After successfully defending his dissertation in April, Robert Felty started a post-doctoral fellowship at Indiana University in July, under the tutelage of Prof. David Pisoni. The Speech Research Lab at Indiana University has been in operation for over 30 years, and Prof. Pisoni has funded post-docs throughout this time with an NIH training grant. The lab is built in an interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, with a variety of psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, speech and hearing scientists, and linguists.

Robert is currently working on two projects in the lab:

Discovering neighborhoods through recognition errors

In this collaborative project with Adam Buchwald, we have developed a large (> 1400 words) stimulus list which is designed to be representative of the entire English lexicon in terms of lexical frequency, number of syllables, syllable structure, and initial phoneme. We are presenting these materials in open-set word recognition tasks in order to discover what words are actually being activated in the mental lexicon

A new perceptually robust test of spoken word recognition

In this project with David Pisoni, we are developing a new spoken word recognition test battery to be used in clinical situations, which more accurately represents normal communicative situations, by including sources of variation that we commonly encounter, including speaker specific characteristics such as gender and dialectal variation, as well as a variety of degraded listening situations

You can learn more about Robert’s research from his website.

Eric Brown graduated 4 years ago from UC Berkeley in linguistics and is originally from Southern California. He is interested in language contact and theories of language change, specifically with the languages of Southeast Asia, separated language communities, and variants of Portuguese. He’s spent the past few years working and volunteering at a youth crisis line, teaching in Japan, and working at Pfizer here in Ann Arbor.

David Medeiros is interested in syntax and first language acquisition.

Joseph Tyler has interests primarily in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and conversation analysis. He earned his BS in Languages with a major in German from Georgetown University

Jonathan Yip is interested in phonetics, phonology, and the phonetics/phonology interface. In 2006, he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, concentrating in Linguistics and German

Pam Beddor, Kevin McGowan and Andries Coetzee are attending Ultravest IV at
NYU this week-end.

Ultrafest is an annual conference on the use of ultrasound technology in speech research. We are thinking of acquiring an ultrasound machine for the Phonetics Lab, and they are going to Ultrafest to learn more about ultrasound, how it works, what it can be used for, etc.

Pam and Kevin will also spend a day at Haskins Labs before Ultrafest.

Heath, Jeffrey. 2007. Bidirectional case-marking and linear adjacency. Nat Lang Linguist Theory (2007) 25:83–101

Abstract
Bidirectional case markers in West African languages, including those of
the Songhay family, are morphemes inserted between subject and object NPs that
would otherwise be adjacent. They therefore specify both that the NP to the left is
a subject, and that the NP to the right is an object, and they cannot be bracketed
uniquely with either. This is shown by the fact that these morphemes are absent when
either subject or object position is (structurally and phonologically) absent, for exam-
ple due to extraction. This is the only morphological case-marking in the relevant
languages. The operation inserting such morphemes must have reference to constit-
uent structure (NP), abstract case (subject, object), and linear adjacency. These data
increase the evidence that complex case-marking operations can apply in a centrally
located morphology component that has simultaneous access to categorial and linear
relations. The idea is questionable that such morphological operations take place at a
syntax/PF interface, where syntactic categories are first aligned with prosodic phrases,
since actual prosodic (e.g. accentual) bracketings do not always coincide with the
bracketings relevant to case morphology. This point is made with data from Tam-
ashek (Berber) nominal prefix alternations, preceding the main section on Songhay
case marking.

Hisatsugu Kitahara is a visiting scholar from the Institute of Cultural and Linguistic
Studies at Keio University, Japan. His research area is minimalist syntax, specifically
a derivational approach to phrase structure (initially outlined in Epstein et al. 1998
and advanced in Epstein and Seely 2006). He is also interested in foundational
issues concerning the field of generative grammar.

Professor Kitahara will be visiting the department for AY 2007-2009.

The (MSU) Linguistics Department Colloquium Series 2007

Dr. Acrisio Pires
University of Michigan

Thursday, September 27th
4:30 PM in Wells 607

The Syntax of Wh-in-situ and Common Ground

In this talk I will present the results of collaborative work showing that single-question wh-in-situ occurs in English under specific discourse-pragmatics (1)-(2). I will argue these questions are possible only when the information being requested is part of the Common Ground (CG) (Stalnaker 1978). The same analysis constrains wh-in-situ in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (1c)-(2c), restricting the optionality of wh-in-situ. It will then be proposed that both languages display a [+wh] complementizer that does not trigger wh-movement. This is supported by the fact that wh-in-situ in both languages is not subject to the same locality conditions associated with wh-in- situ in a language such as French, and is also not an instance of head-movement.

(1) a. A: I made desserts.
b. B: You made what kind of desserts?
c. B: Você fez que tipo de sobremesa?

(2) a. B. Attorney: Tell me what happened on January 1, 2005 at 4 pm
A. Defendant: I was driving along Andrews Avenue.
b. B. Attorney: And the police officer said you were traveling about how fast?
c. B: E o policial disse que você estava dirigindo em que velocidade?

The Gods Must Be Crazy
Thursday, 27 Sept, 7:30 PM
Room 403 Lorch Hall

A short presentation on click languages by Ryan Rozycki will precede a
showing of the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” Dessert and coffee
provided by the linguistics club.

Pires, Acrisio. 2006. Minimalist Syntax of Defective Domains: Gerunds and Infinitives. John Benjamins.

From the publisher
This book unifies the analysis of certain non-finite domains, focusing on subject licensing, agreement, and Case and control. It proposes a minimalist analysis of English gerunds which allows only a null subject PRO (TP-defective gerunds), a lexical subject (gerunds as complements of perception verbs), or both types of subjects (clausal gerunds). It then analyzes Portuguese infinitives, showing that the morphosyntactic properties of non-inflected and inflected infinitives correlate with distinct treatments of obligatory and non-obligatory control. It explores these and other phenomena to show that tense and event binding do not correlate with the contrast between control and raising/exceptional case marking (ECM), against null Case theories of control. A Probe-Goal approach to Case and agreement is adopted in combination with a movement analysis of control. The book then investigates diachronic morphosyntactic phenomena involving infinitives, verb movement and cliticization in Portuguese, exploring a cue-based theory of syntactic change grounded in language acquisition.

On Monday, 9/24/07, Kristen McLeod will join our outstanding main office staff. Kristen comes from UM’s Office of Technology Transfer, where she assisted with the transfer of paper files to electronic, distributed University software, provided accounting support, and acted as their receptionist — a good match for the responsibilities she’ll have here in Linguistics.

Yahia Ahmad is a visiting scholar from Kuwait University. His interest is in “temporal duration ” of vowels and consonants. He’s investigating an area of vowel length in Arabic which resembles the situation in Lithuanian ( three degrees of vowel length: short, long, over long). His research will cover another experimental domain of vowel length which is connected with emotional speech ( in particular the phonetic cues characteristic of types of emotion).

Professor Ahmad will be visiting the department for AY 2007-09