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endangered language of Sudan, and show that while comparison is always implicit (structures are underspecified and oftenambiguous) one class of structures shows behaviors previously thought to be diagnostic of explicit comparison, prompting a reevaluationof those criteria and their grammatical significance.Laura Kertz (Brown University) Session 37Brendan Hainline (University of Chicago)Eliciting ‘ungrammatical’ ellipsesWe present results from a study investigating whether the syntactic category of a potential antecedent (nominal vs. verbal)influences the production of verbal anaphors. We asked whether participants would spontaneously produce verb phrase ellipseswhen supplied with a nominal antecedent prompt. Such structures, while documented in corpora, are ungrammatical according tomany licensing models. We found that while rates of VPE with nominal anaphors are low, they increase as the phonologicaloverlap between antecedent and target increases. However, a similar pattern was observed for pro-form anaphors, suggesting thatthe matching constraints on verbal anaphora are not specific to ellipsis.Greg Key (University of Arizona) Session 48Flavor fission in the causative/inchoative alternationEvidence from Turkish is presented that ‘flavor’ (Marantz 1997, Folli & Harley 2007) is a feature originating as part of thefeature bundle of little v. In some verbs, CAUSE and BECOME have independent exponence. The suffix –t in the causative verbalternates with the suffix –n in the inchoative verb, e.g., pis-le-t- filthy-v-CAUSE ‘get filthy’(tr.), and pis-le-n- filthy-v-BECOME‘get filthy’ (int.). These are argued to be cases of root-conditioned fission of the flavor feature, with the verbalizing morphemesunderspecified for flavor.Samuel Jay Keyser (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Session 77Generative grammar at MITI came to MIT in 1961, joining the Research Laboratory of Electronics. From the beginning, the goal of linguistic research at MITwas to discover principles underlying the brain’s knowledge structure. In 1977, I became head of the new Department ofLinguistics and Philosophy. Soon thereafter, as government support for the department’s research program dried up, cognitivescience emerged as an independent discipline, and MIT’s Center for Cognitive Science was established. The Center broughttogether linguists, psycholinguists, acousticians, and computer scientists, though it (and psychology) disappeared when aDepartment of Brain and Cognitive Science was formed. Synergistic work is now needed to further the enterprise begun fiftyyears earlier.Naira Khan (Stanford University) Section 3Linear precedence and binding in BanglaLinear precedence has been empirically shown to play a role in syntactic phenomena such as co-reference and variable binding.However, formulations of Binding Conditions have discarded precedence for c-command, with linearization algorithmslinearizing at the level of PF. This paper shows that linear order is crucial for deriving binding relations in Indo-Aryan languagessuch as Bangla; and not only is c-command not relevant, it is actually problematic. I present empirical facts from Bangla to showthat linear precedence must be encoded in the syntax and can be formalized at the level of Merge.Marcin Kilarski (Adam Mickiewicz University) Session 76On the concrete nature of “exotic” languagesIn this paper, I examine an enduring parallel in the characterization of “exotic” languages between the 17th and the late 20thcentury as concrete and excessively elaborate. In particular, I focus on the diversity of evidence adduced from genetically andtypologically diverse languages, and its implications for the description of the languages and the cognitive and cultural propertiesof their speakers. The contribution of such views to the mainstream of linguistic and sociological thought demonstrates howstrong and general theoretical claims can be supported by diverse, frequently contradictory, and opportunistically assorted piecesof linguistic evidence.167