Of mice and (of) men: Phonological influences on the omissibility of French de in coordination

Thursday, October 30, 2014 @ 6:45 PM in LSE B01

This is also a Facebook event:  https://www.facebook.com/events/367780246718018/  (RSVP appreciated but not required)

Co-sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies and the James Geddes, Jr., Lecture Series

ABSTRACT.  In English "pieces of tomatoes and of carrots" and "pieces of tomatoes and carrots" are both possible, and are roughly synonymous. French shows similar variation for its preposition "de" (roughly 'of'): "morceaux de tomatoes et de carottes" or "morceaux de tomates et carottes", though French is much less likely to omit the second "de".

This talk uses a large written corpus of French to test whether phonological factors influence the omissibility of the second "de". These factors include the lengths of the words involved, what sound the second word begins with, and whether the words following "de" begin with vowels or consonants ("de" has an allomorph "d'" that is used before vowel-initial words).

These phonological factors do show an influence on rates of omitting the second "de", which means that either the phonological content of words is accessed before final syntactic decisions are made, or that deleting the second "de" is a phonological operation. We'll consider some consequences of each of these approaches.

This project also has a methodological goal: it uses some new and fairly user-friendly software tools that allow the whole process from downloading corpus files to producing final plots and statistics to be automated through a single computer script. This makes it easier to correct errors when they're caught and to manage a project, but maybe more important, it makes it possible for other researchers to pick apart the analysis, test for errors, and try their own variations on the analysis.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014 @ 6 PM in CAS 211

Join us for pizza, drinks, and a talk by Professors Sasha Nikolaev and Jay Samons on the development of the Klingon language and the role of Klingons as ‘other’ in galactic politics. Following the lecture, we’ll enjoy a screening of the classic TNG episode “Reunion.”

Presented by the Department of Classical Studies and the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum, in coordination with the Undergraduate Classics Association and the BU Linguistics Association. Sponsored by the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship.

This is also a Facebook event.

Click here for a printable flyer.

This will be the first in our new series (co-sponsored by the
Department of Romance Studies): “BULA Linguistics Faculty
Spotlight.”

Thursday, October 2, 2014 at 7 pm in KCB 106

Prof. Neil Myler

“Going the pub and being the library:
A Microparameter in North-West
English Prepositional Phrases”

Abstract:

Dialects in the North-West of England have been shown to allow strings like the following, where other dialects would require a preposition to (Haddican 2010, Biggs 2013, Myler 2011, 2013).

(1) John came the pub with me.

A striking fact (indicated by a comparison of Biggs 2013 and Myler 2011, 2013) is that constructions of this sort differ slightly in their syntactic properties amongst dialects of the North-West, with young Liverpool speakers allowing a wider range of “prepositionless” structures than speakers from elsewhere in the region and older Liverpool speakers. This talk will provide a general introduction to the dialects, describe the syntactic and semantic differences in their “preposition less” structures, and provide a syntactic account of those differences in terms of microparametric variation.

Refreshments will be served.

Everyone is welcome!

We will meet at 6:30 on Wednesday, September 17th in the Back Court of the GSU.

Everyone can pick up what they would like to eat and then join the group.

Very informal.  No agenda.  Just come.  We will get to know each other and discuss ideas for BULA activities for the coming here.

We hope lots of people will get involved 🙂