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CAS Linguistics Faculty
Scholarly presentations - 2009
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Intervention Effects and the Flavors of Q
In Japanese, questions are formed with the help of a question particle "ka" ("Q"), a morpheme that can also be used to signal disjunction or combine with a wh-word like "dare" 'who' to form "dareka" 'someone'. This pattern (with some variations) recurs across many languages. Familiar comparisons with Sinhala and earlier stages of Japanese itself lead to the hypothesis that this "Q" particle undergoes syntactic movement in questions (a proposal much like that recently presented by Seth Cable). We can hypothesize a coherent semantic contribution for each of these pieces, which leads to the more general hypothesis that this process is universal across languages (being part of the means of forming a question or indefinite meaning). One prominent argument for the syntactic movement comes from "intervention effects" (that prohibit certain "intervenors" from the path between a wh-phrase in situ and its associated interrogative complementizer).
In this talk, I will tackle two aspects of this project where open questions remain. The first concerns the identification of Q morphemes across languages: many languages seem to make finer morphological distinctions than Japanese does, suggesting more than one "flavor" of Q. The second concerns the analysis of the intervention effect itself, in response to several recent proposals attributing them to semantic, pragmatic, or prosodic causes, rather than to syntactic causes.
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Crossdisciplinary Corpus-Based ASL Research
This talk will (a) present information about a large, publicly available, linguistically annotated corpus, including high quality video files showing synchronized multiple views (with a close-up of the face) of Deaf native signers, and (b) discuss ways in which these data have been used in our linguistic and computer science collaborations. Projects include development of a sign look-up capability based on live or recorded video input, and recognition of various manual and non-manual properties of signing. This research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (#CNS-0427988, #IIS-0705749).
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April 3, 2009 - University of Minnesota |
Second Language Acquisition of Definiteness Restrictions
The arguments for some kind of inborn language acquisition faculty ("UG") are strong in the domain of first language acquisition, but it is not immediately evident to what extent the acquisition of a second language by adults makes use of the same mechanism. Clearly, there are significant differences between child first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition in terms of course, rate, errors, effort, and ultimate attainment. This has led to a large research industry devoted to investigating how the acquisition and knowledge of a second language relates to the acquisition and knowledge of one's native language.
In this talk, I will discuss these issues in the context of ongoing experimental work probing second language learners on a subtle contrast known as the definiteness effect ("DE"). (This is joint work in collaboration with Lydia White, Alyona Belikova, and Öner Özçelik, at McGill University, and Tanja Kupisch, at University of Hamburg.) The DE here refers to the restriction on existential sentences of the form "there be NP..." that allows one type of noun phrase (e.g., indefinite NPs as in "There is a car in the ditch") but not another (e.g., definite NPs as in the ill-formed "*There is the car in the ditch"). We have tested native speakers of Turkish on these constructions, and are in the process of testing native speakers of Russian. Turkish and Russian are of particular interest here because these languages do not show quite the same DE effect as English does. In particular, the DE effect goes away in negative existential constructions, so the literal translation of "There isn't Mary at home" is fine (unlike in English). This allows us to test whether any success these English learners have with the DE in English can be attributed to transfer from their knowledge of DE in their native language. What we found was that the Turkish speakers performed remarkably well, despite not having been explicitly taught. After presenting the experiment and results, I will discuss what this tells us (and what it doesn't) concerning the involvement of "UG principles" in second language acquisition, as well as relate this to the existing literature on the acquisition of articles and of definiteness and specificity distinctions.
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April 6, 2009 - workshop at the University of Minnesota |
Building Questions
This two-hour workshop will focus on a crosslinguistic comparison of a number of wh-in-situ languages, most prominently Japanese, Sinhala, and Premodern Japanese, that seem to provide a window into the syntax and interpretation of questions and some insight into what the basic linguistics building blocks are. The syntactic and morphological comparison of these languages leads to the proposal that the question particle that appears at the end of Japanese questions comes to be there as a result of a movement operation. Exploring the semantics of other constructions in which wh-words and the question particle appear allows us to posit a consistent semantic contribution for each of these pieces. With this much in place, we will look at three areas where open questions remain. The first concerns "intervention effects" that prohibit a certain class of expressions from separating an unmoved wh-word and the head of the interrogative clause it is interpreted with. My own work has characterized this as a syntactic effect, but the recent literature contains a number of proposals that attribute them variously to semantic, pragmatic, or prosodic effects. The second concerns the specific inventory of linguistic "atoms" involved in questions, and what morphological comparison across languages can tell us. The basic proposal has been formulated on the basis of Japanese morphology, and in particular the wide variety of environments the question particle can appear, but other languages often make morphological distinctions that seem to be collapsed in Japanese. The final set of issues we will look at at least cursorily is how all of this relates to wh-movement languages like English, and exploring the idea that even wh-movement languages make use of a (silent) question particle in question formation.
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A Method for Recognition of Grammatically Significant Head Movements and Facial Expressions, Developed Through Use of a Linguistically Annotated Video Corpus
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