30.2632, Confs: General Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theories/Japan

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2632. Wed Jul 03 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2632, Confs: General Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Linguistic Theories/Japan

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Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2019 22:24:51
From: Ayaka Sugawara [ayakasug at alum.mit.edu]
Subject: Satellite Seminar: Early Lessons from Early Verbs

 
Satellite Seminar: Early Lessons from Early Verbs 

Date: 26-Jul-2019 - 26-Jul-2019 
Location: Kobe, Hyogo, Japan 
Contact: Mapll Organizer 
Contact Email: mapllcontact at gmail.com 
Meeting URL: https://maplltcp2019.wordpress.com/satellite-seminar/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Linguistic Theories 

Meeting Description: 

There will be a satellite seminar by Matt Wagers the day before the
conference.

This seminar is independent of MAPLL-TCP-TL and there is no fee for the
participation. All are welcome!

Please register from the website for the satellite seminar.
Seminar Lecturer: Matt Wagers (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Date and Time: 13:30-17:00 on Friday, 26 July, 2019
Venue: Seminar Room, Hirao Memorial Seminar House, Konan University, Kobe,
Japan

Course Abstract:

Early lessons from early verbs

The past decade has witnessed a small explosion of studies on sentence
processing in verb-initial languages, that is, languages whose speakers make
heavy use of verb-initial clauses like VSO or VOS. This research has opened
the door for contributions from a strikingly diverse array of speakers and
languages. And just as diverse has been the range of questions pursued, each
linked to the grammatical resources of the language under investigation – to
pick a few examples: null pronouns and obviation in Odawa (Christianson &
Ferreira, 2005), subject/object asymmetries in Kaqchikel (Koizumi et al.,
2014), and ergativity and extraction in Niuean (Longenbaugh & Polinsky, 2016).

In these lectures I wish to scope above the particular issues that have been
investigated, and ask a more tendentious question. Can we find any
commonalities in language processing of verb-initial languages? Here I am
inspired by the contribution made by verb-final languages, which have provided
us with much evidence about just how strong incrementality and predictive
pressures can be in sentence processing (cf. Inoue & Fodor, 1995). A great
locus of these pressures is the verb — a nexus of tense/aspect, agreement and
argument structure, etc. In verb-initial languages, these “pressures” can
often be relieved early in the clause. So, could it be that speakers are less
incremental in some sense?

I will discuss studies on three verb-initial languages: Chamorro and Tagalog,
both Austronesian languages whose verbs are richly inflected with agreement;
and Zapotec, an Otomanguean language whose verbs are not. Across several
experiments, we find that comprehenders often seem to ignore very strong
statistical cues either to early interpretation or to disambiguation, unless
those cues are morphological ones grammatically linked to argument
realization. In Tagalog and Chamorro such cues include voice or wh-agreement
morphology; in  Zapotec and Chamorro, they are pronouns with extremely limited
distributions, governed by strict grammatical feature hierarchies. These
findings suggest a more limited type of incrementality, and offer a qualified
‘yes’ to our question.

Schedule:
13:30-15:00: Lecture 1
15:00-15:30: Break
15:30-17:00: Lecture 2
 






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