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Todor, Carlo, and Teresa going to NELS. Photo by Aaron Braver

Among those attending were Mark Baker, Aaron Braver, Teresa Torres Bustamante, Carlo Linares, Todor Koev, and Peter Staroverov. (See the previous edition of SNARL for the titles of their presentations).
The NELS organizers confirmed that Rutgers had the largest presence at the conference, aside from host school University of Toronto.
In addition to attending the conference, many members of the Rutgers contingent had a chance to explore downtown Toronto before catching flights back to New Brunswick, NJ.

Dr. Sikuku

Dr. Justine Sikuku, the first Afranaph Project Postdoctoral Fellow, returned to Kenya on Thanksgiving Day after a four-month sojourn with us here at Rutgers University. Dr. Sikuku was here from August 2011 through November 2011 as the Afranaph Project Postdoctoral Associate for 2011.
Dr. Sikuku was invited to participate in our project because of an ongoing collaboration with the Afranaph Project and with Prof. Ken Safir, the principal investigator for Afranaph. Upon completing the Lubukusu Anaphora Sketch with Prof. Safir, Dr. Sikuku turned to several new areas of research, including new work with Prof. Safir and Prof. Mark Baker.
While at Rutgers, Dr. Sikuku met with various faculty, graduate students, and other visitors invited by Afranaph (Prof. Michael Marlo of the University of Missouri and Prof. Michael Diercks of Pomona College). He completed a draft of his own paper, ‘Comparing Reflexive and Object Marking in Lubukusu’, and collaborated with Profs. Baker and Safir to send six abstracts for talks to be given at three different conferences on five different topics: ‘Actual Clauses in Lubukusu’, ‘Complex Anaphora in Lubukusu: Evidence for Inside and Outside Voice’, ‘Subject Agreement and Antecedent Agreement in Lubukusu’, ‘Sources of Symmetry in Bantu Double Object Constructions’, ‘Categories of Clausal Constituents in Lubukusu’. Early drafts of most of the collaborative papers are underway, and in addition to these papers, Dr. Sikuku continued to collaborate with Prof. Diercks on yet another paper. He also assisted with the development of five sister projects to Afranaph as a native speaker consultant, and as an analyst for the questionnaires being developed by the sister projects. He is a collaborator on the design of two of the sister projects (with Profs. Diercks, Vicki Carstens (U. of Missouri), Juvenal Ndayiragije (U. of Toronto), Luis Lopez (University of Southern Illinois) and Loyiso Mletshe (University of the Western Cape). Thanks to his input, Afranaph expects to launch at least three of the sister projects within the next three weeks. Finally, Dr. Sikuku also took time to help one of our graduate students with the development of his dissertation research and one of our undergraduates with her senior thesis.
His impact here will be long remembered as he remains an active member of Afranaph and continues to collaborate on the wide variety of projects initiated during his sojourn. We thank his family for loaning him to us for this considerable stretch of time.

(Flickr user dullhunk)

Roger Schwarzschild was the Semantics Guru at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA during October 2011.  As the Fall Semantics Guru, Prof. Schwarzschild delivered a colloquium about comparatives (see Previous Talks in this Issue), conducted an explorative talk on nouns as eventuality predicates and the mass/count distinction, and was available for meetings to provide individual enlightenment.
The announcement in What’s Happening in South College, the newsletter of the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, can be found here.

Metal type. Flickr user jessamyn.

Bittner, Maria. (2011) Time and modality without tenses or modals. In: Tense across Languages (Renate Musan and Monika Rathert, eds.), pp. 147–88. Niemeyer, TŸbingen.

Nick Danis, Jonathan Barnes, and Catherine O’Connor. (to appear) Downstep and Contour Formation in Medumba, a Prosodic Account. Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) 42 Proceedings.

Mark Baker. On Principles and Parameters. Invited talk at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the MIT linguistics department, MIT, December 9, 2011.

Todor Koev. On the Grounding Status of Appositive Relative Clauses. 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, general session, University of Amsterdam, 19–21 December 2011.

Previous Talks

Roger Schwarzschild. Quantifier Domain Adverbials, Semantic Change and the Comparative. Colloquium talk, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, October 21, 2011; The Cognitive Science of Language Lecture Series, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, November 2, 2011.

Mark Baker. Agreement and its Relationship to Case: An Example of Generative Theory and its Relationship to Linguistic Universals. Special invited talk given at NELS 42, University of Toronto, November 11, 2011.

News • Events • Who’s Doing What

(Flickr user droskeet)

On September 30, Crystal Akers successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, “Commitment-Based Learning of Hidden Linguistic Structures”; abstract below. Congratulations, Crystal!

Commitment-Based Learning of Hidden Linguistic Structures

Learners must simultaneously learn a grammar and a lexicon from observed forms, yet some structures that the grammar and lexicon reference are unobservable in the acoustic signal. Moreover, these “hidden” structures interact: the grammar maps a given underlying form to a particular interpretation of an overt form. Learning one structure depends on learning the structures it interacts with, but if the learner knows one, its interactions can be exploited to learn the others. The Commitment-Based Learner (CBL) employs this strategy, using error-driven learning (Gold 1967, Wexler and Culicover 1980) and inconsistency detection (Tesar 1997) to determine when to make commitments and what kinds of commitments to make.
The CBL overcomes structural ambiguity by extending branches from a hypothesis and committing to a separate structural interpretation in each branch, as in the Inconsistency Detection Learner (Tesar 2000). It resolves lexical ambiguity by committing to a feature value only when certain of that value, following the Output-Driven Learner (Tesar, to appear). Each hypothesis branch has its own lexicon whose values reflect the interactions of underlying forms with the branch’s structural commitments.
In computer simulations, the CBL learns all 97 languages in a constructed typology whose linguistic system includes 370 million grammar and lexicon combinations. For each language learned, the CBL takes far fewer steps than those needed to exhaustively search for a consistent and restrictive combination.
The dissertation also uncovers a previously unrecognized relationship: paradigmatic equality. Paradigmatic equals (PEs) have different maps, but because their morpheme behaviors are identical, their learning data is equivalent. Therefore, the learner cannot completely learn either PE unless it receives additional information. The CBL proposes resolving this persistent uncertainty by committing to an input-output mapping which is consistent with the language hypothesis yet yields an error on the current ranking. In the system investigated, there are always two such mappings, each a member of one of the PEs. Committing to a mapping adds new ranking information that allows the learner to derive the hypothesis consistent with the PE that includes the mapping. The learner can learn both PEs by extending branches and separately committing to each mapping.

October 28, 3pm–5pm:  Shigeto Kawahara is going to give a special invited lecture for the Rutgers Undergraduate Linguistics Club on how to prepare for graduate school applications, and in particular how to get ready for speech pathology graduate programs.  Anybody who is interested in going to a graduate program in speech pathology or theoretical linguistics is welcome.  Any questions can be directed to kawahara@rci.rutgers.edu.
18 Seminary Place, room 108

November 4, 1pm-2pm:  SURGE talk featuring Todor Koev
Grounding and temporal properties of appositive relative clauses
18 Seminary Place, room 108

November 4, 3pm:  Colloquium, featuring Jason Merchant (University of Chicago)
(In)delibility of features under agreement with nominal predicates
18 Seminary Place, room 108

Mark your calendar...

November 7, 9:50am:  SURGE talk featuring Ivano Caponigro (University of California, San Diego)
On the questionable nature of rhetorical questions
18 Seminary Place, room 108

November 11, 3pm-5pm:  ST@R talk featuring Michelle Johnson (CUNY Graduate Center)
Interactions of tense, modality, and negation in Lusoga
18 Seminary Place, room 108

November 16, 1:15pm:  SURGE talk featuring Friederike Moltmann (CNRS)
‘The number of people that fit into the bus’: Tropes with intentional bearers?
18 Seminary Place, room 108