Department of Linguistics
Dr. Frederick Ericson
Friday, September 30, 2005, 2:00 pm, ICC 462
Musicality in Classroom Talk and Listening: Possible Consequences for Cognition and Learning
Speech prosody-- tempo, pitch, and volume emphasis in the real-time performance of talk-- togther with changes in voice quality, provide auditors with cues to new or repeated information, and to shifts in emotional key, thus signaling crucial "next" moments in discourse at which special attention needs to be paid by auditors. The cues are implicit-- an aspect of the "contextualizing cueing" identified by Cumperz. The workings of this cueing system will be discussed and illustated through video examples of classroom talk, with particular empasis on analyzing the musicality of speaking in relation to issues of cognition and learning.
Thursday, October 6, 5:00 pm, New Research Building Auditorium
Can Medial-Temporal-Lobe Patients Learn A Category Implicitly?
Can a person with a damaged medial-temporal lobe learn a category implicitly?To address this question, we compared the performance of participants with mildAlzheimer’s disease (AD) to that of age-matched controls in a standard implicit learning task. In this task, participants were first presented a series of objects,then told the objects formed a category, and then had to categorize a longsequence of test items (Knowlton & Squire, 1993). We tested the hypotheses that: (1) both Control and AD participants would show evidence for implicitlearning after the unwanted contribution of learning during test is removed; (2)the degree of implicit learning is the same for AD and Control participants; and (3) training with exemplars that are highly similar to an unseen prototype will lead to better implicit category learning than training with exemplars that are less similar to a prototype. With respect to the first hypothesis, we found that both AD and Control participants performed better on tests of implicit learning than couldbe attributed to just learning on test trials. We found no clear means forevaluating our second hypothesis, and argue that comparisons of the degree of implicit learning between patient and control groups in this paradigm areconfounded by the contribution of other memory systems. In line with the thirdhypothesis, only training with similar exemplars resulted in significant implicit category learning for AD participants.
About the Speaker
Edward E. Smith is the William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology at ColumbiaUniversity. Prior to his move to
Friday, Octover 7, 11:00 -12:30 pm, ICC 450
Agreement in Korean Syntax: The case of Sentence Final Particles
In this talk, I discuss sentence final particles in Korean, exemplified in (1) below:
(1) Na-nun cemsim-ul mek-ess-e/eyo/so/supnita.
I-TOP lunch-ACC eat-PAST-Intimate/Polite/Semiformal/Formal
‘I ate lunch.’
These sentence final particles mark speech style (as well as clause type, the fact which will not be discussed in this talk). Hence, there are at least 6 different speech style particles that can occur in declarative alone. These speech style particles reflect a relationship between the speaker and addressee.
Recently, there have been some attempts to treat the topics related to the notion of ‘speaker’ -- such as evidentiality and logophoricity -- from a syntactic point of view. (Cinque 1999, Tenny 2000, Speas 2004, and Speas and Tenny 2004 among others) Speas (2004), for example, argues for Speech Act Phrase bearing speaker’s points of view of a reported event, basing her argument on the morphological reflex of different kinds of evidentiality available across languages. Most recently the notion of ‘addressee’ has also been proposed to play a role in syntax. For example, in their study of imperatives, Mauck et al 2005, Brandstetter 2005 and Zanuttini 2005 have argued that the notion of addressee is represented in the structure of the clause, discussing the fact that there is a tight relationship between the subject of imperatives and the addressee.
Building on these proposals, in this talk I discuss speech style particles in Korean, which have never received a syntactic analysis. I argue that they involve the notions of speaker and addressee, giving them a representation in the syntax. The main contentions of this talk are the following:
(i) The meaning of speech style particles can be expressed using the notions of speaker and addressee, hierarchy, and intimacy/formality.
(ii) The grammatical patterning of speech style particles can be explained by postulating that these notions are represented in syntax.
(iii) The speech style particles are involved in a formal agreement relation with the vocative phrase, which I assume to be present in all clauses.
If point (iii) is valid, then we can conclude that agreement relations can be found in a non-agreement language like Korean, that is, a language that exhibits no phi-feature agreement.
Friday, October 14, 2005, 11:00- 12:30 pm, ICC 450
Some Pragmatic Thoughts on NPI Licensing
In this talk I argue (following Bhatt and Sharvit, to appear) that superlative expressions provide support for Kadmon and Landman's (1993) theory of NPI licensing. These constructions are an interesting test case for any theory of NPI licensing, because, as observed by Bhatt (2002), the superlative morpheme cannot license a (weak) NPI across an intensional verb such as 'say' (while negation can). This shows that we need a theory of NPI licensing that allows us to place constraints on any of the constituents c-commanded by the NPI-licensor. Kadmon and Landman's theory provides a way to do precisely that. In defending this theory, I also examine some of its weaknesses, and respond to some criticisms raised by various authors (Chierchia 2001, among others).
Why do some people learn a second language (L2) more efficiently, easily and rapidly than others after the same amount of exposure to the language? One of the factors that has been put forth to explain adult inter-learner variability is working memory (WM), defined as the cognitive resources required to process and store incoming information (Baddeley, 1986, 2003). These resources differ from person to person (Just & Carpenter, 1992) and, because they are limited, can affect L2 reading and listening (e.g., Geva & Ryan, 1993; Harrrington & Sawyer, 1992), L2 syntactic processing and development (e.g., Ellis & Sinclair, 1996; Vos, Gunter, Schriefers,& Friederici, 2001; cf. Juffs, 2004); L2 lexical processing and development (e.g., French, 2003; Papagno & Vallar, 1995); noticing of feedback on L2 errors (e.g., Mackey, Philp, Egi, Fuji, & Tatsumi, 2002; Sagarra, 2004); and L2 proficiency (e.g., Kroll, Michael, Tokowicz, & Dufour, 2002; Payne & Whitney, 2002; Service & Kohonen, 1995). The first goal of the present study is to investigate whether the short-term effects of WM capacity found in these cross-sectional studies also reflect a long-term influence. The second objective is to examine whether processing information “strategically” can compensate for lack of capacity (capacity theory vs. processing efficiency hypothesis).
A pool of 110 beginning L2 learners of Spanish completed L2 performance tests during their second- and fourth-semester study of Spanish. WM was measured with Daneman & Carpenter’s (1980) Reading Span Test in the subjects’ native language (L1). Regressional analyses revealed no relation between WM and score gains in the L2 performance tests (grammar, reading), except for listening comprehension. Because other researchers have also found a lack of relation between the Reading Span Test and some aspects of L2 processing (e.g., Juffs, 2004), it has been suggested that the Reading Span Test may have biased the results as it may not measure processing for meaning (central executive). However, if this is the case, how can we explain the correlation between WM and L2 reading found in studies where the Reading Span Test was employed? A close look at these studies reveals that the test was always altered to force semantic processing (e.g., by adding a grammaticality judgment or a verification task).
Experiment 2.
To determine whether lack of relation between WM and L2 reading and grammatical development is caused by the Reading Span Test, 761 beginning L2 learners of Spanish completed a series of L2 performance tests (grammar, reading) at the beginning and at the end of a semester, Daneman & Carpenter’s (1980) Reading Span Test (processing = phonological loop), and Waters & Caplan’s (1996) WM test (processing = central executive). Regressional analyses showed that WM, when measured with a test that forces semantic processing, predicts L2 grammatical development and L2 reading. The use of particular processing strategies did not predict L2 performance. These results support the Capacity Theory and suggest the need for caution in using the Reading Span Test to measure WM’s central executive.
Dr. Shawn Loewen
The University of Auckland, New Zeland
Tuesday, November 8, 12:00- 2:00 pm, ICC 450
Incidental focul on form: its occurrence, characteristics, and effectiveness in the L2 classroom
Incidental focus on form: Its occurrence, characteristics, and effectiveness in the L2 classroom
Incidental focus on form draws learners' attention to linguistic items as they arise spontaneously, without prior planning, in meaning-focused L2 classroom activities. Such a combination of form and meaning is argued to be beneficial for L2 learners. In the present study, thirty-two hours of naturally-occurring, meaning-focused L2 lessons were observed in 12 different classes of young adults in a private language school in
The “biolinguistic” approach that has taken shape since the 1950s regards a person’s language as a “cognitive organ,” one of the subsystems that interact in human life. A language generates an infinite variety of structured expressions, each of which can be taken to be a set of instructions for the systems within which the language is embedded: the semantic systems that make generated expressions available for thought and for actions, such as referring to the world in certain ways; and the sensorimotor systems that produce and interpret external events. For any such system, we can identify three factors that enter into its growth in the individual: genetic endowment, experience, and independent principles that hold more generally. Insofar as the third factor is involved, the language will be efficiently designed to satisfy conditions imposed by these interface systems. We can regard an account of linguistic phenomena as principled if it derives them by third-factor principles satisfying interface conditions. Recent work indicates that principled explanation can go well beyond what had been assumed. We thereby learn more about what is distinctive to language and human capacities more generally, and may be able to approach the study of evolution of language in more productive ways.
Dr. Susi Wurmbrrand
University of Connecticut
Wednesday, November 9, 2005, 10:15- 11:30 am, ICC 462
Infinitives are tenseless
A common view since Stowell (1982) holds that infinitival complements can be tensed or tensless, and that the presence vs. absence of infinitival tense correlates iwth different syntactic structures: infinitives with an irrealis future interpretation involve control, whereas infinitives that lack this interpretation involve ECM/raising. In this talk, I argue that this view is empirically and theoretically untenable. First, I show that the presence vs. absence of an irrealis future interpretation does not correlate with the control vs. ECM/raising distinction, since there are i) future ECM infinitives and ii) control infinitives disallowing a future interpretation. Second, assuming that future is not a simple tense but composed of PRESENT tense plus a future modal woll, I arguethat all infinitives (including irrealis future infinitives) are tenseless; i.e., infinitives lack any semantic tense value (in particular, the PRESENT tense part of the future) and only involve the modal woll if they are interpreted as irrealis future infinitives. Evidence for the lack of tense will come from the semantic properties of infinitival 'tense': lack of double access readings and the locality of sequence-of-tense.
Dr. Julie Anne Legate
University of Delaware
Friday, November 18, 2006, 11:00- 12:30 pm, ICC 450
On Case and Case
Consider the following analysis of the English case system: in the syntax, T assigns structural nominative Case and v assigns structural accusative Case; these abstract Cases are realized morphologically through a (zero) default, because (for DPs) English lacks nominative case morphology and lacks accusative case morphology. This seems a thoroughly unremarkable analysis. However, this type of analysis has not been applied to ergative-absolutive languages. I argue that this has significantly impeded our understanding of ergativity, or rather "absolutivity". I show that a large class of ergative-absolutive languages differ from English only in having an inherent Case for the thematic subject, i.e. ergative. What is referred to as "absolutive" is in fact the default morphological realization of abstract nominative Case on intransitive subjects and abstract accusative Case on transitive objects. I demonstrate that recognizing this class of languages provides an explanation for a range of behavioural distinctions among ergative-absolutive languages. Finally, I show that it also provides an explanation for a striking pattern found in many Pama-Nyungan languages, in which the subparts of a single DP appear to bear different cases.
Dr. Deborah Chen Pichler
Galludet University
Tuesday, February 21, 2006, 10:15- 11:15 am, ICC 450
Acquiring ALS as an L1 (and a Few Thoughts on Acquiring ASL as an L2)
Interest in the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) has grown steadily over the last fifty years, leading to investigation of a wide variety of language development phenomena. However, ASL acquisition studies are still overwhelmingly based on very limited data, and the lack of a standardized coding/transcription system for signed languages often leads to contradictory conclusions and difficulties in comparison across studies. Furthermore, acquisition research has focused almost exclusively on L1 acquisition, with very little attention paid to the acquisition of ASL as an L2. Given the recent explosion in interest in ASL at high schools and universities across the US, this state of affairs is clearly problematic.
This talk will discuss the handful of studies on development of word order in L1 ASL, an area that nicely illustrates the above-mentioned in ASL L1 research. Different data collection methods and incomplete disclosure of coding criteria led to a situation in which the two existing studies on the topic appeared to fully contradict one another. Chen Pichler (2001) attempts to reconcile some of the apparent contradiction, while adding new data to the very limited corpus on which all ASL word order research to date has been based.
The talk will conclude with a brief report of new research on L2 acquisition of ASL by hearing learners. Results are from a recent pilot experiment run at Gallaudet as part of an on-going study of beginning ASL L2 phonology. While the findings of this first experiment are quite interesting, and look promising for continued investigation, their implications are still rather unclear, at least to the speaker. It is hoped that members of the audience, many of whom doubtless possess far greater expertise in the area of L2 acquisition than the speaker, will have helpful comments to contribute to the discussion.Despite various core similarities, agreement in Niger-Congo (NC) languages turns out to be systematically different from agreement in Indo-European (IE) languages in two respects. First, the agreed with NP must be higher in the structure than the agreeing head in NC languages, whereas this requirement does not hold in IE languages. Second, agreement in IE languages is subject to a case-valuation condition that does not hold in NC languages: a head can agree with an NP only if the head values the case of that NP or vice versa (IE only). I show how these two parameters account for systematic differences in the behavior of subject agreement, object agreement, agreement on prepositions, agreement on complementizers, and agreement on determiners in the two language families. I then discuss preliminary results of studying the typological distribution of these two parameters across a sample of 100 languages. In addition to other languages that behave like NC or like IE, I ! present Turkish as a possible language in which both conditions on agreement hold, and Georgian as a possible language in which neither condition on agreement holds. Since these conditions apply to the full inventory of functional heads in the languages in question, this investigation supports the idea that there are true syntactic parameters (“macroparameters”) that do not reduce to stipulations about the features borne by particular items in the lexicon.
Drs. Gennaro Chierchia, Robert M. Harnish, and Wayne Davis
Friday, March 17, 2006, 10:00- 3:00 pm
Workshop on Implicature
Tuesday, March 28, 2006, 11:30- 1:00 pm, ICC 450
Language, Gender ane Economies in Global Transitions: Provocative and Provoking Questions about How Gender is Articulated
The study of gender as socially constructed has been central to feminist discussions which distinguish between what is biologically shaped and socially shaped, between sex and gender. Increasingly, however, the utility of a focus on "social construction" has come under critique, with scholars calling for a fuller attention to sociohistorical and economic processes. This paper is devoted to systematically exploring ways to articulate studies of language and gender with studies of political economy, especially global economy, as it interrogates what notions of language, gender and global economy facilitate such articulations. It offers a critical overview of recent work on language, gender and globalization, and identifies five or six key contributions that sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists can offer to the growing social scientific literature on gender and globalization.
Dr. Mark Light
University of Iowa, Department of Linguistics; School of Library and Information Science; Computer Science Department
Friday, March 31, 2006, 11:40 am, ICC 450
Relation Extraction for Bioscience Literature Using Just Enough Parsing
This talk presents a method for extracting protein interactions that is accurate and efficient. It relies on a novel set of grammatical phrases that can be extracted using efficient partial parsing methods. This set of grammatical phrases has utility for other extraction tasks such as general relation extraction and scope of affect predicates (e.g., speculation).
Dr. Nkoko Kamwangamalu
Howard University
Tuesday, April 5, 2006, 11:40- 12:55 pm, ICC 450
Language Policy and Planning in Post Colonial Africa
This paper reports on the current state of language policy and planning in post-colonial Africa. It points out that although colonialism ended years ago, its legacy together with elite closure continues to impact on the language policies of most African states. The paper considers the prospects for indigenous African languages in the light of current theories of language economics, a field of study whose focus, as Grin (2001) explains, is on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the ways in which linguistic and economic variables influence one another. It concludes with a call for language policies that not only consider the development and promotion of African languages as an integral part of Africa's economic development program, but also ensure that former colonial languages function in addition to rather than at the expense of African languages and the majority of their speakers.
Dr. ZhaoHang Han
Columbia Univeristy, College of Arts and Humanities
Tuesday, April 18, 2006, ICC 450
Recasts and Grammatical Morphemes
SLA research has, over the past four decades, evolved into a pluralistic science with circumscribed boundaries. Within each of its paradigms (e.g., the generative linguistic, the connectionist, the interactionist), and driven by a particular theoretical orientation, researchers have pursued distinct paths towards identifying, describing, and explaining what often turns out to be a common set of phenomena. One such phenomenon that has recently drawn much attention cross-paradigmatically is L2 learners' lack of acquisition of grammatical morphemes - often irrespective of the typological distance of their L1s from the target language. In the research domain of interactional feedback, a similar phenomenon has also been noted and reported, that learners tend not to attend to corrective feedback on morphosyntactic errors, but they do attend to such feedback on lexical and phonological errors. As yet, however, interactional feedback vis-à-vis grammatical morphemes has not been directly examined. In this talk, I would therefore like to lead a discussion on this issue, with specific reference to articles and plurals. Following a brief overview and interpretation of the major explanations advanced from other theoretical camps, I will turn to the research on the efficacy of interactional feedback, in particular, of recasts, establishing and illustrating my arguments with episodes extracted from a recent corpus of EFL classroom interactions (Kim & Han, in preparation), and from other, published studies, where pertinent.
Dr. Bonnie Webber
University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics
Wednesday, April 19, 2006, 11:40- 12:55, ICC 450
Discourse Grammar from a Lexical Perspective
To date, Language Technology has derived its greatest success from words and word-level techniques. Since discourse is so much more than words, will it prove to be beyond the promises of this technology? This talk suggests that the answer is "no", arguing that the lexicon provides a robust basis for low-level discourse grammar. I start by reviewing some previous proposals regarding discourse structure and discourse grammar, and then describe a lexicalised discourse grammar modelled on Lexicalised Tree-Adjoining Grammar. What is attractive about this approach from a linguistic perspective, is the range of examples it is able to explain. On the other hand, interesting examples are not necessarily common examples. So to provide empirical grounding for such work on discourse, I am working with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania on what we call the "Penn Discourse TreeBank" (http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/~pdtb/). I will conclude the talk by describing features of this resource as of its first release.
Dr. Detmar Meurers
Ohio State University
Tuesday, April 25, 11:40- 12:55 pm, ICC 450
Using Natural Language Processing for Foreign Language Teaching: Pitfalls and Opportunities
Research since the 90s has shown that awareness of language forms and rules is important for an adult learner to successfully acquire a foreign language. But given the limited amount of time a teacher/tutor can spend with a student and the communicative focus of instruction, there are only few opportunities for fostering linguistic awareness through focus on form and providing individual feedback on errors. The situation appears ideally suited for Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems to step in, but traditional CALL systems lack the ability to analyze language and provide feedback on that basis. The more recent research on using natural language processing to obtain "intelligent" CALL (ICALL), however, has largely focused on specific technical issues without a clear link to the pedagogical needs and objectives in foreign language teaching. As a result, there are virtually no ICALL systems used in foreign language teaching today.
In this talk, I want to discuss some opportunities for using NLP for foreign language teaching that try to avoid this pitfall. I will primarily focus on an intelligent web-based workbook we are developing in support of the Portuguese Individualized Instruction program at the OSU Foreign Language Center.
Dr. Markus Dickinson
Georgetown University, Visiting Professor
Thursday, April 27, 2006, 11:40- 1:00 pm, ICC 450
Error Detection in Treebanks
Annotation errors in large corpora are harmful for both the training and evaluation of natural language processing technologies, but how do we systematicallly locate such errors? Using the idea that variation in annotation is likely erroneous, I will show how two different methods can successfully identify errors in syntactic annotation, and will demonstrate the impact of such errors on the training of parsing technologies.
The first method is the variation n-gram method, applicable to a variety of annotation types. By searching for identical strings which vary in their annotation, we are able to find erroneous mark-up. I will focus on how to adapt the method for syntactic annotation and the results from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) corpus, as part of the Penn Treebank 3 release.
The second method for detecting errors in syntactic annotation searches for variation in local trees, as potential violators of endocentricity (the idea that a head projects to a phrase). The immediate dominance (ID) variation method indexes every rule in a treebank by its daughters and identifies the daughters which have multiple mothers. Such ID variation is flagged as a potential error. After further identifying specific rule occurrences which are erroneous, we demonstrate the impact such errors have on the effectiveness of a grammar induction algorithm and subsequent parsing.