The 7th Crete Summer School of Linguistics

Morphophonology

Adam Albright & Eulàlia Bonet
Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
If phonology is concerned with how sounds change in the context of other sounds, why does it ever care about morphological information? What kinds of morphological information does phonology have access to? Why would phonological processes care about morphological information such as constituent edges, morphosyntactic features, or the identity of particular morphemes? What does sensitivity to morphological structure tell us about the architecture of phonology (and, perhaps, morphology, as well)?

This class assumes some background in phonological theory, such as an introductory phonology course.

The landscape of causatives and anti-causatives

Elena Anagnostopoulou & Ümit Atlamaz & Sergei Tatevosov
University of Crete & Boğaziçi University & Moscow State University
This intermediate class will explore causatives and anti-causatives from a typological and theoretical perspective. The course will offer an overview of the empirical landscape on causation and the theories that have been advanced to account for a diverse array of causative and anticausative constructions within and across languages. We will emphasize the motivation for decomposition approaches that have attempted to delineate the causative alternation as opposed to other valence changing operations or constructions such as passives, applicatives, reflexives, etc.

Participants are expected to be familiar with basic syntactic theory of the sort used in introductory syntactic classes or textbooks (such as the CreteLing Introduction to Syntax class).

Topics in Language Acquisition

Athulya Aravind & Roman Feiman
Yale University & Brown University
This course focuses on first language acquisition — the process by which native speakers of a language acquire the ability to speak and understand that language. We will discuss a set of selected case studies in core areas of linguistic knowledge, including the lexicon (words), sentence structure, meaning composition, and pragmatics, from a developmental perspective. That is, we will aim to characterize (at times somewhat coarsely) the developmental path children seem to undergo as they acquire a particular property of language: What is the initial state of knowledge? What is the final state of knowledge? What, if any, are intermediate states? What evidence do children have access to as they proceed through stages, and how do they put this evidence to use?

This class assumes basic familiarity with syntax and semantics.

(Dis)connections between Music and Language (Week 2)

John Frederick Bailyn
Stony Brook University
In recent years, the field of music cognition has witnessed an immense growth and the cognitive link between music and language has been subject to various debates across disciplines. One particular domain in which similarities between music and language has been frequently discussed, concerns the cognitive “grammatical” principles of musical structure building.

In this seminar, after a brief general introduction to the study of Music as a cognitive system, we will discuss various aspects of the connections (or lack thereof) of Music and Language. We will discuss basic music theoretical principles, the underlying formal models, and their cognitive, computational and philosophical foundations. Particular focus will be on 4 areas of interest:

i) the grammar of music, incl. the well-known “GTTM” model (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983), the Katz-Pesetsky hypothesis, and the more recent “top-down” model of Rohrmeier 2020.
ii) acquisition of musical abilities in childhood
iii) the evolution of music as it relates to the evolution of language
iv) musical genres and linguistics dialects

This seminar requires basic musical knowledge - the ability to play some instrument and/or read musical notation. It is intended for those interested in music, language, and cognitive science of mind. Some formal training in linguistics is also a plus.

Long Distance Agreement

Rajesh Bhatt & Stefan Keine
University of Massachusetts Amherst & University of California Los Angeles
Case-assignment by an element to a nominal in a different thematic domain is familiar to us in the form of Exceptional Case Marking. One could see Long Distance Agreement as being its agreement analogue - here an element agrees with a nominal in a different thematic domain. We will examine instances of Long Distance Agreement in Icelandic, Hindi-Urdu, Tsez, Border Lakes Ojibwe, Tsova Tush, Innu-Aimun and Passamaquoddy as well as the theoretical proposals made to derive it. We will discuss the relationship of Long Distance Agreement to local agreement, what operations deliver local agreement, and whether we need something in addition to derive Long Distance Agreement. More broadly, we will examine what constrains the formation of cross-clausal dependencies.

Level: Advanced

Approaching Allomorphy (Week 1)

Jonathan Bobaljik
Harvard University
This seminar will engage with some recent (and less recent) approaches to allomorphy: the conditions that govern alternations in form of a single morpheme, with a particular focus on the question of contextual allomorphy. The main aim will be to consider how various theories approach the question: under what conditions can features typically expressed by a morpheme M1 condition the form of another morpheme M2 and what questions in this area are currently open. Questions to be considered include locality conditions on allomorphy, implicational universals of the *ABA type, and the like, considering whether and how (some) different current frameworks restrict the space of possibilities in ways that make predictions about attested and unattested states-of-affairs.

This course will be advanced in the sense that it focusses on a specific sub-topic rather than pursuing an introduction to the field, but intermediate in the sense that the recommended background is knowledge of syntax and phonology at the level one would have after completing introductory courses in those areas: syntactic trees, c-command, phonological distinctive features, basics of morphological segmentation, etc.

Linearization

Guglielmo Cinque & Norvin Richards
Ca' Foscari University of Venice & Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In addition to a brief history of how linear order has been addressed in generative grammar to current Minimalism, the course will cover a number of topics concerning Linearization.

Syntactic theories have approached the question of word order in a variety of ways; researchers have constructed theories which make order entirely post-syntactic (as in much work in Minimalism, for example) and others in which linearization plays a more central role (most famously, Kaynean Antisymmetry). The choice of how to deal with linearization has important consequences for our understanding of the architecture of the grammar. In this class we will review some approaches to these issues, consider the generalizations that hold of cross-linguistic word order variation, the position of Linearization, and make some proposals of our own.

This class assumes familiarity with syntactic theory.

Diachronic semantics

Cleo Condoravdi & Paul Kiparsky
Stanford University
This course investigates semantic change in lexical and functional domains. We will explore recurrent patterns of change and their explanation, focusing on the paradigmatic structure of lexical fields and the unidirectional and cyclical changes undergone by functional categories.

The course presupposes an introductory background in linguistics and an elementary understanding of formal semantics.

Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics

Kathryn Davidson & Josep Quer
Harvard University & Universitat Pompeu Fabra
This course is an introduction into some of the core issues in Sign Language Linguistics, so that students are able to evaluate the results of this research field for the study of the human faculty of language. After a general introduction to their socio-historical contexts, we will discuss several important findings in the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of sign languages. We will analyze both similarities with spoken languages as well as differences deriving from the visual-manual modality and their consequences for linguistic theorizing.

No previous knowledge about sign languages is required.

Formal Pragmatics

Donka Farkas & Paul Portner
University of California, Santa Cruz & Georgetown University
Contemporary formal pragmatics investigates various aspects of linguistic meaning that crucially involve language use in context. In this course, we will discuss phenomena that involve complex interactions between pragmatics and other modules of grammar, such as: the structure of the context and its connection to sentence types; intonation and focus; honorifics and allocutive markers; contemporary approaches to implicature.

We assume that students are familiar with basic semantics and have some acquaintance with the concepts of entailment, presupposition, and implicature as they are usually treated in introductory semantics courses.

Speech acts

Kai von Fintel & Danny Fox & Sabine Iatridou
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The central question we will address will be whether and how the syntax and semantics of sentences include information about the speech acts that the sentences are used to perform. For example, are there “speech act operators” in the syntactic structures of sentences?

Advanced class; background in syntax and semantics strongly recommended.

Prosody

Edward Flemming & Michael Wagner
Massachusetts Institute of Technology & McGill University
Different ways of pronouncing the same sentence can convey different messages. The properties of pronunciation that modify meaning in this way are referred to as sentence prosody.

There are three components of prosody: intonational tune, prominence and phrasing. These components will be introduced through an overview of English prosody and an introduction to the basics of ToBI transcription. The bulk of the course will then focus on intonation, addressing phonological representation, phonetic realization, the meaning of intonational tunes and their effect on pragmatic inferences, based on data from a variety of languages.

The goal of the course is to provide the foundations needed to pursue further research on prosody in its own right, or in relation to other areas of linguistics. The class assumes some background in phonological theory, such as having taken an introductory phonology course. Basic knowledge of syntax and semantics would also be helpful.

Introduction to Neurolinguistics

Yosef Grodzinsky
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This course will discuss the brain bases for linguistic and communicative ability, and the theoretical and experimental tools we use in order to investigate them. Three main questions will be addressed:

(a) What do we currently know about the neural bases for language?
(b) What is the best and most effective theoretical approach to the study the brain’s linguistic knowledge and functions?
(c) What, if anything, do results from brain-based experiments tell us about the shape of our linguistic knowledge and functions?

Question (a) regards the current empirical landscape; question (b) has to do with the best available neurolinguistic theory; question (c) concerns the contribution of the answers to (a) and (b) to our current understanding of syntactic and semantic theory.

The relevant neurolinguistic considerations are rather complex. I will begin by presenting central methods (for experimental measurement, neuroanatomical mapping, and data analysis) that are currently practiced in the study of the neural basis of linguistic ability. This will be followed by a review of recent neurolinguistic results that make contact with phonetic, syntactic and semantic questions. Much prominence will be given to applications of Large Language Models to the study of brain processes that pertain to language.

Among other things, I will present results that seem to identify the neural bases for the computation of downward entailingness at a surprising degree of precision. The course will conclude with some puzzles and open problems, as well as demonstrations of clinical applications of the methods in the field – I will show how fine semantic questions can be tested in clinical settings, and in fact in the operating room, with awake patients that undergo neurosurgical procedures.

Throughout the course, I will put special emphasis on methodological issues and questions of experimental design, that will hopefully help interested students design the important experiments and interpret their results coherently (which often is no small matter).

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of syntax and propositional logic, some knowledge of semantics, familiarity with ChatGPT and its ilk.

The Acquisition of Transitivity Alternations with focus on the Passive (Week 2)

Maria Teresa Guasti & Arhonto Terzi
University of Milano-Bicocca & University of Patras
The course will focus on the acquisition of transitivity alternations (active – passive, causative – unaccusative/anticausative) with particular emphasis on the acquisition of passives. We will address the various synthetic and analytic manners of forming passives, the syncretic patterns that arise in association with the former, and how these interact with the production and comprehension of early passives. We will discuss the connection between passives and causatives and the syncretism between passives and reflexives or passives and impersonals arguably leading to the acquisition of passives in various languages.

Level: intermediate.

Introduction to Syntax

Caroline Heycock
University of Edinburgh
This class is an introduction to investigating how language combines meaningful elements into larger hierarchical structures. We'll look at the evidence for such hierarchical structure and then explore some ways in which this structure affects what are possible and impossible sentences. We'll consider questions of where syntactic structures "come from", and the extent to which they vary from language to language (or don't). Along the way we'll be discussing some of the central discoveries, how they can be captured using the tools of contemporary syntactic theory, and a few of the many open questions.

The class presupposes minimal background knowledge beyond the terminology for categories such as noun, verb, adjective, etc.

Comparing two languages: hot topics in Dutch and German syntax-semantics

Winfried Lechner & Hedde Zeijlstra
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens & University of Göttingen
In this course, we discuss a series of “hot topics” in syntax and semantics by looking at their (different or similar) behaviour in two related, well-studied languages: Dutch and German. Topics range from head movement and scrambling to negation and modality and many more. We will also look at synchronic and diachronic variation within and across the two languages. After the course, you will have a deeper understanding of the grammar of the two languages, as well as of a number of phenomena in syntax, semantics and their interface.

Level: Intermediate/advanced.

Topics in Philosophy of Language: context (Week 2)

Karen Lewis
Barnard College, Columbia University
This course focuses on dynamic notions of context in the philosophy of language and linguistics, with a particular focus on common ground. A central insight about context, stemming from the work of Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, is that interpretation takes place against a background of shared information (common ground or conversational score), and at the same time, the act of speaking changes that same body of information. This basic notion of a dynamic context has been adopted and extended in dynamic semantic as well as formal dynamic pragmatic accounts. This course will engage with foundational questions about and recent challenges to the common ground framework and its extensions such as: what are the formal properties of the common ground? Is common ground necessary for interpretation? How many bodies of information (and what types) are in a context? How should we think of common ground in conversations that are not primarily aimed at information exchange? How should we conceive of common ground in conversations with unknown, diverse, or distant conversational participants?

Level: intermediate/advanced

Large Language Models and Linguistics

Tal Linzen & Alex Warstadt
New York University & University of California, San Diego
Large Language Models (LLMs) represent human language in a way that bears no resemblance to symbolic theories of language. Nonetheless, their linguistic performance is in many respects indistinguishable from that of native speakers. This introductory course explains the nuts and bolts of how Transformer-based LLMs work and what they know about grammar, before exploring how LLMs can contribute to the scientific investigation of human language. Topics will include the syntactic evaluation of LLMs, computational approaches to acquisition and psycholinguistics, and probabilistic theories of linguistic structure.

This is an introductory course for a general linguistics audience; no computational background is required.

Intermediate Syntax

Ora Matushansky
SFL (CNRS/Université Paris 8)
This class will be structured around the syntax of the verb, in inflection and in derivation. Within these limits we will concentrate on the following subtopics: (1) the decomposition of the verbal projection: the external argument, applicatives, the goal and the result, (2) the structure of mixed projections: the syntax of deverbal nominalizations.

Prerequisites: "Introduction to Syntax" from a previous iteration of CreteLing should be sufficient for this class. It is also a good idea to (re)familiarize yourself with the material in the lecture notes for the first ten classes in Sabine's MIT course “Language and its structure II: Syntax”, which are freely accessible online.

Human Evolution and Language (Week 2)

Shigeru Miyagawa
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We will look at recent developments in genetics and neuroscience to begin to ask concrete questions about human language in evolution: When did it appear? How did it get created? Why did it emerge? A related question is, is language unique to humans? For this, we will look at birdsong and monkey communication systems and compare them to human language using recent developments in information theoretic modeling of grammars.

Level: Introductory.

Impossible Languages (Week 1)

Andrea Moro
Institute for Advanced Study IUSS Pavia and the Scuola Normale Superiore
What is a language made of, such that there can be an impossible one? There are at least two ways to consider a human language. One is to describe it as a finite set of discrete primitive elements and simple combinatorial rules generating a potentially infinite array of structures (to be interpreted at the relevant interface). The other is to describe it from a purely physical point of view. From this latter perspective, a human language exists in two distinct environments: outside the brain and within it. Outside the brain, it takes the form of mechanical waves of compressed and rarefied air (i.e., sound); within the brain, it takes the form of electrical waves—the code neurons use to exchange information during cognitive operations. Thus, when we ask whether an impossible language exists, we are in fact asking a twofold question: a formal one (concerning formal properties) and a physical one (concerning its material substrate). The aim of this course is to explore both sides of this coin and ultimately argue for their possible unification. To this end, I will consider several aspects of human language, such as linearization, externalization, inner speech, negation and symmetry-breaking phenomena, crucially taking into account first language acquisition. The course provides a basic introduction to methods in neurolinguistics and discusses some foundational experiments in the field in a very accessible way. Ultimately, new questions and issues will be addressed; among others, the role of impossible languages in distinguishing humans from vLLM and the effect on evolution of non-mutually understandable languages. The goal is to show that we are our limits.

Level: Introductory.

Tenselessness

Roumyana Pancheva & Yael Sharvit
University of California, Santa Cruz & University of California Los Angeles
Some languages have been claimed to lack overt morphological tense. In this course, we review various theories of how temporal relations are expressed/inferred in such “tenseless” languages. One of our goals is to understand whether there are “tenseless” languages whose analysis calls for appealing to covert morphological tense, and whether there are languages whose analysis calls for appealing to other grammatical mechanisms. We also ask what implications these conclusions have for the grammar of temporality in general.

Level: Advanced. Recommended background: introductory and intermediate semantics.

Theories of Passive. Can a sparse one be developed by us? (Week 1)

David Pesetsky
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Constructions to which the name "passive" is plausibly applied have been identified in many (perhaps most) of the world's languages, and a number of apparently universal properties of this construction have been discovered by syntacticians in several research traditions. Several analyses of this construction have been developed, including recent proposals by Bruening, Legate (with colleagues), and Collins, which will be discussed in the half of the week. It will be argued, however, that we should be troubled by passive-specific phrases such as VoiceP or other passive-specific mechanisms required under these analyses — since (despite their other virtues) the existence of "passive" in the first place ends up stipulated rather than explained. Though obviously some difference must be posited between active and passive constructions, a stronger proposal should be sought in which the existence of passive is actually predicted as a by-product of factors independently motivated in areas unrelated to voice. Such a proposal will be sketched in the second half of the week — a simplified version of Collins' proposal, combined with a generalized version of the theory of Dependent Case (which will be introduced mid-week).

Level: Intermediate/Advanced. Students should have a basic grounding in generative syntax, including some exposure to theories of case and the relationship between argument structure and syntactic structure (e.g. the unaccusative/unergative distinction, A vs. A-bar movement, etc.)

Introduction to Phonology

Douglas Pulleyblank
University of British Columbia
This course is an introduction to phonological analysis. We'll focus on ways that sounds are represented in human language, how they are hierarchically structured, and how sound patterns are accounted for. We will consider patterns from many different languages, examining patterns of both distribution and alternation, and looking at phenomena such as assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, stress and reduplication. We will look at what is special about these sorts of phenomena and how linguists approach their treatment. The focus will be on gaining practice in data analysis, with a focus on constraint-based frameworks

The course is introductory in nature; no background is required.

Introduction to Semantics

Maribel Romero
University of Konstanz
The course introduces the students to the central notions and fundamental principles in the study of meaning in formal semantics. The course is structured in three parts. The first part builds our tool-kit: It provides empirical tests to distinguish semantic entailments from several types of pragmatic implications and it develops formal tools to model meaning in natural language. The second part, which constitutes the main bulk of the course, develops a step-by-step meaning composition procedure that covers basic predicate-argument structures, adjunction and quantification. The third and concluding part briefly presents a case study in which the composition procedure is extended to superlative constructions and degree expressions.

No previous background in semantics is required.

Introduction to Super Linguistics (Week 1)

Philippe Schlenker
École Normale Supérieure Paris
We will offer an introduction to Super Linguistics (using the term 'super' in its original Latinate meaning 'beyond'), which we define as the application of formal methods inspired by linguistics to non-standard objects (beyond standard linguistic objects of study). In this course, we zoom in on iconic meanings and their interaction with linguistic structure. We will start by explaining why syntax and semantics must both be extended with an iconic component to deal with certain constructions of sign language. We will then see that pure gestures that replace words in spoken language ('pro-speech gestures') can trigger all the inferential types (presuppositions, implicatures, etc.) that normal words do. Turning to co-speech gestures, we will argue that they typically contribute certain types of (conditionalized) presuppositions, called 'cosuppositions'. Finally, time permitting, we will sketch the argument for the view that music has a meaning, and we will argue that cartoon or film music modifies the meaning of animations in the same way as co-speech gestures modify the meaning of words.

The class does not presuppose familiarity with super linguistic topics. However introductory knowledge of semantics and pragmatics will be assumed.

Identity in Reduplication: analysis, computation, and acquisition

Donca Steriade & Colin Wilson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Johns Hopkins University
Reduplication is copying a word, or part of it, to encode some of its grammatical properties. The copy, or Red(uplicant), tends to remain identical to the substring it corresponds to in the basic unreduplicated form, or Base. The most interesting cases are those where we would expect the identity between Base and Red to be disrupted by regular phonological processes yet it is not. Details of this persistent Identity Effect are often difficult to express in standard rule-based analyses. They have suggested mechanisms that achieve or reward surface identity between Red and Base (Wilbur 1973, McCarthy and Prince 1995, many others). These mechanisms appear to require high formal expressivity, as identity is enforced by potentially unbounded dependencies among segments in Red and Base; in particular, the identity mechanisms run counter to the general claim that morphology and phonology are regular or finite-state systems (e.g., Roark and Sproat 1997, Dolatian and Heinz 2018, Wang 2024; see also Kobele 2006 on copying of syntactic structures).

This intermediate course examines the evidence for the Identity Effect, the analyses it has prompted, the typology that such analyses predict, and alternatives offered to the surface-oriented analysis initiated by Wilbur (Inkelas and Zoll 2005, Kiparsky 2010, McCarthy et al. 2012). We will discuss how persistent identity relations can be expressed in computational models of morphology/phonology, how they can be acquired by humans and machines, and how they relate to broader issues in the cognition and perception of repetition.

A prior course in phonology is recommended. Some understanding of Optimality Theory is a plus.

CSSL26 / Course Descriptions