Summer School

Phonology looking forward

Mike Hammond (University of Arizona)

In this talk I start with a very brief history and exemplification of generative phonology. Next, I go on to talk about the current state of the field in terms of methodologies, e.g. traditional, experimental, and computational approaches. I then go on to talk about the future of phonology in light of recent computational successes like ChatGPT.

Phonological inventories and interpretation in Kurdish and wider West Iranian

Erik Anonby (Carleton University)

Kurdish is variously viewed by linguists as a single language with deep internal diversity, or as a culturally-defined collection of languages from several branches of West Iranic. Whatever the case, everyone agrees that Kurdish is diverse and that it is challenging to describe Kurdish phonology in a way that is both coherent and inclusive. In this session, we’ll cover key aspects of phonological variation across Kurdish and the ways in which geography, language contact, and the idea of core vs. periphery can help us understand the phonological macro-system. We’ll then look at how Kurdish phonology has been mischaracterized in linguistic descriptions, and the reasons for these conceptions. The session will conclude with exploration of contentious issues in phonological interpretation including initial consonant clusters, velar nasals, nasalized vowels, and the labial-palatal approximant.

Stress and Intonation in Four Iranian Languages

Mohsen Mahdavi Mazdeh (University of Arizona)

This talk offers a very short overview of word stress in four Iranian languages (Ossetian, Pashto, Persian, and Sorani Kurdish) and an introduction to how stress interacts with intonation in these languages, focusing on Persian. The major topics discussed are how stress is realized through pitch, the different types of deaccenting that occur in these languages, and how deaccenting interacts with syntax and information structure (especially focus). In all of these topics, rather than discussing the details of how competing theories fare, the priority is to enable students to understand the major conceptual distinctions and theoretical questions.

Useful ways to look at speech in Praat

Natasha Warner (University of Arizona)

Praat is a freely available piece of software for speech analysis, easy to download and install, and relatively easy to learn to use.  It can be used for extremely sophisticated phonetic measurements and scripting for automatic analysis, for a quick look at what happened in a recording, or anything in between.  We will examine several things you can see about speech by using Praat, and cover some additional resources for how to go further.

The development of the generative syntax:  How did it evolve and why?

Simin Karimi (University of Arizona)

The important questions that are asked in generative linguistics are the following:

•       Why does human language work the way it does?

•       Why is it structured the way it is?

•       How does the child acquire the language?

All developments of the theory are about finding responses to these questions, while keeping in mind that within this framework, linguistic theories are evaluated along the following dimensions: Naturalness, simplicity, elegance, and explanatory force.

This lecture provides an overview of the development of the syntactic theory since its birth in 1957 based on the questions and dimensions mentioned above.

The Syntax of Nominal Linkers in Iranian Languages

Arsalan Arsalan kahnemuyipour (University of Toronto)

In this lecture, I will present an overview of the distribution of nominal linkers in Iranian languages as well as the various syntactic accounts proposed to capture these patterns. The discussion will cover both Ezafe (found, for example, in Persian and many Kurdish varieties) and Reverse Ezafe (found, for example, in Caspian languages and Balochi).

Major Themes in Ergativity  

Faruk Akkush (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

This lecture will be an overview of some of the major issues around ergativity, with a focus on how Iranian languages fit into and inform these topics. We start by looking at ergative properties connecting to syntactic versus morphological ergativity. Following an overview of types of split-ergativity, we explore the grammatical manifestations of ergativity, e.g., morphosyntactic properties of case, verbal agreement, and argument indexation. Overall we will see that ergativity is not a unified phenomenon.

Argument Structure in Complex Predicates

Sahar Taghipour (University of Toronto)

The argument structure of complex predicates has been a major topic of research across languages. The central question is whether the components of a complex predicate can independently introduce an argument on their own, and if so, what constraints govern the introduction of arguments. In this lecture, I will present previous accounts that have explored this question in the context of Iranian languages. Additionally, we will examine novel data from Kurdish dialects which suggest new avenues for analyzing the argument structure of complex predicates.

The Syntax of Case, Agreement, and Cliticization in Pashto

John W. W. Powell (University of Arizona)

Pashto is the second largest Iranian language by speakers. Despite Persian having twice as many speakers as Pashto, the scholarship on the Persian language is eighty times larger than that of Pashto, according to Google Scholar, underscoring the relative underdocumentation of Pashto in the family. In this talk, I will discuss conducting syntactic fieldwork, using case, agreement, and cliticization in Pashto as a case study. Pashto case, agreement, and cliticization represent among the most productive tense-based ergative systems in Iranian languages and is sensitive to both gender and number of the arguments. I will illustrate how we formed questionnaires for eliciting case and agreement in all tenses and aspects. Moreover, I will describe how we reliably elicited clitics in the language, which are sensitive to discourse and information structure. I will also briefly touch on the interaction between case, agreement, and cliticization with respect to complex predicates, including light verb alternations, the cliticization of non-verbal elements, and the pluralization of non-verbal elements (which yields pluractional interpretations), and how we elicited these various constructions. Finally, I will discuss my on-going construction of a Pashto corpus and how I use it to critically triangulate my findings from elicitation.

Form and meaning in natural language

Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Göttingen)

It is evident that sentence form and sentence meaning map in some way. But this way is often less transparent than would be expected from a compositional perspective. Certain elements do not contribute to meaning and not every meaningful element has a reflex in the sentence form. In this lecture I will provide an overview of the way sentence form and sentence meaning are connected.  

A crash course in plural semantics

Ryan Walter Smith (University of Manchester)

It seems intuitive that plurals require reference to more than one entity: a sentence like Simin saw dogs is true if Simin saw at least two dogs, and false otherwise. And yet there are many cases in which the plural is appropriate even in cases that include the singular: Simin didn’t see dogs is true if Simin saw no dogs at all, and false if she saw even one dog. The plural thus seems to have an inclusive reading, including singular reference in some cases. There are two general classes of theories of this phenomenon: competition approaches, on which the plural is semantically inclusive and acquires its exclusive plural reading via competition with the singular in certain semantic environments (Krifka 1989; Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Zweig 2009), and ambiguity approaches, on which the plural is inherently ambiguous between an inclusive and an exclusive semantics, with the strongest meaning selected depending on the semantic environment and context (de Swart & Farkas 2010; Grimm 2013; Martí 2017, 2020). In this lecture, we delve into the formal analysis of plural NPs, introducing concepts from mereology like parthood, sums, and cumulative closure. We then survey competition and ambiguity approaches to the problem of exclusive readings of plurals, and conclude with an application of the ideas here to plural expressions in Persian, particularly similative plurality with m-reduplication (Smith 2020; Krifka & Modarresi 2024), and discuss the phenomenon’s implications for approaches to exclusive inferences with plurals.

Toward a unified theory of indefinites

Zahra Mirrazi (UCLA)

Across languages, indefinites have been shown to differ from genuine quantificational expressions in their scopal behavior. While scope of quantificational expressions obey island constraints, the upward scope of indefinites is insensitive to island boundaries. This exceptional scope property of indefinites has led to approaches that take them to be inherently different from generalized quantifiers. There are two main approaches within this group to explain the exceptional scope of indefinites: (i) movement-based approaches, which posit that indefinites have access to special movement-based scope taking mechanisms, unavailable to generalized quantifiers (Charlow 2014, 2020, Demirok 2019), and (ii) in-situ approaches, which posit that indefinites do not depend on syntactic movement in order to take scope (Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011). Since in-situ theories posit no limitation on the upward scope of indefinites, it has been widely argued that they overgenerate. It has been shown that an indefinite cannot scope over a quantifier that binds into its restrictor. This limitation on the scope of indefinites, which Brasoveanu & Farkas 2011 dub as the Binder Roof Constraint, has resulted in accounts that completely rule out wide scope readings of indefinites over operators that bind into them. The problem with such accounts, however, is that it has been cross-linguistically reported that not all indefinites are subject to the Binder Roof Constraint. A well-attested group of indefinites do in fact exhibit an unlimited scopal property, just as in-situ theories predict. A successful account of indefinites thus needs to distinguish between the two kinds of indefinites (Schwarz 2001, 2011). In light of the difficulties to find a unified account of indefinites’ exceptional scope properties, it has been argued that multiple scope mechanisms are needed to account for the diversity of indefinite expressions. 

In this course, we will first review some of the existing accounts of indefinites. Focusing on the cross-linguistic variations in indefinite expressions,  we will then outline desiderata for a unified theory of indefinites.

Ethical issues in linguistic fieldwork

Robert Henderson (University of Arizona)

Fieldwork involves working with people and we should treat people and the communities they come from ethically. Note that law is different than ethics. There are clearly legal requirements that must be met to do fieldwork (which we will, of course, discuss), but we should go above and beyond what is merely legal. This presentation will consider what ethical fieldwork looks like. We will consider ethical questions of collaborative research, receiving consent, paying participants, coauthorship, as well as recording and archiving various kinds of language data.

The methodology of semantic fieldwork

Robert Henderson (University of Arizona)

Research in semantics is most often done using introspection for data collection. While introspection is a powerful tool, working on the semantics of languages for which there are not many native-speaker semanticists (though let's fix that too!), will involve some amount of elicitation. The primary challenge for semantic fieldwork is that there are many more kinds of semantic anomaly than what we have in syntax. Whereas we generally only speak of well-formedness in syntax, in semantics we often want to detect a variety of different things---falsity, contradiction, presupposition failure, implicature and its cancellation, etc. There is also the more pervasive effect of context when eliciting semantic judgement. The goal of this session is to provide a series of best practices and examples of how to do high quality semantic fieldwork.

Discourse representation theory: Anaphora within and across sentences

Manfred Krifka and Fereshteh Modarresi (ZAS Berlin)

The talk will give a quick introduction into Discourse Representation Theory, which is, more than 40 years after its conception, still the most useful theory to represent and discuss anaphoric reference within sentences (e.g., donkey anaphora) and across sentences in text. We will talk about the representation of discourse referents and their lifespan within DRT, discuss the construction of discourse referents from indefinite and definite DPs and also from quantifiers, and talk in particular about the representation of anaphora to pseudo-incorporated nominal antecedents in Persian

How to run reproducible linguistic experiments without pain

Masoud Jasbi (UC Davis)

Running experimental studies are becoming more popular and relevant for linguistic research. In this talk I review why and where experimental studies may be helpful to linguists and present the common tools, methods, and resources that would help with running experiments according to the best practices in the field. I discuss basic topics in experiment design, participant recruitment, data analysis, and sharing results.

Iranian Linguistics at the University of Arizona: An overview

(The University of Arizona team)

A summary of the research activities of the Iranian Linguistics Research Team will be presented, followed by short presentations of the current projects of the individual members of the team. The Iranian Linguistics Research Team in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona consists of a number of faculty members and graduate/undergraduate students.  This team began its work in 2015, based on an NSF grant awarded to Simin Karimi (PI), Heidi Harley and Andrew Carnie (Co-PIs). Another NSF grant was awarded to Simin Karimi (PI), Heidi Harley and Mike Hammond (Co-PIs) in 2019.  The research team investigates various aspects of Iranian languages, including descriptive and theoretical discussions, at their weekly meetings.