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MIT Linguistics is offering a new course this semester called “Linguistics for Researchers in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Related Fields”. As the TA, I gave an opening speech at the beginning of the first class. Here is my speech
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I just came back from the LSA 2020 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, and here are some (but not all) of the talks / posters I found interesting and why.
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Wrap-XP is an important and influential notion in prosody (the study of how sounds in a sentence are grouped together). In this blog post I will explain what Wrap-XP is and why I think it is wrong.
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I think a lot about what I call “coordinators” in natural languages. They are non-local elements that nevertheless must appear together (or even appear similar in form). One example of non-local coordinators is the English disjunction coordinators either…or… (as in (1a)).1 When a disjunction begins with either, or must also appear (1b) (* indicates ungrammaticality).
(1) a. Pat eats either rice or beans.
b. *Pat eats either rice beans.
Coordinators fascinate me because they relate to each other at a distance (they are usually not adjacent to each other, being separated by other words). Linguists study these long-distance relations because they reveal a key property of human language - it often relies on non-local, non-linear relations. In the case of coordinators, how does the grammar ensure that when one of them appears, the other must also appear? As a metaphor, how does one element signal to the other: “I’m here, and you’d better also appear”? Under what conditions must they cooccur, and why? This post talks about my speculation about what conditions their cooccurrence.
Although either and or do not look similar, the negated disjunction coordinators neither and nor do, both beginning with n-, which marks their negative property. In many languages, the disjunction coordinators are even identical. Polish is a language that showcases this property nicely. Its counterpart of “either…or…” is albo…albo…; its “neither…nor…” (the negative version of “either…or…”) is ani…ani…; and its “whether…or…” (the wh-version of “either…or…”) is czy…czy…. ↩
Published:
I just came back from the LSA 2020 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, and here are some (but not all) of the talks / posters I found interesting and why.
Published:
MIT Linguistics is offering a new course this semester called “Linguistics for Researchers in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Related Fields”. As the TA, I gave an opening speech at the beginning of the first class. Here is my speech