Department of Linguistics

'Glossolalia' refers to certain spontaneous utterances with no semantic content. Glossolalia is most famously practiced by religious adherents of certain Christian religions (called 'speaking in tongues'), but is also practiced in other religions, and even for relaxation and artistic performance. This talk will report about an ongoing study of glossolalia. I will propose that glossolalia is a "targetless L2" -- it uses the same cognitive resources as a second language but does not have any external input (unlike normal L2s). I will discuss the implications of this theory of glossolalia for theories of second language acquisition and markedness.

A growing body of literature addresses the notion of gradient well-formedness (GWF). Gradience is the phenomenon that native intuitions about the well- formedness of forms fall on a scale with multiple values, rather than into a binary division of well-formed versus ill-formed. Perhaps the best studied cases of GWF involve OCP-PLACE, the constraint against adjacent consonants with identical place of articulation. Gradient OCP-PLACE effects occur in languages such as Arabic (Greenberg 1950; McCarthy 1986; Frisch, Pierrehumbert & Broe 2004), Hebrew (Berent & Shimron 1997, 2003), English (Berkley 2000), Japanese (Kawahara, Odo & Suno 2005), and Muna (Coetzee & Pater 2006). Although gradient judgments have been shown to correlate with lexical factors such as neighbourhood density (Ohala & Ohala 1986; Bailey & Hahn 2001) and with low-level phonotactic factors such as onset and rhyme frequency (Coleman & Pierrehumbert 1997; Bailey & Hahn 2001), many studies assume an additional involvement of grammatical constraints. Yet, constraints are often motivated on the basis of lexical evidence alone (Frisch, Pierrehumbert & Broe 2004; Coetzee & Pater 2006). That is, lexical under-representation of forms that violate a constraint is interpreted as direct evidence for this constraint. This raises the issue to what extent GWF constraints have grammatical significance beyond the lexical data. Several studies support the mental reality of GWF constraints by means of native well-formedness judgments on non-words (Berent & Shimron 1997, 2003; Frisch & Zawaydeh 2001; Coetzee to appear). Still, eliciting judgments involves a meta-linguistic task, which runs the risk of allowing semi-conscious factors to influence judgments which are absent in speech processing. This problem is aggravated when no time limits are imposed on subjects' responses. Hence, stronger evidence for the mental reality of GWF constraints would require an online task, eliciting subjects' responses to non-words under more realistic conditions of speech processing and establishing correlations between response latencies and the degree of well-formedness of non-words, as predicted by phonological constraints. Here we address the role of GWF constraints in speech processing in Dutch, using the online task of lexical decision. In this task, subjects classify stimuli as either words or non-words, and their response latencies are measured. The task is known to be strongly influenced by lexical processing factors. Hence, if an independent effect of constraints were to emerge, this would constitute strong evidence in favour of the psychological reality of constraints. We will present lexical statistics on avoidance of identical place in Dutch, which reveals that similarity avoidance is influenced not only by degree of similarity, and distance, but also by initial position in the stem. We then nominate three candidate constraints against labial co-occurrence: classical OCP-LAB, self-conjoined *LAB2, and alignment ALIGN-LAB. Our experimental study shows that phonological constraints indeed influence speech processing in a way that is independent of lexical factors. We will compare the relative merits of the three constraints for speech processing.

The two questions in (1) differ in a striking way: 1. a. How tall is John? b. How short is John? While (1a) can be used without the presupposition that John is tall rather than short, (1b) comes with a presupposition that John is significantly short. However, this difference between antonyms is not constant across degree constructions. Neither of the comparatives in (2) presuppose or assert that John is significantly tall or significantly short (respectively). 2. a. John is taller than Bill. b. John is shorter than Mary. I refer to this semantic property -- reference to a degree that exceeds a standard -- as `evaluativity.' To account for the above facts, I derive the distribution of evaluativity in degree constructions based on A) the polarity of the antonym they involve, and B) the semantics of the degree construction itself. I argue that the evaluativity of the marked adjective form in (1) stems from the fact that the meanings of such constructions do not make use of the direction of the scale on which degrees are ordered. The lack of evaluativity in both forms in (2) is a result of the fact that the meanings of these constructions DO make use of the direction of the scale.

As Cinque (1999) notoriously demonstrated, functional elements like Tense, Aspect, and various types of modals seem to appear, cross linguistically, in a rigidly fixed order. Cinque proposed to derive this ordering of functional elements by postulating a fixed universal hierarchy. In this talk, I explore a semantically motivated alternative explanation for this ordering, which does not stipulate different relative syntactic positions for different types of modals, tense, and aspect. I propose a novel analysis of modals, which makes these interactions between tense, aspect, and modality consistent with Kratzer's (1981, 1991) well motivated proposal about modals, which argues that their particular type/flavor is contextually determined.

4 pm Reception/ 4:30 PM Presentation Free and open to the public.

Over the last century, "philology" has gone from the name of a central historical method in the humanities to an antiquated name for historical linguistics. Now, the advent of extensive online corpora promises to breathe new life into the philological enterprise. We can track the origin and development of words more accurately, rapidly, and in greater detail than was ever possible before and capture nuances of meaning that we could previously talk about only impressionistically. In this talk, I'll outline some representative philological issues and revisit some of the theoretical issues they raise about the relation of words to social concepts and "mentalities."