About GLEAMSWelcome to GLEAMS 2020! GLEAMS (Graduate Linguistics Expo At Michigan State) is the MSU Linguistics and Languages department’s graduate student colloquium hosted by the Linguistics Student Organization. GLEAMS 2020 takes place Friday October 30 to Saturday October 31 remotely on Zoom. It aims to provide an opportunity for graduate students in the program to present their recent research among other students and faculty in the department. This year, due to MSU’s adjustments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, GLEAMS will be especially important in sharing graduate research endeavors across the department and promoting discussion amongst colleagues. Unlike past years events, the talks this year will be slightly less formal, meant to build more of a round-table atmosphere where all can discuss research questions.
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Event Schedule
Event |
Time |
Intro and Welcome |
Friday 10/30 3:50pm-4:00pm |
Keynote: MI-COVID Diaries: Tracking language change during a pandemic (Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, Suzanne Wagner) |
4:00pm-5:00pm |
Questions and Discussion |
5:00pm-5:30pm |
Graduate Student Talks Session |
Saturday 10/31 9:15am-1:15pm |
Intro and Welcome |
9:15am-9:30am |
Processing of Complement Coercion: An Eye-tracking Study in Mandarin Chinese (Ye Ma) |
9:30am-10:00am |
Complement Control in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment (Jingying Xu) |
10:00am-10:30am |
Uncovering a Focused Lebanese American Ethnolect in Dearborn Michigan (Chad Hall) |
10:30am-11:00am |
Overt subjects as the source of variation in null subject languages (Daniel Greeson) |
11:10am-11:40am |
Effect of Context on Dimensional Ambiguity in Complement Coercion: A Self-paced Reading Study (Shannon Cousins) |
11:40am-12:10am |
Utterances with Identical Morpho-Syntactic Structures Can Have Different Prosodic Structures for Different Phonological Processes (Naiyan Du) |
12:10pm-12:40pm |
Persian is not SOV (Komeil Ahari) |
12:40pm-1:10pm |
Talk Summaries
Keynote : MI-COVID Diaries: Tracking language change during a pandemic
Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, & Suzanne Wagner
Face-to-face interaction has long been hypothesized to be a central component of both sociolinguistic development for individuals as well as of language change across an entire community. The social distancing conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a deep and long term disruption to typical face-to-face interaction for Michiganders, which in turn enables researchers to test precisely how these widescale disruptions to face-to-face interactions impact sociolinguistic development for children and participation in lifespan change for adults. In this talk, we introduce the MI-COVID Diaries project, which has been tracking audio diaries from participants since the beginning of the pandemic. We highlight some of the major theoretical goals of the project, as well as discuss some of the methodological innovations necessary for conducting sociolinguistic fieldwork during a pandemic.
Processing of Complement Coercion: An Eye-tracking Study in Mandarin Chinese
Ye Ma
This is an eye-tracking study investigating real-time processing of complement coercion in Mandarin Chinese. Two types of verb (aspectual and psychological) involving complement coercion were tested and revealed different effects, which supported the Structured Individual Hypothesis, an account of semantic underspecification, cross-linguistically for the first time.
Complement Control in Early Child Mandarin: Evidence from a Preferential Looking Experiment
Jingying Xu
The present study investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s early comprehension of complement control. We tested 32 Mandarin-speaking 2-year-olds in a preferential looking experiment and assessed their ability to choose the right controller of PRO in subject control and object control structures. The findings indicate that children as young as 2 years of age are sensitive to the anaphoric relation between the controller and PRO and to the structural distinctions between different types of complement control.
Uncovering a Focused Lebanese American Ethnolect in Dearborn Michigan
Chad Hall
This talk presents findings from a quantitative analysis of inter- and intraspeaker phonetic variability in the realization of /t/ and /d/ from second and third generation Lebanese American speakers from Dearborn, Michigan. Tentative evidence is found for a focused Lebanese American English ethnolect in Dearborn. The results of the study lay the foundation for my dissertation.
Overt subjects as the source of variation in null subject languages
Daniel Greeson
Standard accounts for syntactic variation within null subject languages (NSLs) assume that 'partial' NSLs like Brazilian Portuguese differ from consistent NSLs like Spanish in terms of high-level parametric differences in the verbal domain. However, I intend to show that we can account for the variation between Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish null subjects via different settings of a low-level parameter that merely applies to a small lexical subclass of functional heads, namely overt pronouns; I will motivate this difference by exploiting properties of gender and animacy in the overt pronominal inventories of both languages. Then I'll show how this micro-parametric difference can have wide-reaching effects on the distribution of null pronouns in both. Finally, I'll demonstrate how my account paves the path for a straightforward account of diachronic change within and acquisition of null subject languages.
Effect of Context on Dimensional Ambiguity in Complement Coercion: A Self-paced Reading Study
Shannon Cousins
This talk outlines the theoretical motivations for and methodology of a self-paced reading study testing the effect of restrictive contexts in the real-time processing of complement coercion structures. Following the Structured Individual hypothesis that claims processing costs in complement coercion structures is due to semantic underspecification, we introduce different pre-sentential adverbs as dimension restricting contexts with the aim of lessening said ambiguity costs.
Utterances with Identical Morpho-Syntactic Structures
Can Have Different Prosodic Structures for Different Phonological Processes
Naiyan Du
This talk shows that words with identical length and morphological structures can have different prosodic structures for Tone 3 Sandhi and Tone 1 Sandhi in Huai’an Mandarin. Therefore, the prosodic boundaries indicated by multiple phonological processes cannot combine to construct prosodic structures, which surely include recursive prosodic structure. As a result, previous arguments for recursive prosodic structure that involve multiple phonological processes remain questionable.
Persian is not SOV
Komeil Ahari
The aim of this talk is to address two of the more recent syntactic analyses treating Persian verb phrases as underlyingly head-final, and to point out a number of theoretical inconsistencies that must be assumed under such approaches in order to derive a number of grammatical constructions in this language. My arguments against adopting an underlying SOV structure as basic will be based on the following observations: (1) head-incorporation must be assumed to apply to either left or right of licensing heads; (2) both head incorporation and excorporation must be assumed; (3) sentential complements (CPs) are assumed to originate post-verbally within the domain of vP (Karimi, 2005), yet this proposal fails to account for the order of CPs with respect to complex predicates and bigger verbal “clusters”. The content of my talk will lay out each of these points through a summary of Karimi’s (2005) and Rasekhi’s (2018) analyses, followed by a presentation of empirical data that both analyses have left unexplained.
Organizing Committee Members
Shannon Cousins (GLEAMS co-chair)
Josh Herrin (GLEAMS co-chair)
Suzanne Evans Wagner (Director of Graduate Studies)
Shannon Cousins (GLEAMS co-chair)
Josh Herrin (GLEAMS co-chair)
Suzanne Evans Wagner (Director of Graduate Studies)