Course descriptions (in alphabetical order of teachers’ last names)

Berry Claus: Searching for meaning: Methods and findings in experimental (psycho)linguistics

How do we turn letters or sounds into exciting situations in our heads and why do we often understand more than was actually said? These are two of the questions that we will explore in this course as part of the broader question of how we represent meaning in our minds. The course will provide an introduction to methods and findings from experimental and psycholinguistic semantic-pragmatic research. We will take a closer look at a selection of studies covering a variety of topics, including negation and numeral modification. There will also be opportunities to participate in considerations regarding the further advancement and expansion of existing studies and/or the planning of your own studies.

Level: introductory

Éva Kardos: The Syntax and Semantics of Inner Aspect

An important question in inner aspect research is how it is best to represent the delimited nature of event descriptions. While delimitedness or telicity is considered in many analyses to be a purely semantic phenomenon, we have also seen in recent decades several proposals about how telicity is syntactically instantiated. In this course we will survey some of these analyses from the past 70 years or so by comparing and contrasting their central claims and predictions. For example, after a brief introduction to Vendler’s (1957) aspectual classification of verbal predicates, we will discuss semantic proposals such as Verkuyl (1972, 1993) and Krifka (1989, 1992, 1998), who are both fundamentally interested in how the direct object interacts with the verb to determine aspectual interpretations. Krifka uses the semantic properties of quantization and cumulativity to capture the relationship between the referential properties of the direct object and the (a)telicity of verbal predicates. This analysis is challenged in much later work including Kratzer’s (2004) syntactic analysis motivated by the connection between the availability of (a)telic interpretations and case assignment with respect to the direct object.

Another topic that has been the topic of much debate concerns the relationship between result states and telicity: Decomposition analyses like Dowty (1979) directly link telicity to the presence of a caused result state in the lexical semantics of verbal expressions. This is in contrast with the more recent analysis of Borer (2005), who explicitly argues against this idea and proposes instead that telic structures are quantity structures, which come about by range assignment under specifier-head agreement. On this analysis, result states are only a “side effect” of quantity events and the notion of quantity, defined as the absence of homogeneity, is offered as an alternative to Krifka’s quantization property.

In this course we will discuss these and other similarly contentious issues from a cross-linguistic perspective, often using data from Germanic and Slavic languages as well as Hungarian to test theoretical claims.

Level: advanced

Matěj Kundrát & Jeffrey Parrott: Of mice and men: The scope of suppletion

(joint work with Shanti Ulfsbjorninn)

This course has the aim of productively comparing Distributed Morphology (DM) and Nanosyntax (Nano). Accordingly, we find it helpful to adapt from the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1970) the concept of scientific research programs, which form around a “hard core” of theoretical proposals that are “irrefutable by the methodological decision” of those engaged in the research program: the hard core cannot be changed without abandoning it altogether. The hard core also provides positive methodological heuristics for formulating “a protective belt” of “auxiliary hypotheses”, which can “get adjusted and re-adjusted, or even completely replaced, to defend the thus-hardened core” against empirical threats. A research program is “progressive” when modifications to its auxiliary hypotheses yield “an increase in empirical content”, thereby corroborating the theoretical hard core.

In Lakatosian terms, DM and Nano can be seen as research programs with the overlapping hard cores of Merge, i.e. ‘syntax all the way down’, and Modularity, i.e. ‘Late Insertion’, but which employ different auxiliary hypotheses to explain acknowledged empirical anomalies. To further explicate some such similarities and differences between the two programs, we examine suppletion in phonological form (PF)—a prima facie counterexample to Merge—and consider its scope both empirically and theoretically with familiar, oft-cited English examples.

There are three attested empirical possibilities: no suppletion, i.e. ‘regulars’ like cats, dogs, and foxes; partial suppletion, e.g. the eponymous mice and men; and total suppletion, e.g. people and worse. Our main theoretical proposal is that incorporating an independently-motivated research program in autosegmental phonology makes it possible to discard the anti-modular auxiliary hypothesis of morphophonological “Readjustment” rules in DM in favor of hard-core phonological analyses for cases of partial suppletion. We furthermore suggest how such progressive modifications to our phonological auxiliary hypotheses could be made compatible with Nano’s theoretical hard-core of phrasal insertion while avoiding unconstrained superset analyses that treat cases of partial suppletion identically to total suppletion.

Level: advanced

Yuriy Kushnir: Lexical accent systems: Case study Lithuanian

In lexical accent systems, the location of the surface accent(s) within a phonological word depends on the interaction of the underlying prosodic properties of the morphemes contained in it. A very short list of languages with such systems would include Ukrainian, BCMS, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Japanese, Lithuanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Modern English, A’ingae, Chamorro and many others (cf. Chung 1983; Halle & Vergnaud 1987 a, b; Haraguchi 1988; Inkelas & Zec 1988; Blevins 1993; Revithiadou 1999; Zec 1999; Alderete 2001; Kushnir 2019, 2022; Dąbkowski 2021). Lithuanian is a very convenient example for anyone who is starting their inquiry into the world of lexical accent, for multiple reasons. Firstly, it has a straightforward system of surface prosody, featuring exactly one main prominent position in non-compound words. Secondly, its accent system is cyclic, with accent resolution happening every time a base and an affix are concatenated (evidence for cyclicity / cyclic optimization in grammar). Furthermore, while the system as a whole provides evidence in favor of the Mirror Principle (Baker 1985), there is a very interesting bracketing paradox found in the domain of verbal participles when preverbs are involved. Finally, Lithuanian provides evidence for the concept of [strength] in grammar, i.e., there are reasons to believe that underlying prosodic units may be weak and strong. In this class, we will have a very brief introduction into the segmental phonology (and phonetics) of Lithuanian, followed by a detailed case study of its prosody, including the nominal and verbal accent subsystems. In order to successfully follow the material presented in this class, a student is expected to have basic knowledge of phonetics and segmental phonology (including IPA) and be at least superficially familiar with the tree-like autosegmental representations of prosodic words, syllabic units and morae (ω-σ-μ-V).

Level: introductory/intermediate

Magdalena Lohninger & Timea Szarvas: Scientific problem solving for linguists (I got 99 problems but evidence ain’t one)

In this class, two syntacticians with distinct approaches to data collection join forces to teach you how to get from a linguistic problem to theory formation. Along the way, we discuss the following topics:

Key concepts of philosophy of science, how linguistics classifies as a science and what makes a theory falsifiable. We will explore the work of Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos and consider how their ideas apply to linguistic research. In particular, we will discuss to what extent linguistic methodology can be compared to that of the “hard” sciences, focusing on questions such as the nature of linguistic data, whether and how our claims are falsifiable, and what counts as empirical evidence in the field.

Different sources of linguistic evidence and their uses. We will examine various sources of linguistic data and discuss why different research questions require different methodological approaches.

Scientific methodology: from data to formal theory. We will break down how to move from empirical observation to formal analysis, working through processes such as induction, deduction and prediction, hypothesis formation, and hypothesis testing.

The empirical foundation of formal linguistic theory and its current state. We will critically evaluate whether formal linguistics is facing an empirical crisis and dissect the arguments giving rise to this perspective. By examining case studies, we will discuss the prospects and limitations of the recent trend towards experimentalism.

The class is particularly suited for intermediate and advanced students who have already conducted some linguistic research of their own (e.g., seminar papers or BA/MA theses), though less experienced students will also benefit from it. While the main focus will be on syntactic research, students from other subfields will likewise be able to follow the course and profit from it.

Level: intermediate

Vesela Simeonova: The semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality

Arguably, in any language one can convey not only information, but also how they acquired that information: through direct observation, hearsay, inference, etc. For example, in English, one can say:

(1) Reportedly, it’s raining.

About a quarter of the world’s languages organize sources of information into grammatical paradigms, i.e. closed systems with a limited number of members. We call these grammatical evidential markers. For example, Cuzco Quechua has a paradigm of three evidential markers (example from Faller 2002):

(2) Parashan-si/mi/cha.
rain.PROG-REP/DIR/INF
‘It’s raining + source of information: report/direct observation/inference.’

This course will survey the semantics and pragmatics of grammatical evidential markers from a cross-linguistic perspective. We will review the main theories of the core meaning of evidentiality in prototypical simple declarative sentences such as (2). In addition, we will go beyond those and explore the properties of evidentials in more complex environments, such as questions, imperatives, conditionals, embedded clauses, the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modals, and non-canonical uses of evidential markers in mirative and impolite utterances.

Level: intermediate/advanced