Matthew A. Tucker

Posters, Handouts, etc.

Handouts & Slides

  • Your Roots Are Showing: On Root-Sensitive Allomorphy in Arabic. Handout of a talk given at the Roots IV Workshop at NYU. New York, NY. 1 July 2015. [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This is a handout of an invited talk given at the fourth installment of the Roots series of workshops, held at NYU in the summer of 2015. In it I provide an analysis of the Modern Standard Arabic derivational verbal system and deverbal nominal system in the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), examining the consequences of this data for a version of DM which assumes Embick’s (2011) Linearization Hypothesis on Vocabulary Insertion (or: the C1-LIN Theory). Two major consequences of this approach are shown to be that: (1) nonconcatenative templatic morphology is analyzable as underlyingly linear and (2) the ‘little-_x_’ categorizing heads of DM cannot be phasal/cyclic in the sense of rendering their complements opaque to further morphological visibility.

    Notes

    This talk involves some elements of an analysis of the Arabic clause put forth in my paper in a Festschrift for Jorge Hankamer. Full argumentation for some of the assumptions left unproven in the handout appear there.

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A. 2015. Your Roots are Showing: Two Cases of Exceptional Root-Sensitive Allomorphy in Arabic. Handout of a talk given at the Roots IV Workshop, New York University. New York, New York, USA. 1 July 2015.

  • The Cost of Processing Vowel Diacritics in Arabic: Evidence from Masked Priming. Slides of a talk given at the Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference (ERP). Madrid. 2 October 2014 (with Diogo Almeida, Kevin Schluter, & Ali Idrissi). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    One of the constitutive properties of the Semitic languages is their lack of full character orthographic segments for short vowels, which are instead represented with diacritic marks. Despite being available as diacritics, in both Arabic and Hebrew these diacritics are hardly ever used, being retained largely only for (1) language learners, (2) religious texts/poetry, or (3) morphological disambiguation of ambiguous strings. Here we report twop masked priming experiments which investigate this effect by examining whether primes with vowels facilitate the processing of targets without vowels and vice-versa. Our results suggest that form ambiguity (modulo the diacritics) does not slow processing, but the addition of superfluous or otherwise unused diacritics actually inhibits lexical access/single word reading.

    Notes

    This talk is being prepared as a paper. Email me if you are interested in a copy.

    Full Citation

    Almeida, Diogo, Kevin Schluter, Matthew A. Tucker, & Ali Idrissi. 2014. The cost of processing vowel diacritics in Arabic: Evidence from masked priming. Slides of a talk given at the Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference (ERP). Madrid. 2 October 2014.

  • Case and Clausal Architecture: Evidence from Maltese. Handout of a talk given at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Minneapolis, MN. 2 January 2014. [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This talk provides an argument that the complement of the Maltese (Semitic; Republic of Malta) verb ġiegħel, “to cause” is tenseless yet requires an inflected embedded verb, in line with the general typological property that Arabic and Maltese, unlike Hebrew, lack a morphological infinitive. I provide several arguments that there are no morphological, semantic, or syntactic correlates of tense or aspect in the complement of ġiegħel, nor is the thematic agent of the embedded verb marked structurally nominative. Despite this, full subject agreement is required in this embedded clause. I develop a Disjunctive Case approach to this phenomenon (Marantz, 1993) which takes case assignment to be postsyntactic yet agreement to be syntactic. The result is a coherent analysis of Maltese embedded verbs which allows subject agreement to be valued in the absence of both nominative case and φ-complete Tense.

    Notes

    This is a talk version of chapter 3 of my dissertation from UCSC and is exists in a slightly longer format as an unpublished squib. Please cite the squib or dissertation if you wish to refer to this argumentation.

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A. 2014. Case and Clausal Architecture: Evidence from Maltese. Handout of a talk given at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Minneapolis, MN. 2 January 2014.

  • Diagnosing Syntax-Morphology Interactions from Clitic Restrictions: The Case of Maltese. Handout of a talk given at the Seventh Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics. Brussels, Belgium. 18 December 2012. [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This is a handout of a talk given at the Seventh Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics as a keynote. In it, I outline a novel instance of the Person Case/me-lui Constraint in Maltese (Semitic; Republic of Malta). I also provide several arguments that, in this language, at least some verbs instantiate argument structures in which the accusative theme asymmetrically c-commands the dative goal/recipient. The result is argued to be a system in which <span class=”construct>Agree</span>-based approaches to the PCC (Nevins, 2007; Béjar & Rezac, 2009) make incorrect predictions and a morphological approach is required, instead. Along the way, I develop the theoretical analysis that strong pronouns in Semitic are a combination of an accusative pronoun plus a morphologically empty host.

    Notes

    This talk was superseded by chapter 5 of my dissertation, and that should be consulted for more details on the Maltese PCC as well as its relationship to the other documented PCC in Semitic (from Modern Standard Arabic).

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A. 2012. Diagnosing Syntax-Morphology Interactions from Clitic Restrictions: The Case of Maltese. Handout of a talk given at the Seventh Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics. Hoegeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. 18 December 2012.

  • Iraqi Arabic Verbs: The Need for Roots and Templates. Handout of a talk given at the 28th Annual West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California. 21 February 2010. [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This is a handout of a talk given at the 28th Annual Meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics which attempts to derive the entirety of the Iraqi Arabic verbal root-and-pattern system using an input set containing only a consonantal root and vocalic melody. It is a portion of my MA thesis from UC Santa Cruz. Templatic effects are derived solely by phonotactic and syllabic constraints in the language at large. The resulting system is called the Root and Pattern system for nonconcatenative templatic morphology.

    Notes

    This handout led to the published WCCFL Proceedings Paper as well as an article in Recherches linguistique de Vincennes. The paper version, in particular, is a better-packaged version of this project.

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A. 2010. Iraqi Arabic Verbs: The Need for Roots and Templates. Handout of a talk given at the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. 20 February 2010.

  • Latest Insertion in K’ichee’. Handout of a talk given at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Baltimore, MD. 10 January 2010 (with Robert Henderson). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This is a handout of a talk given at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America by Robert Henderson (primary author) and me. In it, we provide a morphophonological analysis of the K’ichee’ (Mayan; Guatemala) status suffixes (e.g., /-ik/) in the Distributed Morphology framework. Specifically, we argue that Vocabulary Insertion is at least partially sensitive to the output of prosodic phrase building operations, allowing us to claim that status suffix allomorphy is sensitive to intonational phrase (ιP) boundaries.

    Notes

    Robert solo-authored a 2011 NLLT Paper (NLLT link) which develops the core empirical insights concerning the status suffixes in the context of an Optimality-Theoretic analysis. That paper should be consulted for any generalizations you wish to draw about K’ichee’ or the status suffixes.

    Full Citation

    Henderson, Robert & Matthew A. Tucker. 2010. Latest Insertion in K’ichee’. Handout of a talk given at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Baltimore, MD. 10 January 2010.

Posters

  • The Complex Structure of Errors and The Independent Visibility of φ-features: Evidence from Agreement Attraction in Arabic. Poster presented at the 2016 Meeting of the Northeastern Linguistics Society. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst, MA. 14 October 2016 (with Diogo Almeida). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This poster presents two quantitative approaches to modeling the effect sizes and reaction time distribution of agreement attraction errors in comprehension in Modern Standard Arabic. In this poster, we address two assumptions normally made in the agreement attraction literature: (1) that simple agreement errors (without a distractor) are uniform with attraction errors (where a distractor is present) and (2) that all agreement features contribute to attraction equally. Using Principle Components Analysis on a large-N self-paced reading experiment, we demonstrate that: (a) agreement errors (with or without an attractor) involve a heavy right tail of the reaction time distribution, (b) this heavy right tail disappears in classical agreement attraction contexts, and (c) when the subject of a sentence bears a marked agreement feature, this heavy right tail never appears. This leads to the conclusion that simple agreement errors are modulated by markedness of the subject’s agreement features, removing the precondition for attraction to obtain. We also show that different agreement features (gender and number) trigger different amounts of illusory licensing, measured in the size of the reading time facilitation to erroneously accepted ungrammatical sentences in Arabic.

    Notes

    This poster is being prepared as a manuscript for inclusion in the Proceedings of NELS. Email me for a copy.

    Full Citation

    Almeida, Diogo and Matthew A. Tucker. 2016. The Complex Structure of Errors and The Independent Visibility of φ-features: Evidence from Agreement Attraction in Arabic. Poster presented at the 2016 Meeting of the Northeastern Linguistics Society. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst, MA. 14 October 2016.

  • Morphological Priming of Sound and Broken Plurals in the Standard Arabic Mental Lexicon. Poster presented at the 30th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY. 4 April 2016 (with Kevin Schluter, Meera Al Kaabi & Diogo Almeida). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This poster describes two masked priming experiments meant to assess a residual fact from our Frontiers paper on agreement in Arabic. In that paper, we observed that broken/ablauting plural nouns do not show two of the hallmarks of plurality in sentence-level reading times, whereas sound/suffixing plurals do. Here we used visual masked priming to assess whether this was a property of lexical access or sentence-level reading. RTs to lexical decision tasks shows no difference in strength of priming effects between broken/ablauting and sound/suffixing plurals, regardless of whether the singular form primes the plural or vice-versa. We conclude that the effect in our Frontiers paper must be a result of sentence-level processing considerations.

    Notes

    This poster is being prepared as a manuscript for publication presently. Email me for a copy.

    Full Citation

    Schluter, Kevin, Matthew A. Tucker, Meera Al Kaabi, & Diogo Almeida. 2016. Morphological priming of sound and broken plurals in the Standard Arabic mental lexicon. Poster presented at the 30th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY. 4 April 2016.

  • Attraction Errors for Gender in Modern Standard Arabic Reading. Poster given at the 2015 Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference. L-Università ta’ Malta, Valletta, Malta. 5 September 2015 (with Ali Idrissi and Diogo Almeida). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This poster presents the results of two experiments which assess the possibility of Agreement Attraction errors (e.g., The key to the cabinets are…) for verbal gender agreement in the comprehension of Modern Standard Arabic verbs. We demonstrate that attraction for gender does occur in comprehension, a novel empirical finding at the time. We also suggest in this poster that, like English number attraction, these errors are asymmetric with respect to markedness — masculine subjects with feminine distractors cause more errors than feminine subjects with masculine distractors (however see our subsequent manuscript, referenced below, for some update of this idea). Finally, we provide some comparative commentary to our previous results on number attraction in Arabic which suggest a difference in timing for these gender errors relative to other agreement features.

    Notes

    This poster now exists as part of a larger manuscript under review. That manuscript should be referred to instead of this poster for our most current thinking on gender in Arabic.

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A., Ali Idrissi, & Diogo Almeida. 2015. Attraction Errors for Gender in Modern Standard Arabic Reading. Poster given at the 2015 Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference. L-Università ta’ Malta, Valletta, Malta. 5 September 2015

  • Grammaticalized Resumption Helps a Little with Islands and D-Linking Helps a Lot: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic Acceptability. Poster given at the 2015 Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference. L-Università ta’ Malta, Valletta, Malta. 5 September 2015 (with Ali Idrissi, Jon Sprouse, & Diogo Almeida). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This poster describes two Likert-style acceptability studies which use the experimental design of the studies reported in Sprouse, Wagers, & Phillips (2012) and Sprouse, Caponigro, Greco, & Cecchetto (In Press) to examine the relationship between resumption and island extractions in Modern Standard Arabic. The results suggest that Modern Standard Arabic shows a strong preference for resumption with d-linked fillers, with speakers heavily dispreferring resumption when the wh-filler is bare (who, especially). However, when a d-linked filler is present, the presence of a resumptive pronoun in the gap position of wh-dependency ameliorates a large portion of the island effect seen in the acceptability measures. In the terminology of Sprouse, Wagers, & Phillips (2012), the resumptive pronoun appears to ameliorate the super-additive/grammatical component of the island violation, only.

    Notes

    This poster is being prepared as a manuscript for publication presently. Email me for a copy.

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A., Ali Idrissi, Jon Sprouse, & Diogo Almeida. 2015. Grammaticalized Resumption Helps a Little with Islands and D-Linking Helps a Lot: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic Acceptability. Poster given at the 2015 Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference. L-Università ta’ Malta, Valletta, Malta. 5 September 2015

  • Agreement Attraction in the Neural Language System. Poster given at the Twentieth Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) Conference. Edinburgh, Scotland. 4 September 2014 and the _2014 Society for the Neurobiology of Language Annual Meeting. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 29 August 2014 (with Stephen Politzer-Ahles, Joseph King, and Diogo Almeida). [pdf] [more]

    Summary

    This poster presents the results of a very large concurrent recording MEG and EEG experiment assessing the neural responses to Agreement Attraction errors such as The key to the cabinets obviously were rusty from years of disuse. Relative to grammatical controls, ungrammatical verbs are shown to trigger a left-lateralized negativity in early time windows (a LAN) and a broad, centro-posterior positivity in later time windows (a P600), both in the EEG signal. In the MEG signal, the P600 is shown to correlate with decreased activation to ungrammatical sentences, localized to the anterior left superior temporal gyrus and perisylvian inferior frontal sites (an M600). Attraction sentences (with ungrammatical verbs but a suitable matching non-subject) are shown to decrease the P600 in amplitude and spatial extent, consistent with the notion that the P600 indexes error recognition or parsing reanalysis. We provide some limited commentary on the polarity reversal of the M600 by suggesting that the P600 might be better viewed as a negative deflection to grammatical utterances as opposed to positive deflection to ungrammatical utterances.

    Notes

    This poster is being prepared as a manuscript presently. Email me for a copy if you are interested.

    Full Citation

    Tucker, Matthew A., Stephen Politzer-Ahles, Joseph King, & Diogo Almeida. 2014. Agreement Attraction in the Neural Language System. Poster given at the 2014 Society for the Neurobiology of Language Annual Meeting. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 29 August 2014.