Michael T Putnam
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 793610 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Michael T Putnam |
| NOMBRES | Michael T |
| APELLIDO | Putnam |
| FIRMA | PUTNAM M T |
| AFILIACIONES | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7758-8266 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1970 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
A dynamic model of fluctuation and re‐stabilization
Excessive events
This paper presents a detailed semantic and accompanying syntactic analysis of predicates denoting events that we describe as ‘excessive’ in Icelandic. Icelandic uses two types of strategies for marking of excess, the preposition yfir complemented by an anaphor (e.g. Sara bakaði yfir sig ‘Sara baked too much’), and the verbal prefix of- (e.g. Sara of-bakaði kökuna ‘Sara over-baked the cake’). We argue that the former strategy regularly expresses …
Moundridge (Kansas) Schweitzer German
Moundridge Schweitzer German (MSG) is a strictly oral moribund heritage variety of German spoken in and around Moundridge, Kansas, approximately 30 miles northeast of Wichita.They are a community of Mennonites whose dialect most closely resembles Eastern Palatinate.Today, there are estimated to be fewer than three dozen speakers remaining, all over the age of 65.The speakers are approximately the third or fourth generation of MSG speakers in the …
Stability in the integrated bilingual grammar
Decades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namely heritage language speakers , shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of fl…
Syntactic change in diachrony versus contact-induced change
Recent studies (e.g. Kupisch, Tanja & Maria Polinsky. 2022. Language history on fast forward: Innovations in heritage languages and diachronic change. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 25. 1–12) have rekindled an old debate concerning whether language change in contact (CIC) and language change in diachrony (CID) proceed along the same developmental path, or whether they diverge from one another in fundamental and predictable ways. This paper …
Ethical concerns for theoretical research in linguistics
Although formal, e.g., generative, approaches to linguistic inquiry are primarily concerned with the analysis of structural patterns, ethical concerns for the elicitation and documentation of empirical data that motivate these analyses persist. In this article, we explicate the challenges to be met and responsibilities that formal linguists must take in data collection, documentation, and analysis to ensure high ethical standards. We direct our a…
Modeling multilingual grammars
We are grateful for the many thoughtful responses to our epistemological paper, ‘The importance of features and exponents: Dissolving Feature Reassembly’ (henceforth, L&P). It is impossible to do justice to all of the points that have been raised in this response; rather, we will focus on three main points which hopefully will address the most important comments and concerns that have been raised
The importance of features and exponents
Formal approaches to bi- and multilingual grammars rely on two important claims: (i) the grammatical architecture should be able to deal with mono- and bi-/multilingual data without any specific constraints for the latter, (ii) features play a pivotal role in accounting for patterns across and within grammars. In the present paper, it is argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar, which clearly distinguishes between the underlying syntactic f…
What linguistic innovation tells us
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Filler-gap dependencies in bi- and multilingual grammars
This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present), and other cognitive considerations non-specific to the faculty of language (i.e. the three factors in…
Mismatches at the syntax-semantics interface
Non-finite complementation strategies found in American Norwegian (AmNo) (made available by the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS)) reveal unique and diverging patterns when compared to both standard and dialectal Norwegian and English. We argue in this paper that the majority of these divergent structures are the result of overextension (Rinke & Flores, 2014; Rinke et al., 2018; Putnam & Hoffman, 2021; Kupisch, 2014), where heritage languag…
Islands, expressiveness, and the theory/formalism confusion
When covert modality sneaks into your grammar
American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses wh-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien, 2021; Svenonius, 2016), we propose that wh-elements in AmNo can encode covert modality (similar to what is found in…
Why Is Inflectional Morphology Difficult to Borrow?-Distributing and Lexicalizing Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch
In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across diffe…
The Adaptive Bilingual Mind
The Tale of Two Lexicons
The notion of complexity is evasive and often left to intuition, yet it is often invoked when studying heritage language grammars. In this article, we propose a first pass at decomposing the notion of complexity into smaller components in a formal grammatical model. In particular, we argue that a distributed model of the lexicon (i.e., one that assumes that principles that generate both words and phrases are one and the same) allows us to identif…
Individual variation in the structure of bilingual grammars
A How to calculate harmony A.1 In a monolingual grammarThe calculation of harmony in a GSC framework minimally involves one set of parameters: the weights assigned to each constraint.To calculate the harmony of each potential output, the violations of each constraint associated with each output are multiplied by their respective constraint's weight, and the negative sum of the weighted violations is the harmony.Thus, in the toy grammar in Table 1…
Individual variation in the structure of bilingual grammars
A bilingual’s two languages can interact in their mind, but the mechanism of this interaction is \nstill open to debate. In this article we employ a variant of gradient symbolic computation \n(GSC; Smolensky et al. 2014) to model the code-switched utterances of unbalanced Dutch-English bilinguals. We aimed to evaluate GSC as an appropriate architecture to model bilingual \ncode-switching grammars, and to explore the extent of variability within a…
Relativized Prosodic Domains
In late-insertion, realizational models of morphology such as Distributed Morphology (DM), the insertion of Vocabulary Items (VIs) is conditioned by cyclic operations in the syntax. This paper explores whether an isomorphic relationship can be established between cyclic operations such as phases and prosodic domains. In the spirit of D'Alessandro and Scheer's (2015) proposal of a Modular Phase Impenetrability Condition (MPIC), we strive to provid…
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics
This chapter discusses Complementizer Agreement (CA): agreement between the complementizer introducing an embedded finite clause and the subject of that embedded clause. CA is mainly found in Frisian and the nonstandard varieties of Dutch and German. This chapter discusses the morphological properties of CA, in particular the (defectivity of) its paradigm, the relation between the CA paradigm and the verbal agreement paradigm, and the relation be…
The good, the bad, and the gradient
Although formal analyses of code-switching have enjoyed some success in determining which structures and interfaces are more fertile environments for switches than others, research exposing recalcitrant counter-examples to proposed constraints and axioms responsible for governing code-switching is abound. We advance the claim here that sub-optimal representations, i.e., losers , stand to reveal important information regarding the interaction of g…
Mental representations in receptive multilingual grammars
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Lesser-Studied Heritage Languages
Heritage languages and their speakers by Maria Polinsky
Reviewed by: Heritage languages and their speakers by Maria Polinsky Michael T. Putnam Heritage languages and their speakers. By Maria Polinsky. (Cambridge studies in linguistics 159.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 410. ISBN 978110704648. $130 (Hb). In spite of the fact that bilinguals and multilinguals make up the majority of Earth's population, it is only a relatively recent phenomenon that being bilingual has been viewed as …
German Particle and Prefix Verbs at the Syntax-Phonology Interface
Differential Access
In this article, we propose that elements of heritage language grammars-both in the form of axiomatic features and larger combined representational units-are not easily lost over the course of the lifespan. This view contrasts with alternative explanations for the steady-state representation of these grammars that suggest truncated acquisition or erosion are the primary culprits of perceived language loss. In production and comprehension processe…
Catenae
This paper introduces a novel unit of syntactic analysis, thecatena(Latin for 'chain'; pluralcatenae). The catena is defined in a dependency-based grammar as a word or a combination of words that is continuous with respect to dominance. According to this definition, any dependency tree or any subtree (complete or partial) of a dependency tree qualifies as a catena. The paper demonstrates that idioms are stored as catenae and that the elided mater…
Redefining Language Death
The present work presents a critical assessment of claims in recent literature that moribund language varieties exhibit accelerated language decay, and that attrition in individual grammars has a causational relationship with language shift to the majority language. We show these claims to be unfounded. Based on two empirical points taken from moribund heritage varieties of German-complementizer agreement and the restructuring of the morphosyntac…
National Socialism with Fler? German Hip Hop from the Right
This article examines the recent rise of right‐wing terminology in mainstream German hip‐hop lyrics and the reaction of the German media to these songs. We argue that the inclusion of these controversial lyrics was a deliberate effort on the part of the individual artists to titillate their audiences and ultimately produce revenue. The media soon “took the bait” and became unwilling collaborators in this effort. Here we expose potential reasons f…
Rammstein and Ostalgie
Ostalgie, former East Germans' desire for the time before German reunification, has played a growing part in the lives of citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). This article examines whether and to what extent this theme is present in the works of Rammstein, the world-famous German band whose members all grew up in the GDR. Our analysis reveals the thematic prominence of Ostalgie in this band's works, and further that this theme…
Ethical concerns for theoretical research in linguistics
Although formal, e.g., generative, approaches to linguistic inquiry are primarily concerned with the analysis of structural patterns, ethical concerns for the elicitation and documentation of empirical data that motivate these analyses persist. In this article, we explicate the challenges to be met and responsibilities that formal linguists must take in data collection, documentation, and analysis to ensure high ethical standards. We direct our a…
Different Perspectives on Critical Factors in Heritage Language Development and Maintenance
Heritage languages (HLs) are acquired in contexts of unbalanced input, or situations in which children receive primary exposure to the family/HL and experience an abrupt shift after the child begins formal schooling. As a consequence, HL speakers normally become more dominant in the environmental language, while the development of the HL is characterized by variable outputs. This means that HL speakers display more variation in their acquisition …
Why Is Inflectional Morphology Difficult to Borrow?-Distributing and Lexicalizing Plural Allomorphy in Pennsylvania Dutch
In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across diffe…
Relativized Prosodic Domains
In late-insertion, realizational models of morphology such as Distributed Morphology (DM), the insertion of Vocabulary Items (VIs) is conditioned by cyclic operations in the syntax. This paper explores whether an isomorphic relationship can be established between cyclic operations such as phases and prosodic domains. In the spirit of D'Alessandro and Scheer's (2015) proposal of a Modular Phase Impenetrability Condition (MPIC), we strive to provid…
Lexicalizing exponents in multilingual grammars
Bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax. Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar
Due to the programmatic nature of Minimalism, there are many directions that variations of this formalism can take. This paper demonstrates that one trend in Minimalism is steering toward Dependency Grammar (DG): bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax are all aspects/developments of/within Minimalism that are steering toward a dependency-based (as opposed to a constituency based) understanding of syntax and grammar. Wi…
Music as a Weapon
The paper engages in a brief exposé of responses to terrorist acts in mainstream (Western) music. In particular, this paper compares and contrasts the (West) German response to the RAF (Red Army Faction) between the years of 1968 and 1977 and the American music response to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. The argument is advanced here that in both American and German society a left-oriented bastion of musicia…
Simple Tibullus or the Ruse of Style
Those There Demonstratives
National Socialism with Fler? German Hip Hop from the Right
This article examines the recent rise of right‐wing terminology in mainstream German hip‐hop lyrics and the reaction of the German media to these songs. We argue that the inclusion of these controversial lyrics was a deliberate effort on the part of the individual artists to titillate their audiences and ultimately produce revenue. The media soon “took the bait” and became unwilling collaborators in this effort. Here we expose potential reasons f…
Towards a Derivational Syntax
This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroik’s (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for displacement phenomena in earlier versions of generative theory. These contributions bring to light many advantages and challenges that beset the Survive-minimalist framework, including topics such as the lexicon-syntax relationship, coordinate symmetries, scope, ellipsis, code-switching, a…
Music as a Weapon
The paper engages in a brief exposé of responses to terrorist acts in mainstream (Western) music. In particular, this paper compares and contrasts the (West) German response to the RAF (Red Army Faction) between the years of 1968 and 1977 and the American music response to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. The argument is advanced here that in both American and German society a left-oriented bastion of musicia…
Rammstein and Ostalgie
Ostalgie, former East Germans' desire for the time before German reunification, has played a growing part in the lives of citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). This article examines whether and to what extent this theme is present in the works of Rammstein, the world-famous German band whose members all grew up in the GDR. Our analysis reveals the thematic prominence of Ostalgie in this band's works, and further that this theme…
Studies on German-Language Islands
The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or Sprachinseln , throughout the world. The individual topics of study in this volume focus on various aspects of these German-language islands such as (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages under investigation. Collectively, the body of re…
Bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax. Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar
Due to the programmatic nature of Minimalism, there are many directions that variations of this formalism can take. This paper demonstrates that one trend in Minimalism is steering toward Dependency Grammar (DG): bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax are all aspects/developments of/within Minimalism that are steering toward a dependency-based (as opposed to a constituency based) understanding of syntax and grammar. Wi…
Straight outta Marzahn
In this article we explore the concept of communicative memory of modern East Germans in contemporary hip-hop lyrics. Our study reveals that even after more than twenty years of existing in a reunified German Republic, former and contemporary East Germans (i.e. Ossis) are still longing for a sense of social and political identity in a new system foreign in most respects to their previous socialist existence
Catenae
This paper introduces a novel unit of syntactic analysis, thecatena(Latin for 'chain'; pluralcatenae). The catena is defined in a dependency-based grammar as a word or a combination of words that is continuous with respect to dominance. According to this definition, any dependency tree or any subtree (complete or partial) of a dependency tree qualifies as a catena. The paper demonstrates that idioms are stored as catenae and that the elided mater…
What’s so incomplete about incomplete acquisition
Modeling the competence grammar of heritage speakers who exhibit low proficiency in their L1 represents a significant challenge for generative and experimental approaches to bilingual linguistic research. In this paper we revisit the core tenets of the incomplete acquisition hypothesis as developed in recent scholarship (in particular by Montrul (2002 et seq.) and Polinsky (1997 , 2006 )). Although we adopt many of these fundamental aspects of th…
Losing their (passive) voice
This paper reports initial findings on the apparent loss of passive voice constructions in Moundridge Schweitzer German, a moribund enclave dialect spoken in South Central Kansas. The dialect once had three agent-suppressing constructions; today speakers produce only an impersonal construction but marginally recognize one passive construction in comprehension tasks. Comparative and internal evidence suggests a clear path for this development qua …
The Structural Design of Language
Although there have been numerous investigations of biolinguistics within the Minimalist Program over the last ten years, many of which appeal to the importance of Turing's Thesis (that the structural design of systems must obey physical and mathematical laws), these studies have by and large ignored the question of the structural design of language. They have paid significant attention to identifying the components of language - settling on a le…
The emergence of middle voice structures with and without agents
This article presents evidence that, cross-linguistically or within the same language (family), there appears to be no morphosyntactic properties and/or structures specifically designated for the formation of middle voice constructions. What has been labeled a ‘middle voice construction’ is a semantic interpretation that, crucially, is blocked when an event variable is existentially closed by T. This article focuses on two ways of expressing a mi…
Minimizing (Interface) Domains
Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America
The contributions in Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America advance the ever-expanding research program in formal and theoretical treatments of heritage language grammars through in-depth empirical investigations. The core focus on moribund varieties of heritage Germanic languages extends beyond the exploration of the individual heritage language grammars and contributes to larger discussions in the field of Germanic linguistics.
Syntactic restructuring in heritage grammars
In order to elucidate the structure of heritage grammars, this paper presents an analysis of word order variation in Moundridge Schweitzer German (MSG), a moribund heritage variety of German spoken in South Central Kansas. Based on elicited production data and an acceptability judgment task, we show that the current state of the MSG grammar maintains the asymmetric German verb-second (V2) and verb-final (V-final) word-ordering closely tied to spe…
How constrained is language mixing in bi- and uni-modal production
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Parasitic Gapping in Bilingual Grammar
We report on work with German-English bilinguals, heritage speakers of German, and their licensing of parasitic gaps (a type of multiple gap construction) in English-to-German translation tasks. English allows such constructions variably, while European German does not. While some recent work reports that some heritage speakers have difficulty licensing null elements generally, most of our speakers allow some gaps in German. Structurally, these g…
Null arguments in transitional trilingual grammars
In this field note we discuss findings from pilot research on a variety of heritage German spoken in the Northeastern Province of Misiones of Argentina. Based on sociolinguistic field interviews with 25 consultants possessing varying degrees of proficiency in the language, we show that this variant of heritage German does in fact occasionally display instances of both null subjects (e.g
Feature reassembly as constraint satisfaction
Research on bilingual grammars from a formal perspective has often come under the guise of mainstream generative grammar. Since the inception of Chomsky’s (
When Bilingualism is the Common Factor
In this paper we take a closer look at the oft-touted divide between heritage language speakers and adult second language (L2) learners. Here, we explore whether some properties of language may display general effects across different populations of bilinguals, explaining, at least partially, why these two groups show some common differences when compared with monolinguals. To test this hypothesis, we adduce data from two unique populations of bi…
Derivational complexity vs. transfer effects
We investigate whether non-target wh -questions in heritage Low German and L2 English speakers are due primarily to cross-linguistic transfer or the reduction of grammatical complexity in developing grammars as modelled by the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis (DCH, Jakubowicz 2005 ). Previous research shows that complex (i.e. cross-clausal) wh -dependencies pose more difficulty to child L1 and adult L2 learners than monoclausal dependencies ( J…
Lexicalizing exponents in multilingual grammars
Differential Access
In this article, we propose that elements of heritage language grammars-both in the form of axiomatic features and larger combined representational units-are not easily lost over the course of the lifespan. This view contrasts with alternative explanations for the steady-state representation of these grammars that suggest truncated acquisition or erosion are the primary culprits of perceived language loss. In production and comprehension processe…
Linguistics (38 obras) · Computer Science (37 obras) · Philosophy (35 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (22 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (21 obras) · Psychology (21 obras) · Natural language processing (19 obras) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (18 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (17 obras) · Rule-based machine translation (17 obras)