2006-2007

Dr. Jeffrey Lidz
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 from 1:15pm to 2:30pm, ICC 462 Competence and Performance in the Acquisition of Quantification

Whereas adults can assign either scopal interpretation to the quantificational NP (QNP) in sentences containing QNPs and negation like (1), 4-year-olds show a massive preference for surface scope (2) over inverse scope (3). (Musolino, Crain and Thornton 2000, Lidz and Musolino 2002, Musolino & Lidz 2006, Lidz & Musolino 2006). 1) Every horse didn't jump over the fence 2) Every horse is such that it didn't jump over the fence (i.e., none did) 3) Not every horse jumped over the fence (i.e., some did and some didn't) In this talk we investigate the factors (prosodic, syntactic, pragmatic, parsing) responsible for children's overly narrow interpretations. We show that while children do have adult-like syntactic representations of such sentences, deficiencies in the domains of pragmatics and sentence parsing lead to their failure to access inverse scope interpretations.

Drs. Sjef Barbiers, John Beavers and Jan Pieter Kunst
Friday, November 10, 2006 from 10:15am to 5:00pm First Workshop on Dialect Syntax

ICC 425, McCarthy Room
10:15 Raffaella Zanuttini, Georgetown University
Introductory remarks
10:30 Sjef Barbiers, Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam)
'Impossible and unrealized syntactic structures'
11:30 John Beavers, Georgetown University
'Expressive capability trumps syntax: A case study in colloquial English pronominals'

ICC 450
2:15 Jan Pieter Kunst, Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam)
'Technical aspects of dialect syntax research: The Syntactic Atlas of Dutch dialects'
3:15-3:30 Coffee Break
3:30-5:00 Discussion continues

Complete abstracts may be found here: http://www1.georgetown.edu/departments/linguistics/14467.html

This is the first workshop on dialect syntax hosted at Georgetown; it is sponsored by the Linguistics Department with help from the Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam). The day will be devoted to a series of discussions on the study of the syntax of non-standard varieties, or dialects. Each talk will last 45 minutes, followed by a question/answer period.

The first talk will be by Sjef Barbiers, from the Meertens Instituut, project manager of the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/projecten/sand/sandeng.html), and now also of the European Dialect Syntax project sponsored by the European Science Foundation. He will briefly illustrate these projects and then present some of the empirical and theoretical findings that have emerged from the work on the syntactic atlas of Dutch dialects.

The second talk will be by John Beavers, visiting Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown (http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jtb44/index.html). He will present some research he's been doing (in collaboration with Andrew Koontz-Garboden) on a syntactic property that appears in many colloquial varieties of English, including his own Texas English.

The third talk will be by Jan Pieter Kunst, the software developer for the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects project; he will discuss issues related to the design and implementation of the database that contains the empirical findings of the research on the syntax of Dutch dialects.  

Dr. Silvina Montrul
Monday, November 20, 2006 from 4:15pm to 5:45pm
Incomplete Acquisition in Adult Bilingualism

In this talk, I address the morphosyntactic development of two types of adult bilinguals with low-intermediate proficiency in Spanish (i.e., incomplete learners)—L2 learners and heritage speakers—who differ with respect of age of onset of acquisition of Spanish. Heritage speakers received input at home in early childhood whereas L2 learners start acquisition after puberty. Comparison of the linguistic behavior of these two types of learners is crucial to inform classic—and ongoing—debates in SLA theory on the one hand, as well as the emerging field of heritage language acquisition, on the other. For example, some linguistic and cognitive theories of SLA maintain that the acquisition of an L2 by adults and the acquisition of an L1 by children differ in fundamental ways, invoking maturational constraints. A critical/sensitive period would explain why the outcome of L1 acquisition is complete and successful while that of L2 acquisition typically is not (DeKeyser 2003; Long 2000). Linguistic theories of L2 competence maintaining that adult L2 learners differ from monolingual and bilingual children with respect to access to Universal Grammar (Bley-Vroman 1989; Clahsen & Muysken 1989; Meisel 1997) predict that bilinguals who acquired two languages in childhood should show evidence of early parameter setting in their two languages, whereas postpuberty L2 learners should be unable to reset parameters in the L2. By contrast, for the Full Access position (White 2003), parameter resetting by adult L2 learners is possible regardless of age of acquisition. To address these hypotheses, I will discuss results of ongoing experiments on three aspects of object expression in Spanish: object clitic placement, clitic left dislocations, and differential object marking. Object clitics and their correct placement are acquired around the age of 2 by monolingual Spanish children, and so is differential object marking, while clitic left dislocations, being part of the left-periphery, emerge by the age of 3. It follows that heritage speakers who acquired and used Spanish early in childhood should have solid knowledge of clitics and word order, even if English is now their stronger language. By contrast, if L2 learners have no access to Universal Grammar, and cannot transfer clitic projections or differential object marking from English, they should be unable to acquire these structures and clitic left dislocations in Spanish. Results of 34 L2 learners, 34 proficiency-matched heritage speakers and a control group of 22 Spanish native speakers on two off-line grammaticality judgment tasks and a on-line processing task showed selective advantages for heritage speakers, suggesting that age of acquisition alone may not the best predictor for these findings. I discuss implications for theories of SLA and linguistic theory.

Dr. Colleen Cotter
Monday, November 27, 2006 from 3:30pm to 5:30pm
Professor Colleen Cotter (former journalist, GU Faculty member, and current Linguistics Professor at Queen Mary College, London) will be talking about her experiences in journalism, as a linguist, and how to combine the two.

Dr. Jenefer Philp
Tuesday, December 5, 2006 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Child's play? The role of maturity and context in second language acquisition'

 This paper considers the distinctive features of child second language acquisition, as outlined through previous research. Some of these features are aspects of the nature of childhood: maturational factors associated with cognitive and social development. These change in nature through the different stages of childhood. Other features are associated with the particular social contexts of children, and their roles and experiences within these settings. This chapter reflects on the ways in which the nature of language learning differs for each of these contexts; for example, the interactions of home differ from those of school; and within each context, for example, language learning in foreign language differs from second language instructional settings. The chapter concludes with a discussion of differences between adult and child L2acquisition and problems associated with the application of findings of research on adult L2 acquisition to child L2 learning.

Dr. Adele Goldberg
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 5:45pm
Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language

We clearly retain a great deal of specific information about how individual lexical items can be used. At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude that speakers do not form generalizations, that such generalizations are merely epiphenomenal. Far from being an arbitrary collection of stipulated descriptions, our knowledge of linguistic constructions, like our knowledge generally, forms an integrated and motivated network. The constructionist approach to grammar allows both broad generalizations and more limited patterns to be analyzed and accounted for fully. In particular, constructionist approaches are generally usage-based: facts about the actual use of linguistic expressions such as frequencies and individual patterns that are fully compositional are recorded alongside more traditional linguistic generalizations (Langacker 1988). Instances are represented at some level of abstraction due to selective encoding, and generalizations over instances are made as well. Insights gained from research in general categorization can shed light on how learners go from the specific to the more general. My presentation will focus on several such factors that promote and constrain generalizations: a) skewed input, b) degree of coverage and c) statistical preemption. Profile A prominent cognitive linguist, Dr. Adele Goldberg is one of the principal founders of (Cognitive) Construction Grammar approaches to language. Her most recent book, Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language, presents compelling evidence in favor of a 'usage-based' model of language acquisition that incorporates both item-based knowledge and broad generalizations manifested in learning grammatical constructions--conventionalized parings of form and semantic/discourse function. After receiving her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1992, Dr. Goldberg taught at UC San Diego and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before moving to Princeton in 2004. She was honored to be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, CA) and won the Gustave O. Arlt Book Award in the Humanities for her first book, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Her research focus is on the psychology of language, including theoretical and experimental aspects of grammar and its representation, acquisition of form-function correspondences, and syntactic priming. http://www.princeton.edu/~adele/

Dr. Christine Mallinson
Thursday, March 1, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm
'Katrina That Bitch!': Hegemonic Representations of Women's Sexuality on Hurricane Katrina Souvenir T-Shirts

This study examines hegemonic representations of women's sexuality on Hurricane Katrina souvenir t-shirts displayed in New Orleans, Louisiana, in March 2006. Previous cultural research has conceptualized the t-shirt as an 'open text,' (Crane 2000) upon which messages are a type of 'personal graffiti' (Heeren 1980) that reveal attitudes and norms of the individual and associated groups. Adopting this approach, this paper analyzes 25 slogans that depict a sexually aggressive and destructive 'Katrina' to the public. In the analysis, four linguistic strategies are prominent. The use of sexual slang (Schultz 1973, Sutton 1995), combined with the use of the active voice to attribute sex acts to 'female' (but not 'male') hurricanes, constructs a gendered Hurricane Katrina as aggressive and promiscuous. At the same time, the use of expletives helps cast the presumed wearer or 'voice' of the t-shirts as being that of a man (de Klerk 1992, 1997; Coates 1993; Sutton 1995; Sapolsky and Kaye 2005), thereby demonstrating the invisibility of woman as both subject and victim. Finally, the jokes made as part of the Hurricane Katrina slogans are shown to parallel other joke cycles in the genre of disaster humor (Smyth 1986, Oring 1987), and results from brief interviews with 26 passersby on Decatur Street in New Orleans support this claim. Results from this study thus speak to the construction of hegemonic discourses about gender and sexuality via media messages that normalize women's sexual degradation, establish the heterosexual man as the universal subject and victim, and engage linguistic 'therapies' like jokes to cope with uncertainty, including disasters such as hurricanes.

Dr. Andrew Salway
Thursday, March 15, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm
Contributions of a Computational Linguistic Approach to Narrative Analysis

Recent developments in narratology have shifted interest onto the kinds of information that are required to understand a story. In this context, this talk will consider how a computational linguistic approach can contribute to narrative analysis, both in the development of narrative theory, and in the development of software tools that extract story-related information from narrative texts. The talk will concentrate on the example of audio description which is emerging as an intriguing new text type with social import. Audio description is a spoken account of on-screen action that accompanies an increasing number of films – in cinemas and on DVD releases – for the benefit of blind and visually impaired audiences; in the USA it is also referred to as 'described video'. In effect, the part of the story told by the moving image is re-told in words which are integrated with the film's dialogue. Audio description refers to a restricted domain, i.e. whatever is depicted in films, and it is scripted and recorded by trained professionals following style guidelines. The work presented in this talk considers audio description as a sublanguage and proceeds to investigate the kinds of information about a film's story that it provides. The approach taken is an automated analysis to identify unusually frequent and characteristic word sequences and paradigms in a corpus of audio description scripts, with reference to a general language corpus. On the basis of this formal analysis, common kinds of information required for story understanding are suggested, and templates and heuristics for an information extraction system are defined. The findings from this work, and from similar analyses of other types of narrative texts, will be discussed with respect to the development of narrative theory using corpus analysis methods. We will also outline some computer applications for narrative-based film retrieval and browsing, and for assisting in the production of audio description.

Dr. Maria Polinsky
Thursday, March 22, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm
A-Complementous Contemplation

This talk addresses the following general question: What is the range of options available for expressing an embedded proposition and how are these options constrained by the grammar? We argue that there are languages like Adyghe (NW Caucasian) that lack complement clauses and make use of a relativization strategy to convey propositional content. What would be a complement clause in English (bracketed string in (1)) is replaced in Adyghe by what descriptively appears to be a complex DP with overt case and tense marking (bracketed string in (2)). (1) I told you [that the boy had gone to school]. (2) [B’aler SkolEm zEre-KWe-Re]-r we-S-{Wa-R boy to_school EMBEDDED-go-PAST-ABS 2SG.OBL-1SG.ERG-say-PAST ‘I told you that the boy had gone to school.’ We propose an analysis of such complex DPs as containing relative clauses. In particular, we argue that (a) the overt case marker takes a complex NP with a null head combining with a relative clause; (b) the relative clause contains a silent operator and trace (the head raising analysis is shown to be untenable). We present empirical arguments in support of both of these analytical components and against alternative analyses. Our analysis also accounts for the ban on sluicing in Adyghe and, since Adyghe allows for only relative complementation, lends further empirical support to the notion that relative and non-relative complementation are different (Rizzi 1990; Lasnik and Saito 1992). In addition to expressing embedded propositions, Adyghe also uses complex DPs with a relative clause attached to express embedded questions (these will also be discussed in the talk). On the semantic side, we tentatively suggest that Adyghe complex DPs with a null head and a relative clause have the same denotations as complex DPs with a complement clause in English and other familiar languages. Thus, a more literal translation of (2) above would be I told you [the fact that the boy had gone to school]. However, in Adyghe the relationship between the null head and the embedded clause is one of modification, not complementation. If this analysis is on the right track, the range of DPs available for expressing propositions is broader than is usually thought: it includes regular nominalizations, complex DPs with complement clauses and complex DPs with relative clauses attached. We conclude with a tentative proposal on the ways to constrain parametric variation between English-type languages and Adyghe-type languages.


Dr. Zoltan Kovesces
Monday, March 26, from 1:15 to 2:30
Universality and Cultural Variation in Metaphor

Cognitive linguists have so far paid a great deal of attention to the remarkable universality of many conceptual metaphors. However, their theories fail to account for the equally impressive diversity of metaphorical conceptualization both across and within cultures. This talk presents an attempt to lay down the foundations of a theory of metaphor that is capable of simultaneously accounting for both universality and variation in metaphor.
Handout in PDF



Dr. Ron Butters
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 from 4:00pm to 5:15pm
The discourse of operatives working to catch sexual predators in IM messages

This presentation builds upon established discourse analysis models and methodology (in the work of, e.g, Roger Shuy and Malcolm Coulthard) for analyzing putatively incriminating linguistic evidence, in this case Instant Message exchanges between (a) unsuspecting adult men of various ages (b) adult males who were pretending to be minors. The cases, many of which led to felony sexual enticement and solicitation charges and convictions, are among hundreds of 'mark-and-decoy' IM conversations instigated by agents of Perverted Justice, a vigilante organization dedicated to the exposure, arrest, and conviction of 'sexual predators'. 'Dateline', the NBC news magazine, has paid Perverted Justice hundreds of thousands of dollars for the use of the material collected by the online decoys; 'Dateline' reporters have then conducted surprise 'interviews' upon some of the marks as they arrived at what they were led to believe were the homes of the 'youths'. The web site Perverted-Just
ice.com publishes transcripts of over 150 such IM exchanges.
Anyone who has seen the 'Dateline' broadcasts may wonder what sort of defense could be possible in the face of such overwhelming-seeming evidence of sexual crimes against underage youths. There may be no disputing the legitimacy of the convictions in the cases under analysis here (in which the marks were typically found guilty and sentenced to as much as six years in federal prison). Even so, linguistic interpretation of the of the IMs and the 'Dateline' broadcast--none of which was presented to any of the courts--might well have altered the outcome of at least some of the cases.



Dr. Jason Kandybowicz
Thursday, April 12, 2007 from 11:40am to 12:55pm

Historically, the notion of EDGE as a grammatically sensitive domain has received strong support from processes and interactions occurring in both the morphological and phonological wings of grammar. Recently, edges have come to play a prominent role in syntactic analysis as well. As with any theoretical innovation or paradigm shift, two crucial issues are raised. First, how principled is the innovation? Second, what advantages does the new conceptualization offer over existing accounts? This talk addresses the second issue by way of two case studies of edge sensitivity in Nupe, a Benue-Congo language spoken in central Nigeria. We show that reference to edges in both the narrow syntax and at the syntax-phonology interface provides principled explanations of two long-standing unsolved puzzles in the Nupe literature. The argument is thus that a syntactic theory that embraces edges is indeed desirable from an analytical standpoint in so far as it provides for satisfactory formulations of anomalous phenomena that were previously unavailable.
The first case study showcases narrow syntactic edge sensitivity. A puzzle perennially observed in the Nupe literature is that extraction from tensed clauses is possible, but extraction from perfect clauses is not (Smith 1967, Kandybowicz & Baker 2003).

(1) a. Ke Musa è/à pa __ o?
[Present/Future TP]
what Musa PRS/FUT pound o
‘What is Musa pounding?’/‘What will Musa pound?’


b. *Ke Musa á pa __ o?

[Perfect TP]

what Musa PRF pound o

‘What has Musa pounded?’

We argue that the existence of EDGE FEATURES (Chomsky 2005) allows for an elegant solution to this empirical problem. At the same time, we show that the problem of Nupe perfect extraction sheds light on the very nature of the edge features that are borne by strong phase heads, i.e. those features responsible for driving cyclic movement to phase edge positions in compliance with the PHASE IMPENETRABILITY CONDITION (Chomsky 2001). Contra Chomsky (2005), we argue that edge features are not inherent properties of strong phase heads (as least for the v phase), but are rather derivative properties inherited by way of edge features already present on the lexical verb which are transmitted to the phase head via head movement.
The second case study showcases sensitivity to the edge at the syntax-phonology interface. A-bar movement in Nupe shows clear Comp-trace effects.

(2) *Zèé Musa gàn [gànán __ nì enyà] o?

who Musa say COMP beat drum o

‘Who did Musa say beat the drum?’

The puzzle in this case is that a seemingly unrelated range of options exist in the language for averting Comp-trace effects. These options include the following: phonological reduction of C0; existence of TP-adjoined adverbials; resumption of the displaced occurrence; and spelling out of tense markers. We show that Nupe Comp-trace effects reduce to a violation of the INTONATIONAL PHRASE EDGE GENERALIZATION (An 2006), which requires that the mapping from syntax to phonology result in an output in which the edge of every intonational phrase is phonetically marked. The seemingly disparate cases of Comp-trace resolution previously mentioned follow naturally as a consequence.



Dr. Trude Heift
Tuesday, April 17, from 11:40 to 12:55
Learner Responses to Corrective Feedback for Spelling Errors in CALL

Communicating linguistic errors to foreign language learners has been subject to fairly long-standing controversies over whether the provision of corrective feedback is necessary or helpful for L2 development. Ferris (2004), in reviewing the grammar correction debate in L2 writing suggests that longitudinal studies are needed to provide evidence for the efficiency of error correction over time. Russell Valezy and Spada (2006) also conclude that too little empirical research has been done on the effectiveness of corrective feedback but that the evidence so far supports the assumption that corrective feedback does work. However, many variables are involved and assessing their impact only adds to the puzzle.

This presentation focuses on error correction and corrective feedback in a Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) environment. More specifically, it describes a study that investigates learner responses to three distinct types of corrective feedback for misspellings produced by English learners of German. 28 beginner and intermediate students used The E-Tutor, an online parser-based CALL system for German that recorded student interaction with the software over 15 weeks. The study considered a corpus of 1268 misspellings for which one of the feedback types provided correction suggestions for the misspelling in addition to highlighting the error in the learner’s input. Study results indicate that, while the number of correct responses was significantly higher when the system provided a correction list, there was also significantly less learner uptake for the feedback type that did not provide any correction suggestions. Moreover, learners were far more successful in submitting the target word if it appeared among the correction suggestions. Finally, the order in which the words appear in the suggestion list seems to be a determining factor for students favouring one word over another.

This study supports previous findings (Heift. 2004, 2006) that suggest that there are significant differences in the way students respond to different types of corrective feedback in a CALL environment although this study did not find any significant differences with respect to gender and proficiency level. With the ultimate goal of understanding how corrective feedback intersects with learners’ working styles, satisfaction and success in CALL, this presentation will suggest areas for future development of error correction and corrective feedback for CALL.

References
Ferris, D. R. (2004). The "Grammar Correction" Debate in L2 Writing: Where Are We, and Where Do We Go from Here? (and What Do We Do in the Meantime ...?). Journal of Second Language Writing, 13, 49-62.
Heift, T. (2004). Corrective Feedback and Learner Uptake in CALL. ReCALL, 15(2), 416-431.
Heift, T. (2006). Context-sensitive Help in CALL. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 19(2+3), 243-259.
Russell Valezy, J., & Spada, N. (2006). The Effectiveness of Corrective Feedback for Second Language Acquisition: A Meta-Analysis of the Research. In J. M. Norris & L. Ortega (Eds.), Synthesizing Research on Language Learning and Teaching (pp. 133-164). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.


Dr. Michael Israel
Wednesday, April 18, from 5:45 to 8:10
Putting It All Together: Analogical Processes in the Acquisition of Argument Structure

 Recent work on syntactic development has made the case that children's knowledge of abstract grammatical patterns emerges gradually from their experience with a rich assortment of item-based constructions. (Tomasello 2000, 2003; Goldberg 2006).

Most of the evidence for this view has come from observations of what young children do not do with language\either from experiments showing that very young children lack some of the productivity typical of older speakers' language use (Abott-Smith et al. 2001; Akhtar & Tomasello 1997), or from corpus studies suggesting that young children's complex utterances may be produced by relatively simple processes of merging or combining previously experienced utterances (Lieven et al. 2003; Dabrowska & Lieven 2005).

In this talk I seek to bolster the case for a usage-based theory of language acquisition by examining some of the ways that children actually do use language creatively. In particular, I will argue that the types of errors which children make with argument structure constructions reflect roughly three stages of development consistent with the predictions of a usage-based grammar. In the earliest stage, children's errors include strange word orders and patterns of combination, which suggests that that children have not yet acquired any entrenched patterns on which to model their utterances. Later, once children begin to use constructions more productively, their utterances tend to be organized around one or a few item specific constructions. Finally, as children attain some critical mass of item-specific constructions in their fourth year, novel utterances emerge which reflect low level analogies across highly entrenched formulae. One consequence of this is that there are striking family resemblances in the idiosyncratic creative uses of different children.

I will argue that these results provide strong support for the usage-based view that abstract grammatical knowledge may be acquired in much the same way that other conceptual categories are learned. At the same time, however, I will argue that the developmental patterns observed here suggest that children rely on certain sorts of abstract semantic categories and simple syntactic abilities from a very early age.

Profile
Dr. Michael Israel has published extensively on issues of motivated form-function relationships and first language acquisition in such journals as Cognitive Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Berkeley Linguistics Society, and Linguistics and Philosophy , as well as in numerous edited books. His particular areas of research center on the phenomenon of polarity sensitivity and the study of child language acquisition from a functional perspective. His recent and forthcoming papers include: "Mental spaces and mental verbs in early child English" (to appear in Tyler, Kim & Takada (eds.), Language in the Context of Use: Usage-based Approaches to Language and Language Learning ), "Saying less and meaning less" (in Birner & Ward (eds.), Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning , 2006), and "Common sense and 'literal meaning'" (in Coulson & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.), The Literal and Non-literal in Language and Thought , 2005).
Dr. Israel received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1998, with his dissertation, The Rhetoric of Grammar: Scalar Reasoning and Polarity Sensitivity . Before joining the Department of English at the University of Maryland, he served as director of the ReVerb project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, from 1999 to 2001. His first book, The Least Bits of Grammar: Pragmatics, Polarity, and the Logic of Scales, is forthcoming later this year from Cambridge University Press.