[lingtalks] TODAY: Adam Albright (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Klinton Bicknell]

TODAY at 2pm, Adam Albright (MIT; http://web.mit.edu/albright/www/ )  
will give a colloquium in the UCSD Linguistics Department, in AP&M 4301.

[Looking ahead, note also that the colloquium after this one (Gennaro  
Chierchia) will be on Friday 14 November, a departure from our usual  
schedule.]

:: Abstract ::

The role of grammar in producing and constraining gradient interactions

Adam Albright
MIT

A recurring theme in work on lexically gradient phonological processes  
is that gradient and categorical processes often mirror one another:  
structures that are categorically banned in one language may be  
present but underrepresented in another. A common interpretation is  
that when possible, speakers use the same constraints to encode both  
kinds of effects. A more radical position is that when speakers  
encounter gradient processes with no categorical counterpart, they do  
not encode them grammatically (Becker et al. 2007). In this talk, I  
discuss a pattern that appears to be common as a statistical trend,  
but is rare or unattested as a categorical restriction in adult  
languages: “ganging up” effects in which unrelated marked structures  
co-occur less often than expected by their independent probabilities.  
I argue that although such restrictions do not mirror categorical  
effects, they are nonetheless best modeled as the interaction of  
standard constraints. I suggest that the discrepancy between the  
typology of gradient and categorical effects is due to a learning bias  
that makes categorical restrictions of this type unstable.

[ for a full page abstract, with more details and examples, see the  
attached pdf ]

-- 

For further information about the Linguistics department colloquia
series, including the schedule of future events, please visit http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia.html 
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