Alec Marantz
New York University, Linguistics, Faculty Member
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This chapter examines the syntactic and semantic properties of heads, e.g. Voice, Appl, and little p, that add participants to events. Instead of assuming that such heads exist as distinct primitives in the functional lexicon, it is... more
This chapter examines the syntactic and semantic properties of heads, e.g. Voice, Appl, and little p, that add participants to events. Instead of assuming that such heads exist as distinct primitives in the functional lexicon, it is proposed that there is one such head, which can get different interpretations depending on how it is merged into the structure. The chapter’s approach attributes the relative uniformity of the expression of argument structure to the principles that interpret syntactic structure semantically; thus, syntax is truly autonomous, with the atoms of syntactic representations carrying no inherent semantic values. Once syntactic heads are absolved from the necessity of explicitly carrying certain features relevant to their interpretation, a sparse inventory of functional heads can be developed. The system is applied to a set of constructions that present distinct challenges to theories that demand a kind of transparent reflection of argument structure in underlyi...
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Research Interests: Bioinformatics, Psychology, Life Sciences, Morphology, Neurolinguistics, and 15 moreLinguistics, Priming, Medicine, Biomedical Research, Masked Priming, Morphological Processing, Past Tense, Irregular Verbs, Repetition Priming, Visual Word Processing, Visual Word Recognition, Visual Word Form Area, Response Priming, Lexical decision task, and Affix
Recent attempts to unify linguistic theory and brain science have grown out of recognition that a proper understanding of language in the brain must reflect the steady advances in linguistic theory of the last forty years. The first Mind... more
Recent attempts to unify linguistic theory and brain science have grown out of recognition that a proper understanding of language in the brain must reflect the steady advances in linguistic theory of the last forty years. The first Mind Articulation Project Symposium ...
“Cognition in Music” (Serafine, 1983) misrepresents the goals of a cognitive approach to music and the proper relation between cognitive science and music theory. As a linguist and cognitive scientist, I feel responsible both for the... more
“Cognition in Music” (Serafine, 1983) misrepresents the goals of a cognitive approach to music and the proper relation between cognitive science and music theory. As a linguist and cognitive scientist, I feel responsible both for the source of Serafine’s major misconception and for the correction of the error. Serafine’s line of reasoning follows a mistaken analogy with arguments from linguistic metatheory. Linguists maintain that a certain structuralist methodology may lead to hypotheses about speakers’ knowledge of language. Serafine appears to interpret this path to a cognitive theory as a restriction on the analysis of language or music to the uncovering of the cognitive processes humans use to deal with linguistic or musical material. She thus asserts a limiting view of what it is interesting or important to do with music. In this paper I hope to liberate music theorists from Serafine’s psychomusical constraints, but the considerations I will bring forward have wider application. Serafine’s main assertion appears at the beginning of her article (p. 120): “every formal analysis of an artwork should be an implicit description of the human cognitive processes that give rise to it, in composing or hearing or both.” Change ‘artwork’ to ‘sentence’ and one derives a constraint on linguistic theory; change ‘hearing’ to ‘reading’ and literary theory is implicated; change ‘hearing’ to ‘looking’ or ‘perceiving’ and one is in the realm of art criticism. If Serafine could support her assertion, it would have wide-ranging implications across a variety of disciplines, but the assertion finds no backing in her article. The linguistic analogy underlying Serafine’s reasoning is clear from the beginning of her article.’ What are the facts of music worthy of investigation?:
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Standard practice in linguistics often obscures the connection between theory and data, leading some to the conclusion that generative linguistics could not serve as the basis for a cognitive neuroscience of language. Here the... more
Standard practice in linguistics often obscures the connection between theory and data, leading some to the conclusion that generative linguistics could not serve as the basis for a cognitive neuroscience of language. Here the founda-tions and methodology of generative grammar are clarified with the goal of explaining how generative theory already functions as a reasonable source of hypotheses about the representation and computation of language in the mind and brain. The claims of generative theory, as exemplified, e.g., within Chom-sky’s (2000) Minimalist Program, are contrasted with those of theories en-dorsing parallel architectures with independent systems of generative phonol-ogy, syntax and semantics. The single generative engine within Minimalist ap-proaches rejects dual routes to linguistic representations, including possible extra-syntactic strategies for semantic structure-building. Clarification of the implications of this property of generative theory undermines the fou...
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The striking parallels across languages in the syntactic expression of “argument structure” broadly construed has led within generative grammar, at least since Generative Semantics, to generative theories that demand a kind of transparent... more
The striking parallels across languages in the syntactic expression of “argument structure” broadly construed has led within generative grammar, at least since Generative Semantics, to generative theories that demand a kind of transparent reflection of argument structure in
Abstract—We have developed a method suitable for recon-structing spatio-temporal activities of neural sources by using magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data. The method extends the adaptive beamformer technique originally proposed by Borgiotti... more
Abstract—We have developed a method suitable for recon-structing spatio-temporal activities of neural sources by using magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data. The method extends the adaptive beamformer technique originally proposed by Borgiotti and Kaplan to incorporate the vector beamformer formulation in which a set of three weight vectors are used to detect the source activity in three orthogonal directions. The weight vectors of the vector-extended version of the Borgiotti–Kaplan beamformer are then projected onto the signal subspace of the measurement covariance matrix to obtain the final form of the proposed beamformer’s weight vectors. Our numerical experiments show that both spatial resolution and output signal-to-noise ratio of the proposed beamformer are significantly higher than those of the minimum-variance-based vector beamformer used in previous investigations. We also applied the proposed beamformer to two sets of auditory-evoked MEG data, and the results clearly demon-strat...
Research Interests: Biomedical Engineering, Signal Processing, Magnetoencephalography, Neurophysiology, Inverse Problems, and 14 moreSensor Arrays, Biomedical, Brain Mapping, Image Reconstruction, Minimum variance, Inverse Problem, Vectors, Covariance Matrix, Auditory evoked Potentials, Spatial resolution, Signal Reconstruction, Adaptive Beamforming, Signal to Noise Ratio, and Electrical And Electronic Engineering
We discuss theoretical approaches to blocking effects, with particular emphasis on cases in which words appear to block phrases (and perhaps vice versa). These approaches share at least one intuition: that syntactic and semantic features... more
We discuss theoretical approaches to blocking effects, with particular emphasis on cases in which words appear to block phrases (and perhaps vice versa). These approaches share at least one intuition: that syntactic and semantic features create possible ‘‘cells’ ’ or slots in which particu-lar items can appear, and that blocking occurs when one such cell is occupied by one form as opposed to another. Accounts of blocking differ along two primary dimensions: the size of the objects that com-pete with one another (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences); and whether or not ungrammatical forms are taken into consideration in determining the correct output (relatedly, whether otherwise well-formed objects are marked ungrammatical by competition). We argue that blocking in the sense of competition for the expression of syntactic or semantic features is limited to insertion of the phonological expo-nents of such features (the Vocabulary items of Distributed Morphol-ogy) at terminal nodes fr...
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■ Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such... more
■ Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typ-ically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics of prediction within serially presented adjective–noun phrases, beginning at the point at which the pre-dictive information is first available to the reader. Using corpus transitional probability to estimate the predictability of a noun, we found an increase in activity in the left middle temporal gyrus in response to the presentation of highly predictive adjectives (i.e., adjectives that license a strong noun prediction). Moreover, we found that adjective predictivity and expected noun frequency interacted, such that the response to the highly predictive adjec-tives (e.g., stainless) was ...
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Dans une grammaire de l'anglais appliquant correctement la convention X-barre, la categorie S doit etre remplacee par V.
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What do linguists do?1 Or, rather, what do linguists do that draws such luminaries as the late Tom Wolfe2 to complain so publicly about our enterprise?3 I’ll confine my discussion here to what we call “syntax,” which is at the core of... more
What do linguists do?1 Or, rather, what do linguists do that draws such luminaries as the late Tom Wolfe2 to complain so publicly about our enterprise?3 I’ll confine my discussion here to what we call “syntax,” which is at the core of so-called “Generative Grammar,” the way of doing linguistics that has dominated linguistics departments in the US for the past 50 years or so. Linguists deeply engaged in the enterprise of syntax feel that it’s obvious what they are doing is not only fascinating, but that it also has led to a set of interesting and important results. However, outsiders can be skeptical, and my own view is that this skepticism can leads to hostility–and bad press –for two reasons. As I will briefly illustrate with some examples from my own research, the actual work of linguists is esoteric and specific. Not everyone gets excited about the details of ant colonies, for example, and not everyone may be kept up at night by the connection between predicate possession in Engl...
So Lexicalism claims that the syntax manipulates internally complex words, not unanalyzable atomic units. The leading idea of Lexicalism might be summarized as follows: Everyone agrees that there has to be a list of sound/meaning... more
So Lexicalism claims that the syntax manipulates internally complex words, not unanalyzable atomic units. The leading idea of Lexicalism might be summarized as follows: Everyone agrees that there has to be a list of sound/meaning connections for the atomic building blocks of language (=the “morphemes”). There also has to be a list of idiosyncratic properties associated with the building blocks. Perhaps the storage house of sound/meaning connections for building blocks and the storage house of idiosyncratic information associated with building blocks is the same house. Perhaps the distinction between this unified storage house and the computational system of syntax could be used to correlate and localize various other crucial distinctions: non-syntax vs. syntax, "lexical" phonological rules vs. phrasal and everywhere phonological rules, unpredictable composition vs. predictable composition ... Syntax is for the ruly, the lexicon for the unruly (see, e.g., DiSciullo and Will...
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Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored, and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated... more
Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored, and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated similar issues for functional affixes. In Word or Lexeme Based Morphology (Aronoff 1994), affixes are not representational units on par with stems or roots. This view is in stark contrast to the claims of linguistic theories like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), which assign rich representational content to affixes. We conducted a series of eight visual lexical decision studies, evaluating effects of derivational affix priming along with stem priming, identity priming, form priming, and semantic priming at long and short lags. We find robust and consistent affix priming (but not semantic or form priming) with lags up to 33 items, supporting the position that affixes are morphemes, i.e., representational units on par with stems. Intriguingly,...
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ABSTRACT The size and probability distribution of a word-form’s cohort of lexical competitors influence auditory processing and can be constrained by syntactic category information. This experiment employs noun/verb homonyms (e.g. “ache”)... more
ABSTRACT The size and probability distribution of a word-form’s cohort of lexical competitors influence auditory processing and can be constrained by syntactic category information. This experiment employs noun/verb homonyms (e.g. “ache”) presented in syntactic context to clarify the mechanisms and representations involved in context-based cohort restriction. Implications for theories positing single versus multiple word-forms in cases of category ambiguity also arise. Using correlations between neural activity in auditory cortex, measured by magnetoencephalography (MEG), and standard and context-dependent cohort entropy and phoneme surprisal variables, we consider the possibility of cohort restriction on the basis of form or on the basis of category usage. Crucially, the form-conditional measure is consistent only with a single word-form view of category ambiguity. Our results show that noun/verb homonyms are derived from single category-neutral word-forms and that the cohort is restricted incrementally in context, by form and then by usage.
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Case and Licensing Alec Marantz Massachusetts Institute of Technology It is fairly well understood that noun phrases (or DPs) occupy argument positions in sentences (or bear grammatical relations or functions) by virtue of the semantic... more
Case and Licensing Alec Marantz Massachusetts Institute of Technology It is fairly well understood that noun phrases (or DPs) occupy argument positions in sentences (or bear grammatical relations or functions) by virtue of the semantic roles they bear with respect to predicates. Current ...
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In this paper, we conduct a magnetoencephalography (MEG) lexical decision experiment and model morphological processing in the human brain, especially the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the ventral visual stream. Five computational... more
In this paper, we conduct a magnetoencephalography (MEG) lexical decision experiment and model morphological processing in the human brain, especially the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the ventral visual stream. Five computational models of morphological processing are constructed and evaluated against human brain activities: Letter Markov Model and Syllable Markov Model as “amorphous” models without linguistically defined morphemes, and Morpheme Markov Model, Hidden Markov Model (HMM), and Probabilistic ContextFree Grammar (PCFG) as “morphous” models with different amounts of morphological supervision. The present experiment demonstrates that “amorphous” models underperformed relative to “morphous” models, PCFG was more neurologically accurate than sequential models, and PCFG better explained nested words with non-local dependencies between prefixes and suffixes. These results strongly suggest that morphemes are represented in the VWFA and parsed into hierarchical morphological s...
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Using data from a behavioral structural priming experiment, we test two competing theoretical approaches to argument structure, which attribute different configurations to (in)transitive structures. These approaches make different claims... more
Using data from a behavioral structural priming experiment, we test two competing theoretical approaches to argument structure, which attribute different configurations to (in)transitive structures. These approaches make different claims about the relationship between unergatives and transitive structures selecting either a DP complement or a small clause complement in structurally unambiguous sentences, thus making different predictions about priming relations between them. Using statistical tools that combine a factorial 6 × 6 within subjects ANOVA, a mixed effects ANCOVA and a linear mixed effects regression model, we report syntactic priming effects in comprehension, which suggest a stronger predictive contribution of a model that supports an interpretive semantics view of syntax, whereby syntactic structures do not necessarily reflect argument/event structure in semantically unambiguous configurations. They also contribute novel experimental evidence that correlate representati...
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Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such... more
Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics of prediction within serially presented adjective–noun phrases, beginning at the point at which the predictive information is first available to the reader. Using corpus transitional probability to estimate the predictability of a noun, we found an increase in activity in the left middle temporal gyrus in response to the presentation of highly predictive adjectives (i.e., adjectives that license a strong noun prediction). Moreover, we found that adjective predictivity and expected noun frequency interacted, such that the response to the highly predictive adjectives (e.g., stainless) was modulated by the frequency of the expected noun (steel). These results likely reflect preactivation of nouns in highly predictive contexts. The fact that the preactivation process was modulated by the frequency of the predicted item is argued to provide support for a frequency-sensitive lexicon.
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We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems... more
We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems (e.g., taxable), bound roots (e.g., tolerable), and unique root words (e.g., vulnerable, the root of which does not appear elsewhere). Analysis was focused on brain responses within 100–200 msec poststimulus onset in the previously identified letter string and visual word-form areas. MEG data were analyzed using cortically constrained minimum-norm estimation. Correlations were computed between activity at functionally defined ROIs and continuous measures of the words' morphological properties. ROIs were identified across subjects on a reference brain and then morphed back onto each individual subject's brain (n = 9). We find evidence of decomposition for both free stems and bound roots at the M170 stage in processing. The M170 response is shown to be sensitive to morphological properties such as affix frequency and the conditional probability of encountering each word given its stem. These morphological properties are contrasted with orthographic form features (letter string frequency, transition probability from one string to the next), which exert effects on earlier stages in processing (∼130 msec). We find that effects of decomposition at the M170 can, in fact, be attributed to morphological properties of complex words, rather than to purely orthographic and form-related properties. Our data support a model of word recognition in which decomposition is attempted, and possibly utilized, for complex words containing bound roots as well as free word-stems.
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Visual perception, Reading, Cognitive Neuroscience, and 15 moreBrain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Reaction Time, Lexical Decision, Conditional probability, Adult, Time Factors, Visual Word Form Area, Neurosciences, Region of Interest, Psychomotor Performance, Lexical decision task, photic stimulation, and transition probability
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Halle and Marantz features to the terminal nodes, but it does not add to the semantic/syntactic features making up the terminal nodes. It is worth noting that in the process of VI the syntactic, semantic and morphological features shown... more
Halle and Marantz features to the terminal nodes, but it does not add to the semantic/syntactic features making up the terminal nodes. It is worth noting that in the process of VI the syntactic, semantic and morphological features shown on the left in (1) function as indices ...