The Stanford linguistics AZ community — adjunct faculty Annie Zaenen and Arnold M. Zwicky, graduate student Anissa Zaitsu — is pleased to announce the PhD dissertation oral presentation of one of its little band:
The Landscape of Polarity-Sensitivity in African American English: Meaning and Structure by Anissa Rei Zaitsu: PhD dissertation oral presentation (Monday, June 8, 2026, 1:00-2:15pm). Committee: Vera Gribanova (co-chair), Cleo Condoravdi (co-chair), Boris Harizanov, Nandi Sims, and Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures, university chair).
ARZ’s abstract:
How do speakers recover abstract logical meanings from linguistic form when those meanings are not transparently encoded on the surface? This dissertation approaches this question through the study of Negative Concord, a widespread phenomenon in which multiple negative forms correspond to a single interpreted negation. [AMZ: for example, I ain’t see nobody ‘I didn’t see anybody’, with main negative ain’t and concordant negative nobody.] A longstanding puzzle concerns Negative Concord Items (NCIs), the elements participating in NC, which appear to be directly associated with negative meaning in some environments, but not all. I focus on novel evidence from African American English (AAE), a language whose NC system displays unusual flexibility in the conditions under which NC is licensed, creating an especially revealing empirical landscape for investigating this broader puzzle.
Existing approaches have typically rooted explanations for the apparent duality of NCIs in the special properties of NCIs themselves. I argue instead that this duality is emergent, arising through the coordination of independent constraints across multiple levels of grammatical representation. Leveraging the broader range of environments made available by AAE, I examine how components of NC behave in interaction with other grammatical phenomena, using these interactions to diagnose distinct semantic, syntactic, and morphophonological pressures contributing to apparent NCI duality. The apparent exceptionalism of NCIs disappears once the division of labor across levels of representation is properly specified.
ARZ’s academic biography. “About Me” from her Stanford site:
At Stanford, I work under the direction of Vera Gribanova and Cleo Condoravdi. My research investigates the syntax-semantics interface, with a special focus on the clause structure of polarity, and the syntactic and semantic dimensions of polarity-sensitivity.
Before coming to Stanford, I was a Baggett Fellow at UMD [the Univ. of Maryland, College Park], advised by Jeff Lidz and Valentine Hacquard.
Before that, I completed a BA/MA at UC Santa Cruz, where I was an active member of the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Group. My MA thesis, advised by Jim McCloskey, emerged from my work with the group.
I am currently affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity as a Graduate Teaching Fellow.
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