Language and Cognition

Berkeley linguists @ The Society of Biblical Literature

November 15, 2018

The 2018 annual meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature is taking place this weekend in Denver. The meeting features a pre-conference workshop on Tense and Aspect in Narrative, organized by Eve Sweetser (and featuring an invited talk by Laura Michaelis, PhD '93), as well as a talk by Rich Rhodes entitled "Frames and Exegesis...

BLS workshop announced

November 1, 2018

In place of the general meeting of BLS this February, there will be a workshop on the topic of countability distinctions. Here is the call for papers:

BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions

08-Feb-2019 - 09-Feb-2019

Countability distinctions and mass nouns are a topic of long-standing interest in semantics, grammar, and the philosophy and psychology of language. Recent work on this topic has pushed our understanding forward in three separate but related directions:

There is more than one type of countability distinction relevant to natural language: nouns like furniture are different from nouns like sand both in how quantity judgments are carried out (Barner and Snedeker 2005) and in which types of adjectival modification are possible (Rothstein 2010, Schwarzschild 2011). A semantics for mass nouns can be given that captures the many grammatical parallels between water and furniture without ascribing the same status to the minimal elements in their denotations (Chierchia 2010, Landman 2011). The crosslinguistic picture on countability distinctions is more nuanced than originally thought: there are languages where all nouns combine with numerals in apparently similar ways (Lima 2014, Deal 2017), and in languages where classifiers are necessary to mediate noun-numeral combinations, there nevertheless exist countability-related distinctions among nouns diagnosable by quantity judgments and adjective distribution (Cheung, Li, and Barner 2010, Rothstein 2010).


For this workshop, held in place of the general meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, we invite submissions for talks on all aspects of countability distinctions in natural language. Submissions may address questions including, though not limited to, the following:

- What are the ways in which countability distinctions are manifested in particular languages?
- Are morphosyntactic differences in the distribution of count versus mass nouns traceable directly to their semantics, or to their syntax, or to both?
- What do countability distinctions show us about nominal semantics? What do they teach us about nominal syntax?
- How should we choose among theories of mass noun semantics (or syntax) currently on the market?
- Are countability distinctions a language universal? Which distinctions are subject to variation (if any), and which (if any) are not?
- How are countability distinctions represented psychologically, and acquired by children?

Invited speakers (confirmed):
David Barner (UC San Diego)
Suzi Lima (University of Toronto)

Conference website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/
Contact: blsworkshop@berkeley.edu

Organizing Committee:
Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Amy Rose Deal, Paula Floro, Peter Jenks, Tyler Lemon, Line Mikkelsen, Tessa Scott, Yi-Chi Wu

Call for Papers:

Submission deadline: November 30, 2018

Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=blsw1

Abstracts should not exceed two pages in length (12-point type, Times New Roman, single line spacing, 1 inch margins) including examples and references.

Submissions must be anonymous and are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author or two joint abstracts per author.

Reviews and notifications of acceptance will be returned to authors by mid-December.

Sweetser, Regier on the Origins & Nature of Language

November 1, 2018

On-going this semester is a Learning in Retirement course, offered through the Berkeley Retirement Center, entitled The Origins and Nature of Language. The course lecture this week was delivered by Eve Sweetser, and next week's lecture will be given by Terry Regier:

Eve Sweetser: Why are Languages so different? Slides Audio Link with Slides Terry Regier: What are the consequences of linguistic diversity for perception and thought?
Tuesday, November 6, 2018, 2-4 pm, Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Building

Congrats, Eve and Terry!

Berkeley linguists @ LSA 2019

October 3, 2018

The program for this year's LSA annual meeting has been released, and Berkeley linguistics will be represented in 14 talks and posters (plus an organized session) by students, faculty, and very recent alumni:

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham Amalia Skilton and David Peeters (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: new experimental evidence Zachary O'Hagan: Two Sorts of Contrastive Topic in Caquinte Emily Clem and Virginia Dawson: Feature sharing and functional heads in concord Noga Zaslavsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp (University of Melbourne), Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Terry Regier: Color-naming evolution and efficiency: The case of Nafaanra Susan Lin and Myriam Lapierre: Articulatory patterns in contrasting nasal-stop sequences in Panará John Merrill (PhD '18): Polarity rules in Kobiana consonant mutation Jesse Zymet: Learning lexical trends together with idiosyncrasy: MaxEnt versus the mixed logit Andrew Cheng: Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent Emily Clem: The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18): A cyclic account of a trigger-target asymmetry in concatenative vs. replacive tone Virginia Dawson: Disjunction scope can be lexically encoded: Evidence from Tiwa Tessa Scott: Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, and Sharon Inkelas: Representing Segment Strength: New Applications of Q Theory [in the special session on Inside Segments, organized by Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas!]

Congrats all!

Gahl named Mercator Fellow

October 4, 2018

Congrats to Susanne Gahl, who has just been named a Mercator Fellow by the DFG (German Research Foundation)! The fellowship lasts for three years and will support a collaboration with Ingo Plag and others at Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf.

Color naming reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need

Noga Zaslavsky
Charles Kemp
Naftali Tishby
Terry Regier
2018

Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool colors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm-colored rather than cool-colored. Here, we present new analyses that alter this picture. We show that greater communicative precision for warm than for cool colors, and greater communicative need, may both be explained by perceptual structure. However, using an information-theoretic analysis, we also...

Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution

Noga Zaslavsky
Charles Kemp
Terry Regier
Naftali Tishby
2018

We derive a principled information-theoretic account of cross-language semantic variation. Specifically, we argue that languages efficiently compress ideas into words by optimizing the information bottleneck (IB) trade-off between the complexity and accuracy of the lexicon. We test this proposal in the domain of color naming and show that (i) color-naming systems across languages achieve near-optimal compression; (ii) small changes in a single trade-off parameter account to a large extent for observed cross-language variation; (...

Lexical competition in vowel articulation revisited: Vowel dispersion in the Easy/Hard database.

Susanne Gahl
2015

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 2004). Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation. In J. Local, R. Ogden & R. Temple (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology, Vol. VI (pp. 26–50)) reported that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker's F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represented difficult recognition targets (‘...