Mayfest 2024
The science of linguistic diversity.
Research at our top-ranked department spans syntax, semantics, phonology, language acquisition, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.
Connections between our core competencies are strong, with theoretical, experimental and computational work typically pursued in tandem.
A network of collaboration at all levels sustains a research climate that is both vigorous and friendly. Here new ideas develop in conversation, stimulated by the steady activity of our labs and research groups, frequent student meetings with faculty, regular talks by local and invited scholars and collaborations with the broader University of Maryland language science community, the largest and most integrated language science research community in North America.
Language acquisition presents a formidable task for infants, for whom word learning is a crucial yet challenging step. Syntax (the rules for combining words into sentences) has been robustly shown to be a cue to word meaning. But how can infants access syntactic information when they are still acquiring the meanings of words? We investigated the contribution of two cues that may help infants break into the syntax and give a boost to their lexical acquisition: phrasal prosody (speech melody) and function words, both of which are accessible early in life and correlate with syntactic structure in the world’s languages. We show that 18-month-old infants use prosody and function words to recover sentences’ syntactic structure, which in turn constrains the possible meanings of novel words: Participants (N = 48 in each of two experiments) interpreted a novel word as referring to either an object or an action, given its position within the prosodic-syntactic structure of sentences.
Based on the cross- and intra-linguistic distribution of Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects, this paper shows that there can be no agreement in ϕ-features (PERSON, NUMBER, GENDER/NOUN-CLASS) which systematically lacks a morpho-phonological footprint. That is, there is no such thing as “abstract” ϕ-agreement, null across the entire paradigm. Applying the same diagnostic to instances of clitic doubling, we see that these do involve syntactic agreement. This cannot be because clitic doubling is agreement; it behaves like movement (and unlike agreement) in a variety of respects. Nor can this be because clitic doubling, qua movement, is contingent on prior agreement—since the claim that all movement depends on prior agreement is demonstrably false. Clitic doubling requires prior agreement because it is an instance of non-local head movement, and movement of X0 to Y0 always requires a prior syntactic relationship between Y0 and XP. In local head movement (the kind that is already permitted under the Head Movement Constraint), this requirement is trivially satisfied by (c-)selection. But in non-local cases, agreement must fill this role.
Read More about What the PCC tells us about “abstract” agreement, head movement, and locality
This chapter examines three themes concerning ellipsis that have been extensively discussed in transformational generative grammar: structure, recoverability, and licensing. It reviews arguments in favor of the analysis according to which the ellipsis site is syntactically fully represented, and compares the two variants of this analysis (the deletion analysis and the LF-copying analysis). It is concluded that the deletion analysis is superior to the LF-copying analysis. A discussion of recoverability follows, which concludes that in order for elided material to be recoverable, a semantic identity condition must be satisfied, but that is not a sufficient condition: syntactic or formal identity must be taken into account. The chapter finally considers licensing. It reviews some proposals in the literature about what properties of licensing heads and what local relation between the ellipsis site and the licensing head are relevant to ellipsis licensing.
Many proposals on restructuring suggest that restructuring phenomena are only observed when a control predicate takes as a complement a functional projection smaller than a clause. In this paper, I present novel Mandarin data against recent proposals that restructuring control predicates cannot take clausal complements and the related generalization that clausal complements always block restructuring phenomena. An alternative account of the Mandarin data is presented. The data also bear on the question of whether a finiteness distinction exists in Chinese. In particular, they provide clearer evidence that control predicates can take clausal complements that differ syntactically from those of non-control attitude predicates. This difference parallels the cross-linguistic correlation between control predicates and non-finite clausal complements and lends new support for the claim that Chinese makes a finiteness distinction.
Language learners use the data in their environment in order to infer the grammatical system that produced that data. Yang (2018) makes the important point that this process requires integrating learners’ experiences with their current linguistic knowledge. A complete theory of language acquisition must explain how learners leverage their developing knowledge in order to draw further inferences on the basis of new data. As Yang and others have argued, the fact that input plays a role in learning is orthogonal to the question of whether language acquisition is primarily knowledge-driven or data-driven (J. A. Fodor, 1966; Lidz & Gagliardi, 2015; Lightfoot, 1991; Wexler & Culicover, 1980). Learning from data is not incompatible with approaches that attribute rich initial linguistic knowledge to the learner. On the contrary, such approaches must still account for how knowledge guides learners in using their data to infer a grammar.
In English, the distinction between belief verbs, such as think, and desire verbs, such as want, is tracked by tense found in the subordinate clauses of those verbs. This suggests that subordinate clause tense might be a useful cue for learning the meanings of these verbs via syntactic bootstrapping. However, the correlation between tense and the belief v. desire distinction is not cross-linguistically robust; yet the acquisition profile of these verbs is similar cross-linguistically. Our proposal in this chapter is that, instead of using concrete cues like subordinate clause tense, learners may utilize more abstract syntactic cues that must be tuned to the syntactic distinctions present in a particular language. We present computational modeling evidence supporting the viability of this proposal.