Duk-Ho goes to NELS!

Duk-Ho Jung presented his recent work on sprouting at the 51st Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS), one of the most prestigious venues for work in theoretical linguistics. The paper is entitled "There is no wh-movement in sprouting" and you can see the abstract here

Fall 2020 lab meetings

October 12

Coffee break! An informal meeting to plan out upcoming meetings, talk about the quarter in general, make sure everybody knows each other, etc.

October 16

Happy hour! An afternoon meeting to continue discussions from the 12th.

October 23

Sihun will give us a preview of the experiment he is currently designing that explores the possible role of focus prosody in ameliorating COMP-trace violations. 

October 30

Duk-Ho will give us a preview of his upcoming NELS talk entitled "There is no wh-movement in sprouting."

November 6

Maho will walk us through a pair of experiments she did this summer on relative clauses in Japanese, one involving relativization out of relative clauses and the other involving binding into relative clauses. 

November 20

Discussion of: Marty, P., Chemla, E., & Sprouse, J. (2020). The effect of three basic task features on the sensitivity of acceptability judgment tasks. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 5(1). https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.980/

December 4

Josh will present some of his recent work, where he uses acceptability and reading time data to explore potential differences between event nominals like running and event nominals like run (as in some running vs. a run).  

Spring '20 lab meetings

 April 7

Discussion of the Tabor, Villata and Sprouse presentation at CUNY on "A theory of island semi-accessibility: the case of the Strong/Weak distinction". This was the very first presentation at the conference, and you can find the video and the abstract at https://blogs.umass.edu/cuny2020/cuny-2020-umass-amherst/program/ (this talk starts at around minute 24 on the video). You can find just the slides at https://osf.io/vzt3g/?pid=ac4th.

April 14

Grant will give an overview of COMP-trace phenomenon (and synthesis from 225 course last quarter).

April 21

Three posters from the CUNY conference on COMP-trace:

"What does that tell us about sentence production?"  Shota Momma and Michael Wilson https://osf.io/hrwvd/

"Subject gaps are not inherently worse than object gaps in islands: Experimental evidence unifying that-trace effects and subject-object gap asymmetries in islands"  Adam Morgan https://osf.io/ek8sw/

"Processing COMP-trace violations in German: implications for syntax" Ankelien Schippers, Margreet Vogelzang & Esther Ruigendijk https://osf.io/gu56m/

April 28

Duk-Ho will tell us about his recent experiment on the island sensitivity of sprouting (which he was originally going to present at CLS, scheduled for next weekend).

May 5

Alex will present the results (a world-premier unveiling!) of his recent experiment on Clitic Left-Dislocation in Spanish.

May 12

Dayoung will present the results of her very latest experiment (just finished!) on complexity effects in A- and A'-dependencies.

May 19

Maho will give us an overview of her upcoming experiment on the island status of relative clauses in Japanese.

May 26

We will discuss the approach to islands that Lisa Pearl sketched in her colloquium last week. Both the slides and a video presentation are available (see links below), but in the slides here are the relevant parts (by slide #):

    28-49 Overview of island phenomena (you might be able to skip this part)

    50-83 An analysis of how island behavior is acquired (from Pearl and Sprouse 2013: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10489223.2012.738742)

    84-129 The current study

Links to slides and video:

slides: https://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/presentations/Pearl2020_UCSD.pdf

intro: https://youtu.be/sEj1eQJWp_o

part 1: https://youtu.be/QvbBFiXb9C0

part 2: https://youtu.be/RbKo0beDCVg

part 3: https://youtu.be/AcO6nol-BY0 

part 4: https://youtu.be/AK7ykVIGJv8

part 5: https://youtu.be/YyavkXbDX04

part 6: https://youtu.be/_sRsJBMZdaY

part 7: https://youtu.be/THT9Tj0-aoI

part 8: https://youtu.be/DX2tzTFn644

takeaway: https://youtu.be/wcONv4xsHOo

June 2

Grant will present an overview of recent approaches to subject islands (follow-up to 225 course last quarter). 

June 19

Coffee break to finish out the year!

Is it an understatement to say that Spring 2020 didn't go as planned?

 Like everything else, Spring conference season turned out a little different than expected, but still, lab members had their work accepted at some of the most important venues and did virtual presentations at many of them:

Alex Rodriguez: “On the universality of wh-islands: Experimental evidence from Spanish.” 50^th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, University of Texas at Austin 

Duk-Ho Jung: “Sprouting is not sensitive to islands.” 54^th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, University of Chicago 

Duk-Ho Jung: “Two types of wh-dependencies: Same, but different.” 33^rd CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

Alex and Duk-Ho go to spring conferences!

Lab members will be spreading out across the continent this spring to tell the world about all the amazing things they've been discovering. First, Duk-Ho Jung will go to the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at UMass Amherst in March to present a poster on "Two types of wh-dependencies: Same, but different." This is the most important conference on psycholinguistics in North America and this year, it has a special emphasis on the relationship between psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics. 

Then in April, Alex Rodríguez will be heading to Austin, Texas for the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages to present a poster on "On the universality of wh-islands: Experimental evidence from Spanish." LSRL is the premier conference on Romance linguistics in the U.S. and Alex's paper is on a topic that is sure to attract a lot of attention.

Winter '20 lab meetings

We have reserved Fridays 9:30-11 for lab meetings this quarter, but we'll only have them on an occasional basis, when someone wants to give a practice talk, present preliminary results from an experiment, etc. Grant is teaching a seminar this quarter on "Subjects and Extraction," and this will take the place of (most) lab meetings for the quarter. 

Duk-Ho presents at the LSA!

Duk-Ho Jung is going to New Orleans in January to present his latest work at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. The title of his poster is "A wh-dependency that does not obey islands: Remnants and correlates in backward sprouting".

Fall '19 lab meetings

Our lab meetings this quarter will be Fridays, 9:00-10:00.

Oct. 4
We'll discuss Grant's forthcoming article "Sentence acceptability experiments: what, how, and why."

Oct. 11
We'll discuss a forthcoming article by Jana Häussler and Tom Juzek on dealing with variability in stimuli and participants in syntax experiments.

Oct. 18
We'll discuss a forthcoming article on the relationship between "theoretical" and "experimental" linguistics by Colin Phillips, Phoebe Gaston, Nick Huang, and Hanna Muller.

Oct. 25
Continuation of article by Phillips et al.

Nov. 1
We'll discuss a forthcoming article by Sam Featherston on the pros and cons of different response methods in acceptability experiments.

Nov. 8
We'll discuss this really interesting recent article on quantifying different measures of acceptability:

• Langsford, S., Perfors, A., Hendrickson, A. T., Kennedy, L. A., & Navarro, D. J. (2018). Quantifying sentence acceptability measures: Reliability, bias, and variability. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1), 37. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.396

Nov. 15
Continuation of Langsford et al. article.

Nov. 22
We'll discuss a forthcoming article by William Snyder on the ever-fascinating phenomenon of satiation. 

Dec. 6
Duk-Ho will do a practice presentation of his LSA poster on "A wh-dependency that does not obey islands: Remnants and correlates in backward sprouting." Our last meeting of the quarter!

Duk-Ho goes to Davis!

Duk-Ho Jung presented the paper "Backward Sprouting is not sensitive to islands" at the international Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis Conference, held this year at UC Davis in conjunction with the LSA Summer Institute.

Gustavo and Grant publish article in Glossa!

Gustavo Guajardo, who finished his Ph.D. in 2017, and Grant Goodall have published “On the status of Concordantia Temporum in Spanish: An experimental approach” in the open-access journal Glossa. This article is based on a large-scale acceptability experiment done in three countries as part of Gustavo’s dissertation work. The article argues that the agreement mechanism known as Concordantia Temporum, in which matrix and subjunctive clauses appear to agree in tense, actually does not exist and that the facts are better accounted for by general principles of tense interpretation. Gustavo is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.