Today at 12:15 in the Greenberg Room, Emily Cibelli (Berkeley) will be presenting on some of her neurolinguistic work for the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop.
Early processing pathways of words and pseudowords: Evidence from electrocorticography
Pseudowords – phonotactically-legal novel forms like “blick” and “piteretion” – are common tools employed in studies of lexical processing. They are often compared to words, under the assumption that these novel forms isolate sub-lexical levels of processing; however, there is some debate about whether words and pseudowords utilize shared or distinct pathways at early stages of processing. Critically, the answer to this question affects the interpretation what is being isolated in word-pseudoword comparisons.
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Please mark your calendars for a visit that should be of interest to anyone who plays with big collected data. Stefan Gries is among the leading folks in corpus methods, tackling research questions that span the linguistic spectrum – phonology, acquisition, cognition, syntax, semantics, and more. His visit this time is hosted by SPLaT!
When: Thursday, May 16th, 4:15-6
Where: Greenberg Room
Contact Robin Melnick (rmelnick@stanford.edu) ASAP if you are interested in meeting with Stefan 1-on-1 while he is here.
Improving corpus-linguistic methods: three small examples / case studies
In this talk, I will discuss three corpus-linguistic case studies that aim at drawing attention to patterns and methods that corpus-linguistic approaches may not pay enough attention to.
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Due to circumstances, this week’s Phonetics & Phonology workshop has been postponed indefinitely. Never fear, ye soundies! Prepare for a lovely P-Int night later this month.
About the P-Interest meeting today at 12:15 in the Chair’s Office, Ed King writes:
I just stumbled across a paper on the effects of alcohol on rhythm and vowel articulation, and I thought it’d be fun to read it for this Friday (today). I’ll go over the main points, and we can talk about different ways to approach their hypotheses, how alcohol might affect phonology, whether we should pressure the department to buy access to German Alcohol Language Corpus, and the morphological merits of the word “alcoholization”.
The paper is only 4 pages long, and can be found at
http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/publikationen/Schiel-IS2010.pdf
Peter Jenks (Berkeley) will be visiting on Tuesday for the SMircle meeting at 2pm in the Greenberg Room. He will be talking about his research on quantifier scope. Come join!
Quantifier Float and Scope in Thai
In this paper I present an analysis of quantifier float (Q-float) in Thai as overt Quantifier Raising (QR). I show that floated quantifiers have at least four properties which are typically associated with QR: locally restricted to arguments, rigid scope, and an adverbial distribution. I argue Thai Q-float cannot be generated by stranding (Sportiche 1988, Miyagawa 1989) or extraposition (Simpson 2009). I propose instead that Thai Q-float is QR, here conceived as A-scrambling to a projection of VP (Johnson and Tomioka 1997). I further show that Thai Q-float provides evidence for the syntactic mechanisms that underlie QR: quantifiers in Thai form a natural class with adverbs and verbs in their ability to be negated and their ability to form the elliptical answer to a polar question. This indicates that quantifiers are syntactically both adnominal and adverbial, an observation which matches the traditional view of Generalized Quantifiers (Barwise and Cooper 1981). Finally, I show that Q-float in Thai is driven by information focus on the quantifier, and that Thai QR is otherwise covert.