Announcements
- Congratulations to Joshua Katz on being named in The Best 300 Professors (Random House / Princeton Review, $19.99).
In its profile on Professor Katz, The Princeton Review editors cite that Katz wants “to teach facts, to inspire wide-ranging, interdisciplinary knowledge and approaches, and to foster good arguments,” meaning “both that I want my students to appreciate a logical mode of argumentation and that I want them to engage in interesting fights, with me and with one another.” The write-up also includes comments from Princeton students of Professor Katz surveyed by The Princeton Review who described him as "one of the finest professors Princeton has to offer." Katz is the only faculty member from Princeton to make the list.
The Princeton Review is not affiliated with Princeton University and is not a magazine.
- The Program in Linguistics is pleased to announce that linguistics concentrator Erik Zyman '12 has been awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship for graduate study in linguistics.
- The linguistics program is pleased to announce that Leonard Babby's book, The Syntax of Argument Structure (Cambridge University Press, 2009) has been awarded the 2011 AATSEEL book prize in linguistics.
Events for 2011-2012 - Spring
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Lunch Talk: Thursday, March 1st, 12:00pm, Ian Wong, Princeton University Independent Concentrator in Linguistics, Class of ’12 “Lexical Case Phenomena in Icelandic”
209 Scheide Caldwell House
Lexical case has presented many challenges to prevailing theories of Case. The rich lexical case phenomena in Icelandic in particular have been subject to many decades of extensive research and were critical in the development of modern conceptions of Case and agreement. In this talk, I will give a brief descriptive overview of the main lexical case patterns in Icelandic. In addition, the important empirical conclusions regarding the interplay between case assignment, feature checking, agreement and noun licensing will be discussed within the framework of the Minimalist Program. Through the analysis of specific examples, detailed mechanisms regulating the derivation of all attested case frames will be developed into a single theoretical model of Case. -
Lunch Talk: Thursday, March 8th, 12:00pm, Carlos Fasola, Rutgers University, “The Syntactic Structure of Mapudungun Complement Clauses”
209 Scheide Caldwell HouseIn this talk I present a syntactic analysis of complement clauses in Mapudungun, an isolate, Native American language spoken in Chile and Argentina. These clauses resemble Noun Phrases in several respects which I ultimately deem to be superficial. I present arguments that complement clauses in Mapudungun are not nominalizations of any sort but rather have full clausal structure. Along the way I contrast the behavior of Mapudungun complement clauses with various species of nominalizations in English. -
Lecture: Tuesday, March 13th, 4:30pm, Richard Kayne, New York University, “Comparative Syntax and English Is To”
Richard Kayne, New York University, Silver Professor of Linguistics103 Scheide Caldwell HouseDescriptive adequacy in the case of comparative syntax involves discovering generalizations over cross-linguistic differences and similarities. Explanatory adequacy in the case of comparative syntax involves trying to understand, in general UG terms or beyond, why a given cross-linguistic correlation should hold in the first place. The primary importance of comparative syntax lies in the fact that it provides us with new kinds of evidence bearing on questions concerning the general character of the language faculty. Figuring out what cross-linguistic generalizations hold and why exactly they hold will invariably help us to narrow down the set of hypotheses that we entertain about the language faculty. In this talk, I will be interested in looking at the implications of English is to (as in You are to return by midnight), from a (Romance and Germanic) comparative perspective. -
Lecture: Tuesday, March 27th, 4:30pm, Angelo Mercado, Grinnell College, “The Problem(s) of Archaic Latin Versification”
Angelo Mercado, Grinnell College, Assistant Professor of Classics010 East Pyne -
Lunch Talk: Thursday, April 5th, 12:00pm, Erik Zyman, Princeton University Independent Concentrator in Linguistics, Class of ’12, “Remarks on the Relationship Between Information Structure and Syntax in P’urhépecha”
Room 16 Joseph Henry House"Free word order" languages pose a problem for the traditional hypothesis that the semantic interpretation of an utterance bears a tight relation to its syntactic structure. But the problem can be solved if word-order variation in these languages is not just random but instead reflects information structure (IS). This study tested whether IS considerations can explain the high degree of constituent-order variation found in P'urhépecha, a language isolate of the state of Michoacán in central-western Mexico. First, the syntax used in information-structurally neutral contexts was explored (in particular, the headedness of various phrases). Then, the analysis of Capistrán (2002), which ascribes most or all syntactic variability in P'urhépecha to IS, was tested against a ten-text corpus and found to be highly accurate. Particular attention was given to the constituent orders OV and VS. Two major findings were: 1) In SOV clauses, O is focused or otherwise prominent in any of a number of ways, as claimed by Capistrán. 2) VS has an IS interpretation not discussed by Capistrán (but cf. Soto Bravo 1982): V = focused or new; S = old and hence backgrounded. Finally, syntactic analysis suggested that the O in OV and the V in VS occupy different focus positions. Overall, the corpus analysis confirmed the hypothesis that P'urhépecha surface constituent order is largely determined by IS. -
Lunch Talk: Thursday, April 12th, 12:00pm, Laura Suttle, Princeton University, “Learning What Not to Say: Constraints on the Acquisition of Argument Structure”
209 Scheide Caldwell House -
Lecture: Wednesday, April 25th, 4:30pm, Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley, “Next Generation Brainstorming: Robots, Gardens and Social Media”
Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley, Professor of New MediaSponsored by the Aesthetics, Language and Media Group, Princeton University105 Computer SciencePoster
Amazingly, the process of Brainstorming hasn't really changed since the term was coined in 1953. Yet everything else has: we're facing enormous problems in economics, politics, healthcare, and the environment. Can Social Media tools be adapted to help us work together to discover solutions? My students and I have been working on a new approach to online brainstorming at UC Berkeley. To achieve scale and speed, our Collaborative Discovery Engine employs techniques from robotics: non-linear spatial models that present a broad diversity of ideas and higher-order statistical filtering that rapidly extract the most valuable ideas (the signals) from the noise. Our describe the system and how it is being used by the US Department of State, General Motors, Unilever, and Humana. -
Lunch Talk: Thursday, April 26th, 12:00pm, Anna Tchetchetkine, Princeton University Independent Concentrator in Linguistics, Class of ’12, “Russian-English Codeswitching in a Group of Russian-American Teenagers: Individual and Situational Factors”
Room 16 Joseph Henry House -
Lecture: Thursday, April 26th, 4:30pm, David Kemmerer, Purdue University, "The cross-linguistic prevalence of SOV and SVO word orders reflects the sequential and hierarchical representation of action in Broca’s area"
David Kemmerer, Professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing sciences, Purdue
209 Scheide Caldwell House
Despite the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the language sciences, so far relatively little effort has been devoted to exploring potential connections between typology and neuroscience. To illustrate some of the insights that can be gained from pursuing such an integration, this paper focuses on one of the most well established and frequently cited typological generalizations, namely that in the vast majority of human languages, the basic word order is either SOV (about 48%) or SVO (about 41%). It has been suggested that these strong tendencies can be explained cognitively in terms of the prototypical transitive action scenario, in which an animate agent acts forcefully on an inanimate patient to induce a change of state. Two forms of iconicity are especially relevant: first, because the agent is at the head of the causal chain that affects the patient, subjects usually precede objects; and second, because it is the agent’s action, rather than the agent per se, that changes the state of the patient, verbs and objects are usually adjacent. The purpose of this paper is to show that this account converges with, and hence receives further support from, recent research on how actions are represented in the brain. Specifically, several lines of evidence are reviewed which suggest that Broca's area plays a pivotal role in schematically representing the sequential and hierarchical organization of goal-directed bodily movements, not only when they are performed and perceived in the real world, but also when they are conceptualized and symbolically expressed as transitive clauses. Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that the most cross-linguistically prevalent word order patterns reflect the most natural ways of linearizing and nesting the core conceptual components of actions in Broca's area.
Past Events
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Lecture: Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 4:30pm, Barbara H. Partee, University of Massachussetts, Amherst, "The History of Formal Semantics: Influences from and to Linguistics and Philosophy"
Barbara H. Partee, University of Massachussetts, Amherst
010 East Pyne
Poster
Formal semantics and pragmatics as they have developed over the last 40+ years have been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians, among others, and in turn have had noticeable effects on developments in syntax, philosophy of language, computational linguistics, and cognitive science. In this talk I’ll set some background and then reflect on developments in semantics in the 1960’s and 70’s in linguistics and philosophy, and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics from there. I’ll discuss innovations, key players, and leading ideas that have shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax, to pragmatics, and to the philosophy of language over the decades. And I’ll describe some of the ways that advances and debates in formal semantics and pragmatics have been connected with foundational issues in linguistic theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. This talk is connected with a project I’ve begun to write a book on the history of formal semantics; feedback and additional perspectives on the topic will be welcome.
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Lunch Talk: Thursday, November 10, 2011 12:00pm, Vsevolod Kapatsinsky, Princeton University, Visiting Professor, "When and Why We (fail to) Extend Morphophonological Alternations"
Vsevolod Kapatsinsky, Princeton University, Visiting Professor
Room 16 Joseph Henry House
Poster
Suppose that you are exposed to a language in which 'k' becomes 'ch' before the plural suffix -i. If you are like most English speakers acquiring a miniature language in the lab, then you will most likely fail to learn that -i changes 'k's if most of the time it does not attach to 'k's (i.e., hearing that the plural of 'lit' is 'liti' predisposes learners to infer that the plural of 'swik' is 'swiki' and not 'swichi'). This finding suggests that a suffix that gains in productivity and comes to attach to stems with a wider variety of phonological shapes is likely to stop triggering previously productive phonological alternations, a prediction that is confirmed by naturalistic data from Russian, where k-->ch is only semi-productive before the suffixes that tend not to attach to k-final stems (the verbal stem extension -i and diminutive -ik) but fully productive before suffixes that do usually attach to k-final stems (the diminutives -ek and -ok). Another interesting result from the lab is that examples of -i simply attaching to 'ch' (e.g., lich-lichi) increase the productivity of k-->ch/_i and t-->ch/_i despite featuring no stem change. This suggests a reliance on generalizations about what outputs are like ('plurals often do and therefore should end in 'chi''). Examples of ch-->chi help unobserved stem changes more than observed ones. If you have heard 'look-loochi', then hearing 'lich-lichi' will help 'loochi' over 'looti' but not over 'looki', suggesting that weak input-output mappings are particularly helped by an infusion of extra support for the output. I argue that, while problematic for rules, constraints against unobserved sequences, minimization of competition, and non-probabilistic theories of phonology, the results are naturally accounted for in a tweaked version of Harmonic Grammar. -
Lunch Talk: Thursday, October 20th, 2011 12:00 pm
Evelina Fedorenko, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Evelina Fedorenko, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, "A Novel Framework for a Neural Architecture of Language"
Room 16 Joseph Henry House
In this talk I will argue that high-level linguistic processing is accomplished by the joint engagement of two functionally and computationally different brain systems: i) the classic "language regions" on the lateral surfaces of left frontal and temporal lobes that appear to be quite functionally specialized for linguistic processing, showing little or no response to arithmetic, general working memory, cognitive control or music (e.g., Fedorenko et al., in press; Monti et al., 2009), and ii) the fronto-parietal network, a set of regions that is engaged across a wide range of cognitive demands (e.g., Duncan, 2010). Most past neuroimaging work on language processing has not explicitly distinguished between these two systems, especially in the frontal lobes, where subsets of each system reside side by side within the region referred to as "Broca's area". Using methods which surpass traditional methods in sensitivity and functional resolution - i.e., identifying key brain regions functionally in each individual brain (Fedorenko et al., 2010; Saxe et al., 2006) - we are beginning to characterize the important roles played by both domain-specific and domain-general brain regions in language understanding and production.
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Lecture: Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 4:30 pm, Tim Barnes, "Aorist and Augment: New Light on the Early History of the Greek Verb"
Tim Barnes, Harvard University
010 East Pyne
In 1932 J.Wackernagel delivered his famous lecture on ‘Indogermanische Dichtersprache’ (Kleine Schriften I, 186-204), in which he identified four areas in which early Greek and Indo-Iranian poetic texts displayed commonalities so striking as to suggest a shared tradition. One of these was that in both Homeric Greek and Vedic Sanskrit we find, descriptively, some fluidity in the appearance or not of the augment in past tense verbal forms. The Indo-Iranian situation has since been clarified by Karl Hoffmann, who set up a separate ‘injunctive’ mood to account for these unaugmented preterites, whose functions he described in meticulous detail. It has often been suggested that Greek too – where absence of augment cannot be correlated with any such functional distinctions – once had such an ‘injunctive’. In my talk I provide further evidence – from Pindar’s Greek – for believing this. The ‘injunctive’, however, is such an unusual and evanescent category that it has failed to command the assent of all scholars. In the second half of my talk, I provide a framework for understanding just how the category arose.
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Linguistics Open House: Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 4 – 5 pm
Joseph Henry House sun porch
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Lecture: Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 4:00pm, Friedemann Pulvermuller, Cambridge University “Can the Brain Speak to Questions About Language?”
0-S-9 Green Hall
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Lunch Talk: Monday, May 16, 2011, noon, Ioanna Sitaridou, “Syntactic Microvariation in Complementation Strategies in Pontic Greek Varieties”
103 Scheide Caldwell House
The present paper constitutes a first attempt at a syntactic analysis of complementation strategies in different varieties of Pontic Greek (PG) (but see also Drettas 1997; Mackridge 1987, 1995; Tombaidis 1996; Janse 2006), quite an understudied syntactic area of Pontic Greek, and a relatively underexplored area in the study of Greek dialects in general (but see Nicholas 2001 for a survey; Ralli 2008; Roussou 2008). Drawing data from two different varieties of PG namely, Northern Pontic Greek (NPG) and Romeyka of Of (ROf), we explore all possible patterns in the syntax of complementation. Methodology: Original data collection involving structured questionnaires (orally administered) from two locations so far: Northern Greece and Of (north-eastern Turkey). Research objectives: (a) Establish the different complementation patterns among PG varieties and contrast them to Standard Modern Greek (SMG); (b) Relate the syntax of ROf infinitival complementation to some more general properties of obligatory control (OC)/non-obligatory-control (NOC); (c) Discuss the articulation of the complementiser system in ROf which is characterised by the absence of overt complementisersI briefly motivate a mode of syntactic derivation in which no syntactic structure is built, but in which semantics and morphosynctactic structure are built simultaneously and independently. I will suggest a treatment of quantification in that mode, and discuss differences in scope behavior of the different parts of speech.
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Lunch Talk: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 12:00pm, Edwin S. Williams, "Scope in a Theory of Syntactic Derivation Without Syntactic Structures"
Seminar Room 15, Joseph Henry House
I will first briefly motivate a mode of syntactic derivation in which no syntactic structure is built, but in which semantics and morphosyntactic structure are built simultaneously and independently. I will suggest a treatment of quantification in that mode, and discuss differences in scope behavior of the different parts of speech.
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Lecture: Thursday, April 7, 2011, 4:30pm, Stephanie Harves, "To Have and To Need"
Stephanie A. Harves, New York University
010 East Pyne - Poster
As discussed by Harves and Kayne (to appear), a survey of a number of the world’s languages reveals that only those languages that have a transitive verb used to express possession (i.e., Have-languages) also have a transitive verb need. No Be-language lacking a transitive verb for possession has a transitive verb need. This generalization suggests a Hale and Keyser (1993)-style incorporation approach, whereby nominal need incorporates to an unpronounced verbal HAVE, yielding transitive verbal need. In this talk I briefly present Harves and Kayne’s proposal and then delve deeper into the syntax of need and consider the structure of needing propositions not only in Have-languages, but also in Be-languages that lack a transitive counterpart of need, e.g. Russian. A number of semantic diagnostics suggest that while the morphosyntax of needing propositions in Have and Be-languages is quite different, they share a hidden clausal complement structure. I will further show that the generalization pointed out by Harves and Kayne does not extend to transitive intensional want, which has been argued to have the same underlying structure as transitive need. This suggests that while HAVE is crucial to the derivation of need, it is not a crucial element underlying the syntax of want. This proposal raises a number of questions about the underlying structure of these two predicates, given their shared syntactic and semantic properties. In addition, the proposal presented here makes predictions regarding the acquisition of verbal have, need, and want. As it turns out, these predictions are borne out for children acquiring English.
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Lunch Talk: Tuesday, March 29, 2011, 12:00pm, Adam Hesterberg '11, "Contest Linguistics Problems"
Adam Hesterberg, Class of 2011
We solve and discuss linguistics-themed logic puzzles from three linguistics puzzle contests: The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, the International Linguistics Olympiad, and the Linguistics Puzzle Challenge.
Seminar Room 15 Joseph Henry House
- Lecture: Monday, March 7, 2011, 4:30pm, Suzanne Stevenson, "Learning the Meaning of Words in Context: A Probablisitic Computational Model"
Suzanne Stevenson, University of Toronto
An average five-year old knows 10,000-15,000 words, most of which she has heard only in ambiguous contexts - that is, when she hears an utterance, the child must determine which of numerous possible concepts is being talked about, and must further figure out which word goes along with which of those meanings. The open-ended nature of the input to children has often been used as an argument for the necessity of innate, language-specific mechanisms that enable them to focus their learning appropriately. More recently, however, a number of researchers have instead claimed that general cognitive abilities should be sufficient to the task of word learning. We have developed a computational model that helps to shed light on this debate by demonstrating that word-meaning mappings can be acquired through a general probabilistic learning mechanism. The model incrementally builds up (probabilistic) associations between words and meanings when exposed to naturalistic data of words in context, without the use of special biases or constraints. In this talk, I'll describe the model along with some of its results on learning low frequency words, a particular challenge for children given the large number of such words and the dearth of evidence about them.
209 Scheide Caldwell House
This is joint work with Afsaneh Fazly, Afra Alishahi, Aida Nematzadeh, and Fatemeh Ahmadi-Fakhr.
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Lunch Talk: Tuesday, February 8, 2011, 12:00pm, Delia Graff Fara, "Constrative Desire"
Delia Graff Fara, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University
Joseph Henry House
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Lunch Talk: Wednesday, January 19, 2011, 12:00pm, John Bolender, "Language, Thought and Human Uniqueness"
John Bolender, Visiting Fellow in Philosphy, Princeton University
Joseph Henry House
Humans can think about entities they have never perceived. They can think about the children of their unborn children, historical personages, subatomic particles, fictional characters, spirits. This ability appears to be unique to humans. There is evidence of planning among simians, but planning does not always require thinking about entities that one has never perceived -- unperceived states of affairs yes, but not necessarily unperceived entities. A number of cognitive scientists have recently proposed hypotheses trying to show that much uniquely human cognition depends upon some aspect of language or other. Chomsky, for example, has argued that unbounded counting is an offshoot of the computational core of language. Could that computational core also explain how humans can conceive of unseen objects? Note that there is evidence for language-like computations in some non-human species without any evident ability to conceive of unperceived entities. So even if Chomsky is right about counting, we may need a different explanation for conceiving of unperceived entities. I propose that, not syntactic computation as such, but a special sub-case of syntactic computation, namely Internal Merge, crucially enters into this ability. While language-like cognition as such is not unique to humans, Internal Merge plausibly is. The resulting hypothesis crosses disciplinary lines, as it combines elements of Russell’s theory of descriptions with Chomsky’s trace theory.
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Lecture: Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 1:30 pm, David Harrison, "Endangered Languages: Global and Local Trends"
David Harrison, Swarthmore College
Whig Hall, Oak Lounge
Approximately half of the world's 7,000 languages are predicted to go extinct in this century. In this talk I discuss how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. I also detail efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide. Local perspectives on language endangerment and extinction are illustrated with original field materials and recordings of last speakers. Global trends in language diversity are explored through the use of a new quantitative model "Language Hotspots."
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Lecture: Thursday, May 13, 2010, 4:30 pm, Greg Carlson, “Weak definites”
Greg Carlson, University of Rochester
010 East Pyne
“Weak” definites have been noted in the semantics literature for some time (e.g. Poesio (1994), Birner and Ward (1994); Löbner ‘s(1985) ‘semantic definites’), but it is only recently that they have become more broadly researched. The “weak” definites I will be focusing on are noun phrases with definite determiners (or other forms of definite marking) which would appear to have the truth-conditions of corresponding indefinite forms, and share features with noun-incorporated structures across languages. One (American) English example is “John needed to go to the hospital”, on the reading that he required medical treatment (the reading where he forgot his car keys there and went to pick them up is the “strong” definite reading). This talk outlines the properties of this construction in English, with reference to similar constructions in other languages. I present a series of experiments we have been conducting to further investigate their processing properties. The talk concludes with possible directions for future research.
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Lecture: Monday, April 12, 2010, 4:30 pm, Donka Farkas "The Semantics of 'yes' and 'no' across Languages"
Donka Farkas, University of California, Santa Cruz
219 Aaron Burr Hall -
Lecture: Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010, 4:30 pm, Michael Wagner
THIS EVENT IS STILL PLANNED FOR THURSDAY AT 4:30PM.
Michael Wagner, Cornell University
“Givenness and Focus across Languages”
010 East PyneLanguages differ with respect to patterns of 'prosodic subordination,'i.e., cases in which material is deaccented or at least heavily reducedin pitch range compared to preceding material in the sentence. Ladd(1996), e.g., observes contrasts between English and Italian that revealdifferences both with respect to the effect of argument structure and ofinformation structure on prosody. These differences seem to generalizeto other Romance and Germanic languages (see Swerts et al. 2002, Swerts2007 for experimental evidence on Dutch, Italian, and Romanian). Thiscasts doubts on claims about a universal nuclear stress rule as it wasproposed Cinque (1993), and as it is assumed in recent work on languageacquisition (Nespor et al. 1996, Christophe et al. 2003).Using evidence from English, Brazilian Portuguese and French, this paperlooks at the question of what exactly are the semantic and syntacticunderpinnings behind these differences in how givennesss and focusaffects prosody. The observed patterns offer new insights into theanalysis of a variety of linguistic constructions (e.g., the unstressedstatus of certain pronouns, or elements like 'someone' or 'something',and of certain epithets), and have repercussions in sometimes unexpectedways, e.g., they influence what rhyme-types are considered appropriatein poetic rhyme in a given language. -
Lecture: Monday, Jan. 11, 2010, 4:30pm, Martina Wiltschko “A case for caselessness. Exploring nominal licensing in two tenseless languages”
Martina Wiltschko, Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia
“In her presentation Professor Wiltschko will show how one of the fundamental mechanisms of syntax – nominal licensing – must be reconceived to accommodate findings that have arisen in her extensive field work on the Halkomelem and Blackfoot languages.” -
Brown Bag Lunch: Wednesday, Dec 9, 2009, 12:00, Christiane Fellbaum “Word Sense Disambiguation: Man vs. Machine”
Christiane Fellbaum, Senior Research Scientist, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University
Room 15 Joseph Henry House -
Lecture: Thursday, Dec. 3rd 4:30 pm, Lisa Green “Negative Inversion in African American English: Evidence from Child Language”
Lisa Green, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director, Center for the Study of African American Language, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Council of the Humanities Old Dominion Fellow
209 Scheide Caldwell House -
Lecture: Friday, Nov. 20th 1 pm, Ray Jackendoff “A Domain-General Approach to Ellipsis”
Ray Jackendoff, Tufts University
209 Scheide Caldwell House