Linguistics Anonymous

It's a two-headed monster!

2008-03-11T22:56:00.002-04:00

While working on my thesis, I came across the following interesting sentence today:

Taro-wa [[[dare-ga neko-o turete kita] -no] -ga nigedasita ka] sitte iru.
Taro-TOP who-NOM cat-ACC brought along NM NOM ran away Q know.
Lit. "Taro knows who(x) brought along a cat and that the cat that x brought along ran away."

Of particular interest to me is the nesting of relative clauses here. We have our most embedded clause, "dare-ga neko-o turete kita." This clause then merges with a matrix clause, "... -ga nigedasita ka." In this matrix verb, neko is interpreted as the subject of "nigedasita." However, this is further embedded in another matrix clause, "Taro wa ... sitte iru." Oddly enough in this one, dare "who" is interpreted as the object of "sitte iru!" The innermost embedded clause provides two separate heads for two successive matrix clauses!

Has anyone ever seen data like this from any other language? This is particularly complicated by the fact that the above example is a head-internal relative, and not an English-style external relative (I can't even think of an equivalent English example). I'm quite curious as to what is going on here.

Thanks everyone!

2008-03-11T16:22:00.003-04:00

As one might guess from Oliver's last post, the 2nd Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium has come and gone. Thank you to all of our participants for braving the Ithaca weather to come and make it a wonderful weekend!

We are hoping to put out a conference proceedings by the end of May - most likely in a widely accessible online format. It will contain both the abstracts and papers that were presented at the conference.

Colloquium, this weekend

2008-03-05T03:45:00.005-05:00

At long last, the 2nd Annual Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium is almost here. Please feel free to join us in Morrill 106A. You can find the nearly final schedule here.

Back in business

2008-01-31T21:34:00.001-05:00

At today's UnderLings meeting, we decided to revive the undergraduate blog without renewing the domain, which means we're back to good old Blogger. As the current Events Coordinator and Field Marshal of Keepin' It Real, I think this is a good idea; the current seniors in particular have got some really interesting research going on, and we ought to be sharing it. Also, an informal blog like this will be a great way to get new people interested in Cornell UnderLings.

I believe I'll start keepin' it real by calling on my fellow UnderLings to start posting again. Let's hear about some of these upcoming honors theses. If you're not doing a thesis, don't let that stop you–post about what you're learning in your ling classes, or about something you heard on the street that got you thinking. I wouldn't mind getting some responses to the article in the Sun about Cornellian slang– any takers?

And as long as I'm giving out ideas, how about a shameless plug for the 2008 Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium? Abstracts are due in a week (Feb. 8th), so it's not too late, but it will be soon. Mark your calendars for March 8-9th if you're on campus, and be sure to show up even if you aren't presenting, because it's sure to be a great event. Here's the call for papers.

Stay tuned for some tidbits about what I'm up to with the semantics of Japanese honorifics. To any visitors, welcome, and to the contributors, welcome back.

New Blog!

2006-06-01T19:01:00.000-04:00

Fortunately (or unfortunately) LA is moving off blogger!

We've harnessed the power of Ruby On Rails via Typo to move to our new address:

http://www.linguisticsanonymous.org

So I'll leave this blog up for a bit, but I''ll come down eventually. If you're a contributor and didn't get an email from me, let me know.

Thoughts on (Structural) Case

2006-05-24T12:41:00.000-04:00

So I meant to get this up while I was writing the paper, but I'm sure we're all aware how much extra time one has during finals. Anyway, this post is an attempted answer to the pretheoretical problem I discussed last time.

The main issue with the standard agreement/case theory is that it can't necessarily make any claims about the uniqueness of the Spec-Head relationship. However, this is exactly the relationship that seems to be needed to explain stronger agreement patterns in asymmetrically agreeing languages. More specifically, we have the following generalization to account for:

Let H be a head and K be a DP with phi-features which agrees with H. If H manifests a feature F morphologically when H c-commands K, then H will manifest that feature when K is in [Spec, H].

Obviously this generalization says nothing about the converse, and it is meant to capture increased agreement in the Spec-Head configuration.

This kind of agreement pattern is evidenced in Arabic, as we have already seen. However, there is an analogous asymmetry in Berber involving case. The standard word order in Berber is VSO, with SVO as a free alternate. In the VSO configuration, the subject DP is not in the nominative case, but instead in a form known as the Construct State (CS - not to be too closely confused Semitic construct state genitives). In the SVO configuration, however, the nominal appears in the nominative. Typically, these two phenomena are treated separately - but what generalizations can be drawn from viewing them as two sides of the same coin?

A very important one - that structural case features may not be necessary in the narrow syntax, and indeed may even be problematic.

Recall from the previous post that a phi-defective head cannot assign case to a DP. If we assume that, in languages like Berber and Arabic, the phi-defective head T can exist in matrix clauses, we come much closer to explaining this asymmetry. Specifically, it can explain why there is weak phi-feature agreement in VSO configurations in Arabic, and the appearance of a (presumably) inherent or oblique case on Berber VSO subjects. We could then say that the phi-complete T is responsible for agreeing with the subject DP, valuing its case nominative, and raising the subject to [Spec, T] and producing an SVO configuration. In these cases, we would expect full agreement and nominative case because of the feature-completeness of T.

However, this does not get us all the way. My next post will explore the need to revise the notions of EPP and the definition of nominative case, as well as discuss why case features such as [NOM], [ACC], and [uCase] may not be necessary.

distance learning phonetics anyone?

2006-05-23T12:10:00.001-04:00

A heads up to anyone interested in learning (or refreshing their) phonetics: University College London is running a pilot distance-learning course this summer from 12 June to 04 August. Since it is a pilot version, the course is completely free-of-charge. The course focuses on English phonetics, and they estimate 2-3 hours/wk of online material. The profs running it will be looking for feedback during the whole process too, so if you want to be part of the pilot you can get more info and apply at: www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/phonline/

Finals, and a Theoretical Problem

2006-05-07T13:56:00.000-04:00

Okay, so it's finals time here, which means, at least for me, copious amounts of paper writing. In an effort to organize my thoughts, I'll be posting probably the better part of all the major arguments from my papers over the next few days. At the end I'll put up references and organize the posts, much the way Jedediah did. The first of these is the pretheoretical problem for my syntax paper, which is on the theoretical status of structural case.

Chomsky (2000) notes that "...[W]e assume that only a probe with a full complement of phi-features is capable of deleting the feature that activates the matched goal." This is used to keep participles from deleting structural case and freezing their subjects in embedded clauses. Continuing, Chomsky goes on to say that the Spec-Head relationship is obtained by EPP (Extended Projection Principle), which in recent works (Chomsky 2000, 2001) is assumed to be a reflex of phi-feature checking. This means that the Spec-Head relationship should, presumably, have no special theoretical significance than relationships established under c-command specifically, or more generally, than relationships established by Agree(H, K) where H is a head/probe and K the matching DP/goal. Since Move and Agree are separate operations, Agree(H, K) does not imply Move(K, Spec-H).

This is an interesting conclusion in and of itself, that the Spec-Head relationship should not, in some way, be "special" as was assumed under Government and Binding. However, when we begin to consider structural case. Case is presumed to be assigned under an Agree relation between a case assigning head H and a goal K which agrees with H. So regardless of whether or not there are such abstract features as [NOM] and [ACC], they can be checked on a head H iff Agree(H, K). Therefore we are back to the first point from this post: a head H with incomplete phi-features cannot assign (structural) case.

This is an issue, however, as it appears to be patently false in Arabic and possibly Kabyle Berber. More specifically, in Arabic Spec-Head subjects appear to be special since they can license full agreement whereas c-commanded subjects cannot. Moreover, Berber postverbal subjects appear in a different case known in the Berber literature as the Construct State of the nominal. Inter alia, Ouhalla (1995) has analyzed this as genitive case, whereas preverbal subjects are nominative.

But how can this be? The Spec-Head relationship is not supposed to be "special"...

More on this later.

Undergraduate Honors!

2006-05-04T01:29:00.000-04:00

The Cornell University Linguistics Department is hosting a forum showcasing the work of its undergraduate Honors Students, ALL of whom have worked with LA in one way or another. Please go support them!

Tuesday, May 9, 2:00-4:00pm
Morrill Hall 106A

Presenting their work will be:

Byron Ahn
"Nominative-Genitive Conversion in Japanese: The Structure and Its Implications"

Michelle Dixon
"Child Interpretation of the Quantifier 'some': the Influence of the Partitive Construction"

Annie Gagliardi
“Just Try and Cliticize This!”

Allegra Giovine
“Language Localization and the Digital Divide"

Aaron Sommers
“Measuring the Effect of Writing on the Rate of Vocabulary Change”

A reception will follow the talks

ideas needed

2006-04-27T22:18:00.000-04:00

Hello,

Someday I may post something more substantial than this, but today I am trying to finish up a little honors thesis and I really need a title. Since I don't have time to put anything more substantial on here right now, it is basically a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the construction try and +verb, and an analysis of a new pattern which inflects try, producing sentences like "I am trying and write this paper" or "I tried and think up a title myself but had to resort to asking blog-people." Any and all ideas are welcome. If I use yours I will give you a signed copy, bound to be worth thousands of dollars someday. Please help!

Annie

Learning LaTeX?

2006-04-27T21:11:00.000-04:00

Byron gave me an idea for something to put up here.

I have been meaning to do this for awhile, but now thanks to Justin from Reed College (whom we met at the Harvard LinG Colloquium), I have finally begun to learn LaTeX, a very flexible and powerful markup language for formatting documents and papers. It's widely used in academic circles, as well as being the reason that nearly every paper you ever see at a conference from someone at MIT looks the same.

So here are a few of the resources I used to get myself up and running on LaTeX. One should keep in mind that "up and running" is a gross overstatement: I can still barely do anything. I will, however, update this as I learn more. Also, I own a Mac, so if you don't use a UNIX based system, I'm sorry - you'll have to tailor this to your own machine.

For getting started:
LaTex For Linguists (Just bookmark this - you'll need it)
Beginner's Guide to LaTeX (the best beginner's reference I've found)
Another Beginner's Guide (also very good)

Software for Editing (Mac OSX Only)
TeXShop (easy to use)
TeXMaker (incredibly versatile)
BibDesk (for bibliographic databases)

This should be enough to get folks started. I can't stress how helpful the "LaTeX for Linguists" website was - good stuff on trees, OT Tableaux, IPA Fonts, Semantics notation, etc. Check it out.

Trees in Powerpoint

2006-04-27T16:28:00.000-04:00

So, until now, I have had yet to post here. Mostly a product of me being lazy, thesising, visiting grad schools and trying to maintain a semblence of a non-academic life. Anyway, this post isn't much either, but it's something. When I was working on my honors thesis defense powerpoint presentation (that's a really long compound) I decided that I needed to have movement actually taking place on the screen since I have a lot of it and a static picture doesn't necessarily cut it (read: it's too complicated for its own good).

After a little bit of toying with powerpoint, I discovered it's actually fairly simple once you get the hang of it. The biggest piece of advice I can give on the subject is to build your whole tree first on the slide and then and only then start doing the animation process. To give a basic idea of how to do one yourself, I've posted a sample powerpoint on the interweb for your use. Download it here.

Conference Report

2006-04-26T22:15:00.000-04:00

So as Matt mentioned a while ago, he and I presented at the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium this past weekend, along with our colleague Annie. Our presentations all went very well, and we had a fantastic time. The quality of the presentations overall was remarkable, and we met a lot of very cool people.

Both Matt and I promoted this blog in our talks, so it's possible that we have some new readers--I see that Bridget Samuels has already commented on the post I linked above. If anyone else out there found out about us from the conference, please go ahead and leave us some comments; there are quite a few posts now, and many of them (especially Matt's) contain very sharp insights and summaries of important papers. We would definitely appreciate any responses you have to our ideas.

The Arabic Pronoun Asymmetry: Solved

2006-04-24T21:57:00.000-04:00

For reference, see my post: Partial Agreement in Arabic Clauses

In the above post I noted that there was a particular problem with the analysis that I had developed of the Arabic asymmetry given by feature strength in that pronouns seemed to be a marked exception. Concretely, pronouns do NOT raise to a pre-verbal position despite a verbal element which inflects fully for number, unlike other VSO clauses in spoken Arabic.

The major insight is this: a hidden thrust of the previous post was that syntactic movement and agreement of the kind seen in Arabic might be analyzed wholly in terms of feature checking and the mechanism of AGREE, in line with Checking Theory (Chomsky 1995). So in furthering this analysis, it makes sense to ask a rather bold question: to what extent could we forgo major category features and concentrate solely on agreement relations between syntactic constituents?

Luckily enough, this is precisely what Ouhalla (2005) seeks to do. In his analysis, specialized category features have no theoretical motivation (or status). Instead, categorization is driven by context: [PERSON] (on the head Pred) values a syntactic element verbal and [CLASS] (on a head of the same name) values a syntactic element nominal, once an agreement relation is established between the two.

This is a fairly hefty proposal, and I cannot do it justice here. However, there is one thing that can be of use to us: Ouhalla points out that it is not a good idea to associate the [PERSON] feature with EPP in his analysis (which one might be tempted to do upon reading his work), since it conflicts with the modern notion of EPP. However, it is still necessary for pronominal elements to check and delete their [PERSON] feature against the Pred head to avoid conflicting feature sets with Pro[PERSON, CLASS]. Regular nominals, on the other hand, do not have a [PERSON] feature, since unless they are a pronoun, they carry default 3rd person (obviously I am skimming over a lot here in the interests of brevity - I direct the reader to Ouhalla's article for a proper treatment of his analysis).

Since we do not want to associate EPP (in other words, the feature associated with raising to [Spec, T]) with [PERSON], but pronominals must check and delete it, we can see that pronominals must enter into an Agree relation with the verbal element (thereby valuing it for number, unlike regular nominals, which do not do so for phi-features) in order to check off [PERSON]. But since [PERSON] does not trigger raising, the pronominal must stay in-situ.

This leaves one open question: how do regular nominals raise, then, if they are not agreeing with the verbal element for [NUMBER] (as was claimed in the initial post). The exact mechanisms of this are still to be worked out, but one might gain insight from Ouhalla:

"...while nouns have [CASE], pronouns have [PERSON], or, to put it differently, [CASE] is to nouns what [PERSON] is to pronouns" (pp. 682).

Thus the conditioning factor on number agreement is the presence of a [PERSON] feature on the nominal that must be checked, and raising is obligatory in the presence of a [CASE] feature on a nominal.

---------
References

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ouhalla, Jamal. 2005. "Agreement Features, Agreement and Antiagreement." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23: 655-686.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 8

2006-04-21T00:05:00.000-04:00

I'm done with the substantive posts on this subject, but I thought I should collect them all in order so that new readers (if we ever get any) can read them in order and better understand the sequence. I've also put up a list of references I've used in the course of this project, not all of which are mentioned in these posts. Feel free to use the comments to this post for any questions or complaints.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

References:

Aro, J. (1955). Studien zur Mittelbabylonischen Grammatik (Studia Orientalia, 20). Helsinki: Societas orientalis Fennica.

Böhl, F. (1909). Die Sprache der Amarnabriefe mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kanaanismen (Leipziger Semitische Studien, 5/2). Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich.

Faber, A. (1989). On the nature of Proto-Semitic *l. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 109, 33-36.

Gordon, M., Potter, B., Dawson, J., de Reuse, W., & Ladefoged, P. (2001). Phonetic structures of Western Apache. International Journal of American Linguistics, 67, 415-448.

Henderson, E. J. A. (1970). Acoustic features of certain consonants and consonant clusters in Kabardian. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 33, 92-106.

Jucquois, G. (1966). Phonétique comparée des dialects moyen-babyloniens du nord et de l’ouest (Bibliothèque du Muséon, 53). Louvain: Université de Louvain, Institut Orientaliste.

Ohala, J. J. (1993). Sound change as nature’s speech perception experiment. Speech Communication, 13, 155-161.

Steiner, R. C. (1977). The case for fricative-laterals in Proto-Semitic. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 7

2006-04-20T23:23:00.000-04:00

I promised more data, so here it is. The figure to the left shows FFT spectra for the fricatives of Western Apache, a language that has both of the sounds involved in the Akkadian sound change I've been discussing (from Gordon et al., "Phonetic Structures of Western Apache," International Journal of American Linguistics, 2001). As you can see from the labels, the fricatives were pronounced by male speakers before [a], so these examples, like those from Kabardian, are not perfect matches for the environment of the Akkadian change (in medial clusters before coronal obstruents). However, it is well known that consonants tend to be reduced in various ways in clusters, so demonstrating similarities between consonants in highly salient contexts such as syllable-initially should be sufficient to suggest that they could be confused when reduced in clusters.

Note that the two segments (the top two squares in the diagram) are very similar. They both have spectral peaks around 3000 Hz, although the peak for [š] is slightly higher in both frequency and amplitude. The main difference is that [š] has lower intensity in the low-frequency area, although the energy distribution is still remarkably similar, with a steady decline up to around 1000 Hz followed by a fairly sharp rise to the spectral peak. The two are particularly similar when compared to the other two fricatives in the language, whose spectra look very different, with different energy distributions in different frequency ranges. I think this evidence supports my contention that the two sounds were similar enough acoustically to be confused by listeners when heard in medial clusters.

The main issue remaining is also the most baffling: why did this change only happen before coronals? After all, /l/ could easily have been devoiced before all voiceless obstruents, and the same perceptual confusion I have posited here could have occurred in those environments. So why was there no sound change there? Why was it limited to just this narrow context? And why did it spread so far within that context without spreading further?

I don't have answers to these questions, important though they are. I only have suggestions, which could explored in further research. The main idea I have, in keeping with the acoustic explanation I have given in these posts for the sound change as a whole, is that there was something about the transitions going in to the coronal segments that made a perceptual confusion more likely. Transitions are very important for perception, so I think this is most probably the direction to go to figure out why the change was so restricted. One way to investigate this, which I didn't do for this project due to time constraints, would be to find native speakers of a language with these segments (for best results, one in which /l/ was phonologically devoiced in comparable contexts) and record tokens with medial clusters like those of Akkadian. Examining those recordings would go a long way toward finding a solution to the issues mentioned above; any particular acoustic features of the clusters could be tested for salience through perception experiments or other techniques of experimental phonetics. My presentation is on Saturday, though, so that will have to wait for another time.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 6

2006-04-20T01:15:00.000-04:00

So what is this mysterious phonetic evidence I've been hinting about? How can you possibly use phonetic evidence to examine a language that has been dead for over 2000 years, anyway?

Well, the short answer is that you can't. We don't know exactly how Akkadian was pronounced and we probably never will. Nonetheless, sound changes like this one and other indirect evidence can give us a pretty good idea of how most phonemes were realized, and we can then look for living languages that have those same sounds and examine recordings of them to try to find out about what Akkadian may have looked like acoustically.

The languages I have used here all have the two sounds involved in this sound change, [š] and [ɬ], although they have both of them as phonemes whereas the latter was only allophonic in Akkadian (according to my interpretation). This is a matter of abstract phonology, though, and shouldn't matter for acoustic phonetics. I should note that I was unable to find any examples of these phones in the most useful environment, in clusters before coronal obstruents, so the following spectral evidence will not quite be identical with how I'm picturing the sounds involved in the Akkadian change. I think the basic points are still valid, though.

We start with Kabardian, a Northwest Caucasian language spoken in the Russian Caucasus. This language has the sounds in question, and they are reflected in these spectrograms (from E. J. A. Henderson, "Acoustic features of certain consonants and consonant clusters in Kabardian," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1970).

The top image is of the Kabardian word /šɨ/, and the bottom image is of the word /ɬɨ/. Note that the main difference is the frequency at which the high-intensity noise begins; in the top image this is around 1500 Hz, while in the bottom image it's more like 2500 Hz. Otherwise the two images are pretty similar. Both show high-intensity noise concentrated around 5000 Hz, as well as rather well-defined formant structure. This paper was published in 1970, so the technology used for the analysis was a far cry from the advanced digital methods we have now, but it still shows the similarities between these two sounds very well.

I was originally going to try to put all the phonetic evidence in this one post, but it's pretty late, so I'm going to just finish this post and leave the rest for another. Stay tuned, though, because the other evidence is even more exciting (if you can believe that).

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 5

2006-04-19T00:08:00.000-04:00

John Ohala is a professor at Berkeley (now emeritus) who has done an enormous amount of work on the phonetic mechanisms of sound change. He has concluded that the primary source of sound change is incorrect parsing of speech sounds by listeners, either by dissociating signals that are meant (by speakers) to represent the same sound or by associating signals that are meant to be distinct sounds. In the Akkadian change we are discussing here, it is clear that the origin of the change must be the second of Ohala’s processes: listeners hearing [št] and [ɬt] and assuming they are the same, then adjusting their own speech to pronounce the two sequences identically as [ɬt]. Although the two fricatives are distinct articulatorily, there is considerable evidence that they are similar acoustically. I will present some such evidence (from languages which have both as phonemes) in a later post; right now the important thing to consider is just that they are indeed similar, and this similarity led to a perceptual confusion.

Here I would just like to detail the process I am proposing for this sound change, since I'm not sure it was very clear in my original paper. Basically, I'm arguing that there was a phonological rule in Akkadian starting at an early stage (it's impossible to tell exactly how early, but certainly by the Old Babylonian period) which devoiced /l/ before /t/ and /s/. This rule, although it is necessary for explaining the sound change, is separate from it, and may well have operated before other voiceless obstruents as well; there's just no way to tell from the textual evidence since no sound changes occurred in those environments. Later, during the Middle Babylonian period, the perceptual confusion I mentioned above began to develop, with texts showing sporadic cases of for <š> before . As this confusion continued through generations, the pronunciation of /š/ moved more and more in the direction of [ɬ], until finally the two allophones (of different phonemes, remember) became identical in pronunciation and the allophone of /š/ in this environment actually became [ɬ], which was also the allophone of /l/. This is thus a total merger in a highly specific context. Later, by the time of the Neo-Babylonian period, the change had spread analogically to environments before the other coronal obstruents /d/, /ṭ/, /s/, and /z/; the resulting phone was presumably pronounced as a voiced [l] before the voiced segments (its realization before the emphatic is unclear due to our lack of knowledge of its pronunciation).

This is a complicated, multi-step change, but I think it is the only way to adequately explain this unusual shift. In my next post I will present some phonetic evidence to bolster my contentions here.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 4

2006-04-07T00:52:00.000-04:00

This change is unusual from a phonological perspective, since /š/ and /l/ share few features and it only occurs in a very restricted environment, so it has attracted much attention from scholars over the years. Some early Assyriologists proposed that the answer lay in reassessing the phonetic values of the signs in question; for instance, C. F. Lehmann proposed in 1892 that /l/ was voiceless in Akkadian, while Yehiel Gumpertz suggested in 1942 that it was rather the sound written <š> that was pronounced as a voiceless lateral fricative [ɬ]. These ad hoc proposals, although they do explain the sound change, don't make much sense in the context of the language as a whole, and there is no reason aside from this one change to believe either one.

A more realistic solution is to propose a simple devoicing rule: /l/ --> [ɬ] / _ [(+cor,) -son, -voice] (or something similar). That is, the voiced lateral approximant becomes voiceless before a voiceless (coronal) obstruent. I have placed "coronal" in parentheses because it is not clear how restricted this rule is, and there is probably no way to tell from the evidence available if it operated generally or just before coronals. This is, as you can probably tell, my preferred solution, but I didn't come up with it on my own; it is also proposed in Alice Faber's article "On the Nature of Proto-Semitic *l" in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 109:1 (Jan.-Mar. 1989), p. 33-36. However, her thesis that there were two lateral phonemes in Proto-Semitic, an alveolar /l/ and a velarized /lˌ/, I find dubious at best, and her explanation of how, exactly, this change supports that thesis is muddled. Despite these problems with her proposal as a whole, I have adopted her basic explanation of the sound change, which is to propose the above phonological rule and a subsequent shift of /š/ due to perceptual confusion with the voiceless allophone of /l/ in this environment. I will support this by giving phonetic data from languages that have both postalveolar and voiceless lateral fricatives and showing how they could be confused in medial clusters. For theoretical support I will turn, like Faber, to the work of John Ohala. But he deserves a post of his own.

Meet the Authors of LA!

2006-04-02T15:50:00.000-04:00

Two of the authors of LA have recently been accepted, along with one of our colleagues, to a conference for undergraduate Linguistics Majors at Harvard University. Please come support us as we give our first talks. More information on the conference can be found at:

http://hcs.harvard.edu/~ling/

Jedediah: "A Lateral Kick to the Shins, Explaining an Akkadian Sound Change", Saturday 10:30 AM.

Matt: "Derivational Reflexivity in Spoken Arabic", Saturday, 2:45 PM

Annie (their colleague): "Try and C", Sunday, 11:15 AM.

Hope to see you all there!

FOCUSing on WH Interpretability

2006-04-02T15:31:00.000-04:00

Note: this post treats the analysis presented in Boskovic, Z. 1999. "Oh multiple feature-checking: Multiple wh-Fronting and multiple head-movement." in S. Epstein and N. Hornstein (eds.). Working Minimalism. 159-187. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

In his 1999 paper on multiple wh-fronting in Slavic languages, Boskovic deals with the issue of what forces wh-words beyond the first to front after the [+wh] feature on the COMP has been checked by the first wh-word. As a solution to this problem, Boskovic proposes that each of the wh-words beyond the first moves into the left periphery because of [FOCUS] features. This post is a collection of thoughts on this idea.

First, let us summarize Boskovic's analysis for a sentence such as (1), from Bulgarian:

(1) Koj kogo obica
who whom loves
"Who loves whom?"

This analysis allows Boskovic to capture the overt movement of the wh-words in multiple wh-fronting (MWF) languages, as well as the superiority effects that subsets of these languages exhibit (this data is not repeated here. The reader is referred to the original article). The interesting claim that Boskovic makes in this analysis is that all wh-elements are focused elements for these languages. This means that the [FOCUS] feature in the tree for (1) will be strong on each of the wh-phrases.

What I would like to comment on is the nature of interpretability of the features Boskovic proposes. He does not comment in his paper on which of the features are interpretable and which are not. This will become crucial, however, in order to predict the correct word order. In order for the FOC head to be able to attract multiple wh-phrases (in the case of three or four-wh-word sentences) the [FOCUS] feature on the FOC head must be interpretable (note that it would also be possible to derive a phase-based analysis of feature deletion in order to account for this, but this solution is not pursued here). If the [FOCUS] feature is not interpretable, it would necessary delete under Minimalist accounts of feature checking, and not be able to attract wh-phrases beyond the first.

In a way, this is also an implicit argument for the existence of a FOC head in the left periphery. If there were not this head, either COMP or some other functional projection would be forced to bear an interpretable feature representing, semantically, focus. Since this is probably something we would like to avoid (not to mention issues of having functional heads represent more than one semantic role...), we can posit the FOC head to bear this feature and attract each of the wh-phrases beyond the first in MWF sentences.

Finally, there is one question left to be resolved, and that is how to make this analysis work vis-a-vis Rizzi's account of the FOC head. In his analysis, this head is unique - it is not iterated multiple times in the periphery as TOP is. This raises the obvious question in light of what we have discussed here: if there are more than two wh-phrases in the MWF language sentence, how can we account for them all being moved to the left periphery? The obvious issue would lie in whether we want to allow multiple wh-words to occupy [SPEC, FOC] or to allow FOC to be iterated beyond the first (contra Rizzi). I believe this is a matter that needs further investigating.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 3

2006-04-01T19:36:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay. In the interim, my paper was accepted by the conference, so I really need to get going on this. The remaining posts will describe the change and previous explanations for it, then give a detailed account of my proposal including the phonetic evidence. This first post will give evidence for the change itself.

The change of š to l in Akkadian can be seen between the Old Babylonian and Middle Babylonian periods. It is particularly clear in certain verbal forms (especially the so-called Š-Stem, which forms causatives) and in certain verbs like šaparum "to send" and šakanum "to place." Some examples of these forms from the Amarna letters (from Franz Böhl, Die Sprache der Amarnabriefe mit besonderer berücksichtigung der Kanaanismen): iltapranni "he sent to me" (from ištapranni), altapra "I sent" (from aštapra), ulzizušu "I set it up" (from ušzizu-šu, Š-Stem of izuzzum "to stand" with the clitic pronoun -šu), altakanma "I settled (them)" (from aštakan with the enclitic conjunction -ma).

Some other examples (from Richard Steiner, The Case for Fricative-Laterals in Proto-Semitic): ildu "foundation" (from išdum), ilti "with" (from išti). These indicate that the sound change is general rather than morphophonemic, as might be expected from the verbal forms alone.

I should note that this change is never fully complete in the written language; forms with š continue into very late texts. However, I do maintain that the change was complete in the spoken language by the Middle Babylonian/Middle Assyrian period and was only reflected in writing sporadically because of the extremely conservative character of the cuneiform writing system and scribal traditions. One piece of evidence for this contention is the fact that different types of texts show different patterns of attestation of the change: royal inscriptions, which tend to be more formal and use more archaic language generally, show it much less than letters, which tend to be less formal and closer to the spoken language. Jussi Aro (Studien zur mittelbabylonischen Grammatik) reports that a sample of Middle Babylonian letters showed lt 52 times and št 18 times (8 letters had both forms). This suggests that the change had become widespread in the spoken language at that point (at least in certain dialects; some peripheral areas don't show the change at all).

So that's the basic structure of the change as attested in the texts. Although not all possible environments were shown in the examples above, it occurs before /t/, /d/, /ṭ/, /s/ and /z/. These are all coronal segments (their exact phonetic realization as dental or alveolar is of course impossible to determine), so this definitely looks like a conditioned sound change. But more on that later.

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 2

2006-03-20T21:36:00.000-05:00

In which I make a few typographic clarifications.

In the preceding post I used the symbol <š> to indicate one of the sounds under discussion. This, obviously, is not an IPA symbol, but is rather the standard Assyriological notation for a voiceless postalveolar fricative (English <sh>, IPA <ʃ>). This symbol (and phoneme) is conventionally known as "shin," from the name of the corresponding letter in the West Semitic alphabets (Hebrew ש, Arabic ش). This name is the source of the jocular title for this series of posts, in which I discuss how certain instances of this phoneme changed into laterals (hence, they received a "lateral kick"; hilarious, I know). I have chosen this transcription to remain in line with the standard Assyriological transcription for the words I am discussing.

Similarly, I will use an underscore dot to indicate the "emphatic" consonant series, which is pharyngealized in Arabic and ejective in Ethiopic; its realization in Akkadian is unknown, but a dissimilation rule known as Geers' Law suggests that ejective is more likely. The lack of certainly about the phonetic realization of these segments makes an IPA transcription inappropriate in my view.

For the laterals, I will use standard IPA symbols, since there is no alternate orthographic convention to worry about; standard transcriptions just use <l> for everything. I will use <l> for voiced lateral approximants and <ɬ> for voiceless lateral fricatives. Should the need arise I will indicate voiceless lateral approximants by the standard IPA voiceless diacritic (a subscript circle) and voiced lateral fricatives by the IPA symbol <ɮ>. These sounds are somewhat tangential to my main arguments, though, so they won't show up much.

And with that out of the way, on to the linguistics!

A Lateral Kick to the Shins: Part 1

2006-03-18T18:06:00.000-05:00

Hi, I'm Jedediah. If you're reading this you probably already know me. This post is based on the abstract I submitted for the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium. It is just an introduction to the topic, which I will discuss in greater detail in subsequent posts.

Akkadian, the language of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, is one of the longest attested and best documented languages of antiquity. The number of surviving texts, written on easily-preserved clay tablets, is immense for an ancient language and provides a window on the development of the language over its long history, including several notable sound changes.

One such change is that of /š/ to /l/ before coronals, attested in the Babylonian dialect between the Old Babylonian and Middle Babylonian periods, the time of the formation of the literary language known as Standard Babylonian. From a phonological perspective, this is a highly unusual change: it only occurs in a highly restricted environment and the two sounds share very few features. Because of its oddity, this change has attracted the attention of many scholars, who have given a variety of explanations for it. I propose that the answer lies in certain acoustic properties of these sounds, as they were likely realized in this specific environment in Akkadian, that made them more similar than they seem. Specifically, /l/ was probably devoiced before voiceless coronals, which led to confusion with /š/. This confusion led to a perceptually-based sound change gradually spreading analogically to other environments.

Of mathematical constructs and functional heads

2006-01-24T20:58:00.000-05:00

With regards to the previous discussion of LISP, I think it would also be interesting to point out the similarities between modern functional head syntax and common infix mathematics. If you look at the structures (a + b) and [Spec Head Comp], one could draw a huge number of parallels between them. This could serve as an interesting case study of why (a + b) is the most common structure of math as well as a possible reanalysis of how linguistics is treating functional heads.

Math uses operators as a way to link terms, and in a sense, tell the 'user' how to combine the first term with the second (note that the first term may be on the right). Indeed, this is exactly how operators are used in some programming languages like Java, C, and Python. The compiler will first come across a single term, then the operand which tells the compiler what to do with the former and the later term.

Suppose we were to apply this same logic to syntax and functional heads. Then the purpose of the functional head would be to link parts of a clause and in a sense give meaning to the elements. Thus the AgtP [He Agt drive] could be interpreted as follows:

1) an element VP(drive) is found
2) we are going to add an Agt it
3) 'He' is found and is added as an Agt

This reanalysis, or restating, of the idea of functional heads will probably have some severe consequences all of which I have not yet worked out(obviously), but here are a few interesting ones:

a) everything must be added to a clause(tree) structure by way of a functional head, ie: there are no lexical heads.
b) the lexicon may not include part of speach features since any lexeme could be merged into the Spec and the cases which are not parsable could be worked out by semantics. Think of how easy it is to crate new verbs from nouns: "I will phone you later" This could be simply stated as a 'noun' merging with a V functional head. In most instances however, semantics doesn't 'allow' it to parse, but it seems very productive: "I usually ipod on the way to class"(just made this up) meaning: "I usually listen to my ipod on my way to class"
c) prepositions are phonetically realized functional heads - is this the same as lexical heads? not really sure yet...

I really don't know how much of what I just said is actually logical or anything since I have really only begun to thinking about this idea or to see if research has already been done.

-R
/woo! first post

linguists should learn LISP, pt. 1

2006-01-17T14:57:00.000-05:00

this will be a multi-part post, which will grow/be revised/deemed less important the more i learn about the topic.

LISP stands for LISt Processesing and is a functional programming language invented by John McCarthy (not the linguist, the computer scientist - coincidence in names noted) in the 1950's and is the second-oldest programming language still in use today (only FORTRAN is older). the langauge is well known for its bare-bones structure and emphasis on programming in which efficiency is not the main concern (as opposed to accuracy, minimality, etc.). LISP makes complex notions such as recursion and abstraction conceptually easy to implement by way of its structure...

consider the following expression in LISP computing the sum of two integers:
(1) (+ 4 5)

fed into an interpreter, this will, of course, produce the response 9. the interesting part about this is the structure of the expression: there is a prefixed primitive operator and the operands fed to it as arguments. more on why this is interesting after some more examples from the language.

primitive data in LISP comes in two forms, atoms and lists. an atom is any discrete element which evaluates: with no abstraction, this will be numbers and character strings of reasonable length: 3, 56, c3, a, etc. a list is a an element recursively constructed by concatenation of atoms: (3, 4, 6, 8) , (f, matt, 98, john), etc. there are no other kinds of data important to us now (there is another, dated, type, the dotted pair. possibly more on this in another post).

expressions such as (1) can be themselves made up of further expressions, for instance, (2):
(2) (* 9 (+4 5 (-6 4)) (+3 5))

which we could represent more schematically as a tree structure with each tree containing branches for each of the elements in the expression/list:

each node on the tree contains at the left the operator for the expression and the subsequent nodes (which may branch) contain the operands. optionally (because implemented LISP has no notion of trees, this is a loose 'optionally'), the values of the non-terminal nodes may be said to percolate their values upward - shown in fig. 1 by the labeled nodes. finally, terminal nodes are atoms in LISP (or at the current level of abstraction, in the case that other elements have been defined from primitives).

i hope at this point you can see where i am going, but allow me to continue with some preliminary LISP notions.

abstraction in LISP is accomplished in a variety of different ways based on implementation, but let us consider here that of SCHEME. an example will begin the discusison:

(3) (DEFINE SQUARE ((lambda (x))(* x x))

this expression makes reference to DEFINE as a primitive which abstracts. the new element is named SQUARE and is said to be the function that maps from x to the square of x (or x times itself - i apologize for those who might not know any lambda calculus - see Heim and Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar for a good introduction for linguists). note again that we can draw this expression as a tree:

so now we know enough about LISP to begin to see some almost startling parallels.

first, take the notion of recursitivity. it is a well known-fact that langauge is recursive and any grammar which accounts for language must account for this fact - do not fear: i will not be proposing that LISP is that grammar. LISP does, however, capture the notion of recursivity in the same way in which it is captured in the nebulous region between syntax and semantics: atoms are combined to form syntactic constituents which can then be manipulated as atoms again, ad infinitum - just like in LISP, the computational power far exceeds the ability of the human mind to parse, as the computational power is theoretically infinite. we could easily take, using LISP to model, for example, syntactic computation, syntactic features as atoms and the syntactic primitives (words, functional heads) they produce by concatenation (or combination) as lists. elements of these lists are then available as individual entities if necessary (in LISP functions usually packaged with implementations or easily written that operate on lists such as FIRST and LAST can produce these results), which would allow us to model feature checking or valuing easily.

with expressions, again, we can see an interesting parallel: expressions have their operator prefixed to the left which carries the semantic or syntactic weight of the expression and operates on the operands. theoretically, the prefix notation is optional, but if we were to keep it, we could easily see LISP as an implementation of Kayne's antisymmetry and/or Bowers' Grammatical Relations theory (the latter is forthcoming). this is a digression, however, as the major point is this: one element (a head) carries the burden of most of the value of the node and is responsible for percolation - (* 5 5) evaluates to the product of 5 and 5, and (V NP) evaluates to VP - after percolation, the element can be operated upon as a whole (XP movement) or as individual items (Head Movement).

moving on, let's take a moment to look at data abstraction. in LISP, we can name variables to hold set data:

(4) (DEFINE a (* 5 5))

here the symbol a is defined as a certain value. this operation is directly parallel to Chomsky's latest formulation about Merge being an operation which forms a list of two elements and produces a label:

(5) MERGE(a, b) = LB(a){a b}

all that is left to be explained in the analogy (and actually in Chomsky's formulation as well) is how LISP can decide which element produces the label. we could even take a preliminary stab at a LISP representation of Merge:

(6) (DEFINE MERGE ((lambda(a))(lambda(b))(LB(a)(a b))))

all that would be left, then, is a proper definition of LB.

one final point in this disconnected series of parallels. when we look at figure 2, we can immediately see that the node immediately dominating (* x x) would not actually be a valid expression in LISP without some relevant abstraction - we need a binder such as (lambda(x)) or another previous instance of DEFINE to make the expression evaluate. this is analogous to principle a of the binding theory in syntax - anaphors (syntactic representations of unbound variables) must be bound by their antecedent or by a wh-phrase (the syntactic representation of a (lambda(x))). this binding then forces us to make reference to the notion of c-command, which we can see in the LISP expression as well! the lambda operator's mother node (the full lambda expression) must c-command the well-formed formula (* x x) in order for the complex to be a valid expression.

okay, so that's a lot of garbage, but what does it all amount to? is LISP the way to express the universal component of syntax (and possibly semantics?) - probably not, though it does allow us to express directly the conceptual basis for the recent minimalist developments in syntax. however, all the usual questions will remain about how much idealization of human language computation is appropriate before descriptive adequacy is lost.

it may simply be that LISP views data and process in a way similar to the human language faculty (again, a very loose notion of 'similar' is needed here), however even this point should not be understated. we should take note of the power and central notions of recursivity and simplicity in LISP and ask ourselves how this might be instantiated in universal grammar and what it says more generally about natural computational processes.

well, this article has either blithered too long or raised more questions than it answered, but one thing is definitely for certain - in viewing analysis of syntactic phenomena (and probably semantic as well) in natural language, it certainly cannot hurt to have the mental flexibility provided by a background in LISP, since the langauge directly captures notions central to human language: recusivity, simplicity (minimality, in whatever sense is most relevant), and abstraction. therefore, one might say that linguists should learn LISP.

reflexives in arabic verbal forms.

2006-01-03T21:01:00.000-05:00

the arabic verbal system is famous for its multiple forms based upon a common triliteral root linking each of the discrete verbs to a common semantic base (mccarthy calls these binyanim in his prosodic theory of nonconcatenative morphology. i will call them "forms"). the varying forms are created by affixing segments to the root - typically by infixation. there are many forms, but three are under consideration here: forms V, VI, and VIII, the reflexives of forms II, III, and I, respectively.

(actually, there is quite a bit of debate about the semantic relationships between the various verbal forms. classical arabic scholars identified V as the reflexive of II, VI as the reflexive of III, and VIII as the reflexive of I. this relationship seems to hold in classical arabic (CA), but it is not always the case even in modern standard arabic, the current literary descendent of CA. the picture is further complicated when looking at the spoken dialects - most of the standard semantic relationships have broken down and are not as clear-cut as the classical analysis. all data concerning this matter presented here is from Younes, Munther. 2000. "Redundancy and Productivity in Palestinian Arabic Verb Derivation." in Proceedings of the Third Conference of AIDA. Manwel Misfud, ed.)

each of the three forms under consideration here contain a common affix /ta/, identified by mccarthy and most of the standard literature as the reflexive morpheme in these forms. the intersting part about these data is that in forms V and VI the morpheme is prefixed to the verb:

root I V VI
ktb katab takattab takaatab
Drb Darab taDarrab taDaarab

in form VIII, however, the morpheme is infixed between the first and second root consonants (along with a prefixed /i-/ and a deletion of the first interconsonantal vowel):

root VIII
ktb iktatab
Drb iDtarab

i feel, contrary to the standard literature, that the form VIII morpheme in arabic is, or is in the process of becoming in modern dialects, a different morpheme than the reflexive which appears in forms V and VI. the first major reason for believing this comes from the semantic relationships outlined above. in modern arabic, form VIII has been lexicalized and rarely ever has a meaning classifiable as a reflexive of I. instead, form VII is beginning to take on the role of passive of I.

morphophonological data supports this analysis. we would expect identical morphemes to behave similarly with respect to the neutrality of their application across different environments (or at least vary in a predictable way based on the phonology of the language). however, with the form VIII /ta/, however, this is not the case. form VIII /ta/ participates in three kinds of phonological processes not exhibited by /ta/ in the V/VI environments: emphasis, voicing, and semivowel assimilation - in form VIII, the initial consonant of the morpheme assimilates to the first root consonant emphasis features ([RTR]), voicing features ([voice]), and semivowel features ([continuant]). any examination of the /ta/ morpheme specifically and the /t/ phoneme more generally in other environments shows that this is not standard to the phonology of arabic. this only occurs in form VIII.

if the VIII /ta/ is different, then what exactly is happening? younes (op. cit.) points out that this may actually be an example of a larger-level phonological process in that the phonological structure of the root actually seems to be determining which form is the reflexive of form I: VIII in roots with {n, l, r} as the first consonant, VII elsewhere. this seemingly bizarre fact can be explained quite easily if, contrary to the standard analysis, VIII is not seen as the reflexive of I. this leaves us with the following standard/reflexive alternations:

standard reflexive
I ~ VII/VIII
II ~ V
III ~ VI

as far as further research is concerned, there is one avenue which i think needs exploring: when presented with nunce words, do speakers of arabic generate the reflexive of a form I according to the phonological environment conditioning as specified in younes? if not, this fact would have to be explained and would possibly call into question this analysis, but if so, it would lend even more support for a reanalysis of form VIII reflexvies and their morphemes in arabic.

partial agreement in arabic clauses.

2006-01-02T15:31:00.000-05:00

this is my thesis topic, probably, so it is obviously incomplete as a blog post.

in modern standard arabic and the modern spoken dialects, the main verb in arabic clauses exhibits different agreement patterns based upon its position relative to the subject. the standard clausal structure is VSO in arabic, with the postverbal subject triggering only partial agreement on the verb: person and gender, but not number. in modern standard arabic, number agreement on a presubject verb is ungrammatical. postsubject verbs, however (in SVO clauses), trigger full agreement on the verb, and no other kind of agreement is grammatical.

the situation gets more complicated than this, however. an auxiliary in a clause in arabic forces AuxSVO word order. as we would predict, the auxiliary agrees partially with the subject, whereas the main verb agrees fully. the problem for an easy account of this data comes when one looks beyond the standard written arabic to the spoken dialects. in many of these dialects, VSO clauses are allowed to agree fully, unlike in modern standard arabic.

thus far, a few different accounts been posited for this data. one of the most commonly referenced involves an incorporation account of the agreement: full or partial agreement on the verb involves incorporation of a phonetically null pronoun into the verb as it raises to the T position (or when the V+T complex raises to I). the major problem with this account, for me, is that it doesn't seem any more explanatory than stipulative accounts of the data: what exactly is it which governs the insertion of this pronoun? if the pronoun account is correct, what is the feature value of that pronoun in standard dialects of arabic? is it different for each of the different dialects of arabic?

another major account has been to see agreement as different under government (which would hold in VSO clauses) than under spec-head relationship which dictates standard agreement. however, i would like to avoid this answer, however, as a notion of government is something i would like to avoid, working in the minimalist framework.

finally, minimalist accounts of this data do exist, making use of the strength of the features on the Agr head which controls the position of the verb. again, however, modern research has moved away from the Agr head as a result of the work that came after the explosion of Infl. the question is, then: is there a way to account for this data under the current state of the minimalist framework?

it is obvious that the solution will have one characteristic: the separation of Move from Agree advanced in chomsky's probe-goal theory. movement to the clause-initial position should not be for agreement purposes but for EPP feature checking. given this, we should look immediately to the Tense functional head - it is the only head which exists locally that might be able to be used to capture this data.

and this is the current state of my research: i think it is possible to capture this data by postulating a correspondence between the presence of the number feature on the T head and the presence/absence of EPP on that same head. if the number feature on the T head is present, then EPP should be present on that head as well, leading to the predicted SVO word order and agreement. VSO agreement, then, would be the product of no number feature or EPP feature on the T head. the agreement patterns are captured by a selection of one of two different lexical T heads. differences in the dialects could be accounted for by postulating different lexical T heads for those dialects.

and that's all i have, for now. more research needs to be done, however, as there is one major piece of data this solution does not account for: pronouns. in arabic, postverbal pronouns trigger full agreement...

introduction.

2006-01-02T14:45:00.000-05:00

welcome to linguistics anonymous, a collection of semi to fully-minimalist ramblings about various topics in current linguistics research. both of the authors are undergraduates at cornell university, and their intellectual interests include, but are not limited to: japanese linguistics, arabic linguistics, minimalist syntax, morphosyntax, optimality theory, and the syntax-sematincs interface.

check back soon for posts with actual content.