We are delighted to announce the publication in Natural Language Semantics of  (third year PhD student) Johanna Alstott’s paper “First and last as superlatives of before and after”. Congratulations Johanna!! Here’s the abstract:

First and last have been variously described as ordinals, superlatives, or both. These descriptions are generally not accompanied by extensive argumentation, and those who label first and last as superlatives do not present and argue for a particular decomposition. Thus, first and last’s status as ordinals vs. superlatives and their internal composition remain open issues. In this paper, I argue that first and last are superlatives, in particular the superlative forms of before and after. To argue that first and last are superlatives, I show that they pattern like superlatives and unlike ordinals (second, third, etc.) with respect to plurality, modifier choice, “modal superlatives” with possible, and the ordinal superlative construction. I next argue that the relations between before and first and between after and last show themselves overtly in many languages and in English paraphrases; furthermore, first and last semantically differ in ways that before and after have also been noted to differ. While I acknowledge one observation that prima facie counterexemplifies these claims, I argue that it constitutes a genuine counterexample only if one formalizes my decomposition of first/last using a standard Heimian (Heim in Notes on superlatives. Manuscript, MIT (1999)) entry for -est. The counterexample, which concerns the “upstairs de dicto” reading of superlatives, ceases to be an issue if one treats before and after as simplex and formalizes my decomposition using a Containment Hypothesis-inspired semantics (Bobaljik in Universals in comparative morphology: Suppletion, superlatives, and the structure of words, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2012) for -est.

Natural Language Semantics is an open-access journal so everyone can access the paper here: https://link.springer.com/journal/11050

On January 28th, 2025, our six-year student Omri Doron gave an invited talk at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled “Presupposing multiplicity: another look at the semantics of plural marking”. Abstract can be seen here:

Plural indefinites in argument position give rise to so-called multiplicity inferences, which are neutralized in downward-entailing environments:

(1) a. Mary owns cats. -> Mary owns more than one cat.
      b. Mary doesn’t own cats. -> Mary owns zero cats.

Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain this pattern (Sauerland 2003, Spector 2007, Zweig 2009, de Swart and Farkas 2010, Ivlieva 2013, Kriz 2017, a.o.), but all seem to face major empirical or conceptual challenges. I take as a desideratum two puzzling facts, both pointed out by Spector (2007): the projection of multiplicity from non-monotonic environments (2), and the infelicity of negated sentences in certain contexts (3).

(2) Exactly one of my friends owns a cat. ->
       a. Exactly one of my friends owns exactly one cat.
       b. The rest of my friends own zero cats.

(3) a. Bill likes to dress fancy, but today he’s not wearing a suit.
      b. #Bill likes to dress fancy, but today he’s not wearing suits.

I propose a solution to these puzzles based on the argument that multiplicity is the result of a presupposition, present both in the basic examples (1a) and the negated ones (1b): that Mary either has more than one cat or zero cats. I show that this presupposition naturally falls out once we consider a recent proposal on the nature of scalar implicatures (Bassi et al. 2021). Finally, I argue that the same mechanism may be extended to account for the behavior of plural definites as well (homogeneity).

Sixth-year graduate student Omri Doron gave a talk at Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on January 23rd, 2025, with the title “Revisiting pronominal copulas”.  Here is the abstract:

(1) dana (hi)                 gvoa
     Dana (Pron.3FSG) tall
     “Dana is tall”

Doron (1983) analyzes Pron as the realization of agreement features in I⁰, spelled out as a pronoun in the lack of a verb. I point out that this analysis is unable to account for Pron’s complicated distribution and interpretative effects, and argue for an alternative analysis of Pron as a resumptive pronoun. I then show that this analysis can shed light on the interaction of Pron with genericity (Greenberg, 2002).

Speaker: Roni Katzir (Tel Aviv University)
Title: On the roles of anaphoricity and questions in free focus
Time: Friday, February 14^th, 3:30-5pm
Location: 32-141

Abstract: The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. I will suggest that we abandon this anaphoric view. Instead of anaphoric felicity conditions, I propose that focus leads to infelicity only indirectly, when the processes that it feeds — in particular,  exhaustification and question formation —- make an inappropriate contribution to discourse. I outline such an account, incorporating insights from Büring (2019) and Fox (2019). A challenge to this account comes from cases where anaphoricity seems needed either to block deaccenting that would be licensed by a question or to allow local deaccenting that is not warranted by a question. Such cases appear to support recent anaphoric proposals such as Schwarzschild (2020) and Goodhue (2022). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that where anaphoric conditions on focus are not inert they are in fact harmful.

Adam Albright gave a talk at the Deparmental Seminar of Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Chinese University of Hong Kong, on January 21st, 2025, with the title “Complex Restrictions from Simple Constraints”. You can read the abstract here:

A recurring finding in the past 30 years has been that phonological restrictions that are categorical in some languages often appear as gradient restrictions in others. This parallel is tantalizing, but do languages also exhibit gradient restrictions that have no categorical counterparts? In this talk, I report the results of on-going work applying linear modeling to develop statistical models of lexicons that can identify and quantify gradient restrictions. Results from modeling the lexicon of Lakhota (Siouan) reveal numerous gradient restrictions on combinations of structures, such as a ban on two fricatives within a root, and a ban on combinations of fricatives and consonant clusters. The observed restrictions have (to the best of my knowledge) never been observed as categorical effects, and never motivate alternations.

These complex restrictions raise a number of learnability questions: first, although there is strong statistical evidence for these restrictions as a group, the support for individual restrictions varies, even in a lexicon of modest size. How do children learn such restrictions, with even smaller lexicons? This question is especially pressing if we take the complexity of the relevant constraints into account: in models that evaluate grammars according to the trade-on between complexity and fit, more complex grammars require greater statistical support. Finally, if learners are able to enforce complex constraints, why do we never observe categorical restrictions based on them? I propose that all three problems can be resolved in a model in which complex restrictions may emerge through the cumulative interaction of simpler constraints. I show how in a weighted constraint model based on maximum entropy, combinations of gradient restrictions can “gang up” to create complex restrictions, without the use of complex constraints.

Our alum Heejong Ko (PhD 2005) gave the opening remarks at the 1st SNU Linguistics Symposium on January 10 and 11, 2025.

Third-year student Bergül Soykan gave a talk entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. A brief abstract is given below and you can read the longer version here.

This study investigates the structure of correlatives and unconditionals in Turkish, focusing on their syntactic and semantic parallels and distinctions. I propose that correlatives align with standard if-conditionals, while unconditionals resemble antecedent-external “even if” conditionals in Turkish, particularly through the interaction with the particle da. The study addresses the key question: why do non-past markers (-Ir, -Iyor, -Acak) block unconditional interpretations? Drawing on previous analyses and new evidence, it proposes that this restriction arises from the presuppositional conflict introduced by da and the non-past markers. These findings shed light on Turkish morphosyntax and its implications for cross-linguistic patterns, leaving open questions about the broader interaction of tense and modality in conditional structures.

Speaker: Ben Flickstein and Ezer Rasin (Tel Aviv)
Title: Towards a phonological feature system for birdsong
Time: Monday, February 10th, 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831

Abstract: A foundational assumption in theoretical phonology is that phonological representations are built from distinctive features, typically stated in articulatory terms. Those features define natural classes that phonological processes typically apply to or are conditioned by. Even though birdsong shares important properties with human phonology, the dominant approach in birdsong research has not yet explored the possibility that the sound patterns of birdsong could be tied to cognitive, articulatory-oriented features. This presentation of an ongoing research project reports on a preliminary attempt to create such a feature system for the song of canaries.

MIT Linguistics was well represented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Philadelphia Marriott Downtown from 1-9 January. Many of our current students, faculty, and visitors gave talks and posters:

Course announcements in this post:

• More Advanced Syntax (24.955)
• Topics in Syntax (24.956)
• Topics in Semantics (MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R)
• Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981)

24.955: More Advanced Syntax

• Instructor: Elise Newman & Sabine Iatridou
• Wednesdays, 10am-1pm
• Room: 32-D461

This class is a requirement for the syntax specialization and strongly recommended for those interested in the syntax-semantics interface.

It explores many topics, all of which have the property that they have not been taught in the 24.951/24.952 classes of the previous two years. Each topic will be covered in at most two class sessions. Registered students will be required to write three snippets. The first snippet has to be on a topic taught