather than nominalizations. I propose that the verb raises to Rel to support a dependent morpheme, and that phi-feature marking arises due to concord on the Rel head. Preliminary work suggests that it is possible to extend this proposal to other Algonquian languages to capture cross-linguistic variation within the family.

March 11 at 4pm in SN 4073.
Reception to follow.
All are welcome.

Coming up in our Seminar Series

March 11th
Sara Johanson (MA student, Linguistics). Title: TBA.

March 25th
Degif Banksira (Linguistics). Title: Against Mobile Morphemes

April 1st
Vit Bubenik (Linguistics).
Title: On the Establishment of Ergative Alignment in Indo-Aryan Languages

Talks start at 4pm. Receptions to follow. All are welcome.

Reminder: "Pushing the Envelope: Are Analogy-Based Approaches to Phonological Acquisition Viable?"

The first talk in this semester`s seminar series, by Yvan Rose and Todd Wareham, will take place tomorrow at 4pm in SN 4073. A small reception follows in the seminar room.

BROWN BAGG-(ing) - TODAY!

Suzanne Power and Evan Hazenberg will be discussing variable (ing) in data collected in Placentia, NL, and Ottawa, ON.

Feel free to bring your lunch or a snack for the group. We are hungry grad students.

Date: Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: FM-2006 (Sociolinguistics lab)

Talk on the Making of the Dictionary of NFLD English

This talk is sponsored by the English Department. Dr. Jeff Webb (Department of History) will speak on the writing of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. A Distinguishing Feature of the English Department: The Writing of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English
	Time: 1 p.m.-2 p.m. Location: A-1049 All are welcome to attend.

Congratulations to Phil Branigan!

Dr. Branigan's new book, "Provocative Syntax" has been published as Linguistics Inquiry Monograph 61, by the MIT Press.

More information about Dr. Branigan's book can be found here.

What people are saying about Phil (and his book) (from the MIT Press page):

"Provocative Syntax is a desperately needed breath of fresh air for Minimalist syntax's model of movement. ‘Provocation’ is an exciting alternative to the EPP that is still well grounded in Chomskyan tradition. This book is a must-read for anyone dissatisfied with motivating movement via uninterpretable features."
—Daniel Siddiqi, School of Linguistics

"Provocative Syntax sparkles with originality and erudition. Branigan brilliantly connects seemingly unrelated theoretical strands to weave a tight and elegant model of syntactic movement and provides theoretically unified solutions to many outstanding problems in the syntax of Germanic and Romance. Among the numerous books and papers spawned by Chomsky’s Minimalist program, this book is one of the most profound I’ve read.”
—Ur Shlonsky, Professor of Linguistics, University of Geneva

Seminar Series starts up again

Yvan Rose (Department of Linguistics) and Todd Wareham (Department of Computer Science) will be speaking on the topic of phonological acquisition. Please see the abstract below. All are welcome to attend!

February 11, 2011
4-5pm
Location: TBA

Pushing the Envelope:
Are Analogy-Based Approaches to Phonological Acquisition Viable?

When learning a language, children must first learn the phonological categories (e.g. sound and syllable types) particular to that language. Even though such learning appears to exploit statistical regularities in language input (e.g. Kuhl 2004), this seems at odds with a growing body of evidence that the later stages of phonological acquisition are performed at a more symbolic level (e.g. Thiessen & Saffran 2003). One way of dealing with this problem is to assume that acquisition occurs by progressive and incremental generalizations over linguistic inputs. Such a model phrased within Dedre Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy-based generalization has been shown to be consistent with the later acquisition of individual words, syntax, and relational categories.

This suggests two important questions:

1) Can such a (possibly modified) model work for phonological acquisition?

2) How might such a model be tested?

In this talk, we will give some preliminary answers and further thoughts on these questions.