Shota Momma (Negishi) is an assistant professor in linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He specializes in psycholinguistics, and his current NSF-funded research focuses on revealing how speakers assemble sentence structures in production in two different languages, English and Japanese. Before joining UMass, he was at the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, working with Victor Ferreira and Tamar Gollan. Before that, he did his Ph. D with Colin Phillips in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Title: Building sentence structures in speaking
Abstract: We have theories of grammatical knowledge and theories of how people produce sentences. These two theories, however, are not well integrated. In this talk, I will attempt to present an integrated theory of structure building in sentence production and grammatical knowledge. I will discuss our group’s recent research on how speakers formulate various types of sentence structure that played central roles in the development of grammatical theories, such as relative clauses (e.g., the cat that the girl thinks the dog chased), wh-questions (e.g., what did the girl think the dog chased?), raising (e.g., the girl seems to like the dog), and control (e.g., the girl wants to hug the dog). Based on the results from these studies, I will argue that there is a surprising parallelism between the notion of locality in grammatical theories and planning units in theories of sentence production. I will attempt to outline a theoretical framework that might allow us to integrate various findings from syntax, sentence production, and possibly, sentence comprehension.

This event will be hybrid held in East Hall 4448 & Zoom.