Weekly Digest, 3/25/24

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Congratulations 🏆

Many congratulations to our linguists who have received accolades this past week! (It’s been a banner week!)

• Hailin Hao has received the Theodore and Wen-Hui Chen Endowed Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year.

• Jack Goldberg has received an East Asian Studies Center Graduate Fellowship to do fieldwork on Yilan Creole in Yilan, Taiwan this coming summer.

Inked ✍︎

• Jun Lyu; Zuzanna Fuchs; and Elsi Kaiser. 2024. “Anticipatory processing of cataphora is constrained by binding principles in L2 English.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Published online 2024:1-14. doi:10.1017/S1366728924000208

Look Who’s Talking 🗣️

• Linh Pham and Andrew Simpson presented a talk on “Reflexivization and minh – exceptional local binding by a monomorphemic anaphor?” at the International Scholars of Vietnamese Linguistics conference/ISVL-4, held in the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, March 16.

• Zuzanna Fuchs presented a guest lecture, “Heritage Languages in the USA”, in The American Languages course (taught by Line Mikkelson) at UC Berkeley on March 22.

Colloquium today: Anne Michelle Tessier (UBC)

Please join us for a colloquium talk by Anne Michelle Tessier (University of British Columbia) on Monday, March 25 at 3:30pm in GFS 330. See below for title and abstract.

A Modestly Novel Proposal about Learning French Liaison Anne-Michelle Tessier (UBC) and Karen Jesney (Carleton University)

This talk is about a morpho-phonological process in French called ‘liaison’: how it is represented in adult grammars, and how it might get that way via learning. The basics of prenominal liaison are roughly equivalent to the English allomorphy between ‘a’ and ‘an’ — a table vs. an apple — but the French process is both much more common (involving many frequent prenominal determiners, possessive pronouns, adjectives, numerals…) and also deeply lexically quirky. There have been many, many theoretical proposals as to how liaison (and other exceptionful morpho-phonological processes) are represented in speakers’ grammars and lexicons, and the present work tries to combine many of the merits of previous accounts, but approaches the problem from an acquisition perspective. If a learner is simultaneously trying to acquire grammar-wide French phonotactics, as well as the wide range of liaison words and phrases, both invariant and variable – how might they get traction on this problem? Where would they start, and over time how might they develop? And what properties does a learner of French need to eventually acquire adult-like knowledge of liaison?

Our proposal is that the allomorphy of liaison is controlled, in part, by grammatical UR constraints, which each prefer one of the surface realizations of liaison-related words. We also adopt a rather traditional and abstract set of inputs, such that vowel-initial nouns that undergo regular liaison are stored with an initial ‘X-slot’. In the talk, we will explicate and argue for this approach in three ways. First we show how, given the right input/output mappings, a simple HG-GLA learning algorithm can learn the core patterns. Then, we show how, given this learner’s end state knowledge of real words, it will also produce wug-test liaison responses on nonce words that align with adult production and judgment data. Finally, we demonstrate how a child learner could discover the right input/output mappings necessary to learn our account of liaison — starting off with no knowledge of alternations, and following learning heuristics that can achieve the target end-state. In this last section, we will also touch on the extent to which our simulations makes errors that look like children’s observed liaison mistakes, and other ongoing and future directions. 

Open House in the Rose Garden

Thank you to everyone for a wonderful annual Open House event this past week in the department! Here’s a picture of the graduate student pizza picnic at the Rose Garden next to campus, organized by Katie Kennedy and Haley Hsu.

Upcoming Events

Colloquiua

Today: Anne-Michelle Tessier (University of British Columbia)

Upcoming: April 15: Michelle Yuan (UCLA)

Department Events

• Monday, Mar. 25 at 1pm @ PhonLunch: No meeting this week

• Tuesday, Mar. 26 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: No meeting this week

• Wednesday, Mar. 27 at 2pm @ S-Side Story: No meeting this week

USiL Events

Please check out https://www.usilusc.org/ for the latest on Undergraduate Students in Linguistics (USiL) events this semester.