blogpost: Meaning contrasts: generated or parasitic?

 Posted by on 10/20/2019  34 Responses »
Oct 202019
 

I just got home from Oslo, where I had many really interesting interactions with several linguists. One of them was a conversation with fellow visitor Jonathan Bobaljik. We were talking about the relatively well-known observation that for many alleged “syntax-semantics mapping phenomena,” the expected mappings only go through if the syntax independently allows at least two different configurations. As Jonathan helpfully points out, this is an observation that goes back to Grice, if not Jespersen. But just because an observation is “old,” we shouldn’t overlook the consequences it has for contemporary syn-sem theories. And the consequences are very interesting. […]  [read more]

blogpost: The occasional value of imprecise recall

 Posted by on 10/03/2019  1 Response »
Oct 032019
 

Here's a thing that I'm sure happens to everyone from time to time:

  1. You read or hear about phenomenon X or generalization X or theoretical proposal X.
  2. Time passes.
  3. You happen upon some new data or a new idea, for which X proves relevant.
  4. However, it turns out that you have imperfect recall of X. Unbeknownst to you, what you have in your head is actually some rejiggered version of X – let's call it X' – which conveniently-and-suspiciously suits your current theoretical or empirical needs. [...]

[read more]

blogpost: Listemes and morphemes and other things

 Posted by on 08/07/2019  5 Responses »
Aug 072019
 

This is a post about listedness: what is the nature of the idiosyncratic information that is listed in the grammar.

In traditional, lexicalist approaches, the listed atoms were lexical items. A lexical item contained, at minimum, a phonological form, a semantic interpretation, [...]

[read more]

blogpost: The problem with “morphosemantics”

 Posted by on 06/08/2019  7 Responses »
Jun 082019
 

There’s been a fair amount of generative linguistics work over the past 15 years or so that identifies itself as “morphosemantics.” There are several reasons why I don’t think morphosemantics is a coherent notion. In this post, I’d like to detail some of these reasons. You’ve probably heard ~1.5 of them before, though, so if that’s the case feel free to skip ahead as needed.

The =&0=& is conceptual. As 

already discussed on this blog […]  [read more]

blogpost: Adventures in modularity, phonological optimization edition

 Posted by on 03/05/2019  15 Responses »
Mar 052019
 

Here is a paper by Canaan Breiss and Bruce Hayes (I will refer to the paper as B&H). To offer a brief summary of B&H’s main empirical point, it shows that the choice of syntactic ‘structure’ (i.e., both the choice of terminals and their arrangement) is probabilistically biased towards avoiding phonotactically problematic sequences (e.g. a sequence of two consecutive sibilants), even when the sequence in question arises across a word boundary. It does so by focusing on a series of well-established phonological constraints (from work on word‑level phonology), and showing that word‑bigrams whose juncture violates these constraints are underattested. This is shown to be the case in a variety of corpora, both written and spoken. Let’s refer to this as

Evidence for Phonologically-Influenced Choice of Syntactic Structure […]  [read more]

blogpost: On science, luck, and “research statements”

 Posted by on 02/21/2019  2 Responses »
Feb 212019
 

This is another post, much like this one (and very much inspired by it), that is more about professional development / career issues, and less about linguistics. So if this kind of thing interests you less, maybe skip this one.

One thing that academics have to periodically do throughout their careers is write various kinds of "statements" about what they've done so far, and what they're going to do in the future. [...]

[read more]

blogpost: Phases vs. minimality: who ya got??

 Posted by on 02/16/2019  No Responses »
Feb 162019
 

Here’s a nice little thing to ponder. Suppose syntactic computation is bound by some cyclic domains – we can call them “phases” (though I am on record with the opinion that phase theory is a faded facsimile of Subjacency, and many of its more recent developments, a faded facsimile of Barriers). And suppose that we encounter a configuration like (1) in which H is able to access XP but unable to access YP, where XP and YP both seem, as far as we can tell, featurally suited to H’s needs:

(1) H ≫ XP ≫ YP                

(where ‘≫’ represents asymmetric c-command) […]  [read more]

blogpost: Kudos

 Posted by on 01/29/2019  1 Response »
Jan 292019
 

I just stumbled upon this: ... Notice the "Published in" field: Lisa Selkirk and Angelika Kratzer have made it publicly known that this paper received a rejection in its very first round of review from Language. I don't think it can be overstated how important it is for senior people to share [...]

[read more]

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