Abstracts:

Language in the Brain: Problems & Methods
Andreas Roepstorff               Presentation (ppt)

In a recent editorial of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the editors explicated the factors weighed in judging the quality of a functional imaging study. One of the most prominent issues were that it is ideal to take advantage of the unique abilities of human subjects, such as language. This is obviously an ideal catch-phrase for a seminar like this, but how does this translate into actual research projects? In this talk, I will attempt to identify (at least) four ways that "language" may be central if not crucial to that strange excercise in epistemic bootstrapping, which functional brain imaging currently consists of. These approaches obviously focus on very different aspects of language. However, although they differ widely with respect to the foregrounded topic in and backgrounded context of a particular research question, they may, when seen together, throw some light on the functioning of the brain, if not on the nature of language.

The fragile nature of the left periphery: CP and IP deficits in agrammatism
Naama Friedmann               Presentation (pdf)

Agrammatic aphasia is a syntactic deficit that is caused by damage to the left hemisphere, which entails a deficit both in sentence comprehension and in sentence production. The talk will describe the intriguing pattern of deficits in agrammatic speech production, showing that this type of inquiry interacts with linguistic theory as well as with knowledge about brain-language relations. The syntactic tree, a construct that has originally been suggested based on purely linguistic grounds, proves to be a useful tool to describe the deficit in agrammatism.

The general idea is that the selective pattern of impairment in agrammatic aphasia and the dissociations witnessed within and between languages follow from the inaccessibility of high nodes of the syntactic tree. This causes syntactic structures that relate to CP such as embedded sentences, wh-questions and V-to-C-movement to be impaired in agrammatism, whereas lower structures are unimpaired. Crucially, agrammatics cannot produce wh-questions and embeddings that require the CP, but can construct questions and embedded clauses that do not require an overt element in CP, such as yes/no-questions in Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, small clauses, and reduced relatives. The pruning of the tree explains cross-linguistic dissociations as well: since yes/no-questions involve overt elements in CP in English and Dutch but not in Hebrew and Arabic, they are impaired in English and Dutch, but not in Hebrew and Arabic. For some individuals, TP is impaired as well, causing a deficit in tense inflection, in copulas and in subject case and subject pronouns. Crucially, whenever TP is impaired CP is also impaired, but CP can be impaired without TP impairment. The hierarchical order on the tree can also serve to explain degrees of agrammatic severity (individuals with inaccessible CP are more mildly impaired than individuals who cannot even reach TP), as well as the path of spontaneous recovery from agrammatism.

Grammatical Perception
Douglas Saddy               Presentation (ppt)

There has been much recent discussion about the centrality (or lack of it) of recursion in language and cognition. In this talk I will review some of the recent literature on statistical learning and present the results of some recent studies that examine the ability of adults to detect both recursively driven and non-recursive structure in auditory stimuli. I will show that humans have a remarkable ability to detect recursively driven structure in pseudo-random strings. I will argue that the special property that recursion brings to language and cognition is not necessarily what has been assumed, and suggest that further investigation of this ability may reveal a type of cortical processing that mediates between higher level cognitive representations and lower level perceptual phenomena.

Asymmetries in Vowel Perception: A Window on How Humans Structure the Vowel Space
Ocke-Schwen Bohn               Presentation (pdf)

Directional asymmetries are often observed in infant vowel discrimination. Polka and Bohn (2003) have recently shown that these asymmetries follow a consistent pattern: Babies perform better in vowel discrimination when the direction of the vowel change is from a less peripheral toward a more peripheral vowel in the vowel space. The consistency of this pattern across infants learning different languages suggests that this perceptual bias is language-universal. This talk will review previously reported asymmetries in infant vowel perception and compare infant data to adult native and nonnative listeners and vowel discrimination by non-human animals, and it will consider the potential role of infant-directed speech in establishing these asymmetries.

Can Gapping be reduced to VP Ellipsis?
Kyle Johnson               Hand-out (pdf)

Vivian Lin argues in her 2002 MIT dissertation that Gapping -- a very common form of ellipsis illustrated by examples like (1) -- can be seen as a special instance of "pseudo gapping" -- illustrated by examples like (2).

(1) John might eat beans and Mary rice.
(2) John might eat beans and Mary might rice.

A salient difference between the two constructions, that (1) and (2) display, is that an auxiliary is leftover from the ellipsis in pseudogapping, but not in gapping. But there are variety of other subtler differences between the two constructions that have prevented reducing them both to the same operation. Lin's proposal is aimed at explaining all these differences by caching them out as a function of the way that the auxiliary gets removed from Gapping. On her view, then, Gapping is the combination of pseudogapping -- which is, itself a special instance of VP Ellipsis -- and an independent mechanism that deletes auxiliary verbs. I will present two problems for that view, and offer a way of solving them that preserves the best parts of her proposal.

Immobile Complex Verbs in Germanic
Sten Vikner               Hand-out (pdf)

Certain complex verbs in Dutch, German, and Swiss German may only occur in finite form in embedded clauses, not in main clauses. These languages are V2 languages, like the Scandinavian languages, which means that in main clauses, the finite verb has to move to the second position. Therefore the assumption is that these complex verbs are "immobile", i.e. they do not undergo verb movement.

I suggest that these "immobile" verbs have to fulfill both the requirements imposed on complex verbs of the V° type (= verbs with "non-separable prefixes") and the requirements imposed on complex verbs of the V* type (= verbs with "separable prefixes"). This results in such verbs being morphologically unexceptional, i.e. having a full set of forms, but syntactically peculiar ("immobile"), i.e. they can only occur in their base position, where no movement has taken place. Any kind of movement is incompatible with either the V° requirements or the V* requirements.

Haider (1993:62) and Koopman (1995), who also discussed such immobile verbs, only account for verbs with two prefix-like parts (e.g. German uraufführen `to perform (a play) for the first time' or Dutch herinvoeren `to reintroduce'), not for the more frequent type with only one prefix-like part (e.g. zwüsche in Swiss German zwüschelande `to have a stop-over' or bauch/buik in German bauchreden/Dutch buikspreken `to ventriloquise').

This analysis will try to account not only for the data in Haider (1993) and Koopman (1995) but also for:

• why these immobile verbs include verbs with only one prefix-like part (and why the single prefix-like part in these verbs may NOT be a particle),
• why these immobile verbs include verbs with two prefix-like parts where each of these are separable (!) particles (as in e.g. German voranmelden `preregister' and vorankündigen `announce in advance')
• why there is such a great amount of individual speaker variation as to which verbs are immobile,
• and finally also for why such verbs are not found in Germanic SVO-languages such as English and Danish.