LingLang Lunch (2/25/2015): Timothy Grinsell (University of Chicago)
I present three sources of evidence for this view. The first comes from jury verdicts. In some cases, juries are required to assign percentage values to a defendant’s negligence, representing that portion of fault attributable to the defendant (e.g. 80% negligent). A study of about 800 jury verdicts (Best & Donohue 2012) shows that juries tend to assign these percentages in clumpy ways. This clumpiness provides evidence for a discontinuous scale structure, consistent with the aggregation hypothesis. Second, the well-known distinction between “absolute” and “relative” adjectives (Rotstein & Winter 2004, Kennedy & McNally 2005) provides evidence that unidimensionality reduces or eliminates vagueness effects, consistent with research in political science (like the Median Voter Theorem) that unidimensionality eliminates the aggregation problem (Sen 1970). Third, a topological view of the aggregation problem (Chichilnisky 1982) finds support in the representation of concepts as continuous spaces, in which dimensions are vectors (Gärdenfors 2000, 2014).
LingLang Lunch (3/4/2015): Tania Rojas-Esponda (Stanford University)
LingLang Lunch (3/18/2015): Václav Cvrček (Institute of the Czech National Corpus)
LingLang Lunch (4/1/2015): Junwen Lee (Brown University)
LingLang Lunch (4/8/2015): Magdalena Kaufmann (University of Connecticut)
LingLang Lunch (4/22/2015): Ryan Bennett (Yale University)
In this talk I present results from the first ultrasound study of Irish consonant production. This study is motivated by several outstanding questions in the study of the Irish consonant system. To what extent do the phonemic labels “palatalized” and “velarized” correspond to phonetic truths about the position of the tongue body during the production of these consonants? What factors condition contextual variation in the production of these consonant types? And what can Irish tell us about the relationship between phonological contrast and articulatory patterning?
Colloquium (4/29/2015): Gregory Hickok (University of California, Irvine)
LingLang Lunch (4/30/2015): Eladio Mateo Toledo (B’alam) (CIESAS-Sureste, México)
(1) A monkey picked leaves or fruit in order to eat them, but it never ate them,
though that was certainly its intention.
Q’anjob’al has two purpose constructions: motion-cum purpose and a finite purpose clause. In this talk, I present a related construction that I call the destinative construction (2).
(2) a. Max-ach y-i-teq ix s-q’ume-j
com-abs2sg erg3-bring-dir clf erg3-talk-tv
‘She brought you to talk to you.’
b. Ay-ach ek’ j-ante-j
exs-abs2sg dir erg1pl-cure-tv
‘You are here for us to cure.’
Analyzing this construction as a purpose clause is problematic because intentionality is not necessary, as in (2b). Furthermore, person inflection is rigidly transitive or intransitive in Q’anjob’al but this construction violates it as the second verb, otherwise transitive, lacks a second person argument. However, this inflectional pattern also occurs in complex predicates like the ditransitive one in 3).
(3) Ch-ach ul hin-say w-il-a’
inc-abs2sg come erg1s-look.for erg1s-see-tv
‘I come to look for you (for myself).’ {txt062}
I have three goals in this talk. Following Simonin’s (2011) work on English and that of Polian et.al. (2015) on Maya, I firstly show that (2) is a destinative construction and not a purpose clause (‘the construction denotes a situation where the matrix verb makes available an entity that is earmarked for a particular use, specified by the second verb’). Second, I show that the Q’anjob’al destinative and the English weak purpose clause, with different syntax, are licensed by the same types of predicates. I finally show that the Q’anjob’al destinative clause has features of both complex clauses and complex predicates; this makes it unique in Q’anjob’al and Maya.