Monthly Archives: February 2020

Tyler colloquium Friday March 6 at 3:30

Matthew Tyler, Yale University, will present “Internal arguments disguised as external arguments: Lessons from an active alignment system” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday March 6. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Abstract
Active alignment describes a morphological alignment pattern where the lone argument of an intransitive verb is marked sometimes like the subject of a transitive verb, and sometimes like the object. Many generative accounts of active alignment hold that this morphological distinction is rooted in the syntactic distinction between external arguments, merged as the specifier of a functional head Voice (or v), and internal arguments, merged as an argument of the lexical verb. However, on the basis of novel fieldwork with Choctaw, a language with an active agreement system, I show that an argument’s morphological marking must be dissociated from its syntactic position: the marking that is characteristic of canonical external arguments is, exceptionally, found with certain internal arguments too. Nevertheless, I show that these internal arguments receive their exceptional marking only if they can form an uninterrupted syntactic (i.e. Agree/case-assignment) relation with the Voice head.

The implications of these findings are twofold. Firstly, active alignment is argued to be a consequence of Voice forming a syntactic relation with some arguments and not with others, rather than a direct consequence of the differing syntactic positions of internal vs. external arguments. This provides a new way of understanding lexical and configurational exceptions to the dominant alignment pattern of a language. Secondly, by studying the particular circumstances under which internal arguments receive exceptional marking, I argue that the agreement/case-assignment properties of a single Voice head can vary contextually according to the syntactic material in its immediate neighborhood, including the lexical root and other functional heads. This brings the agreement/case-assignment properties of functional heads in line with how we often think about their morphological properties: that is, they can have default and contextually-conditioned variants.

Erlewine colloquium Friday February 28 at 3:30

Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (mitcho), National University of Singapore, will present “Bikol clefts and topics and the Austronesian extraction restriction” (joint work with Cheryl Lim) in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 28. An abstract follows. All are welcome!

Abstract

Many Austronesian languages exhibit an extraction restriction whereby only one particular DP — the “pivot” argument, the choice of which is re?ected by morphology on the verb — can be A’-extracted. We show that such extraction restrictions can vary between di?erent A’-constructions in Bikol: local clefting is limited to the pivot, whereas topicalization can target pivots and non-pivot agents, but not other non-pivot DPs. Following the phase-theoretic, locality-based approach to such extraction asymmetries in related Austronesian languages, we propose that clefting and topicalization di?er in the featural speci?cations of their probes, but must always attract their closest matching goal. Evidence for this approach comes from interactions between clefting, topicalization, and hanging topic left dislocation in long-distance con?gurations. Such data motivates the view that the classic Austronesian pivot-only extraction restriction is best characterized in terms of syntactic locality, rather than as a restriction on the grammatical function or morphological case of movement targets.

Akku? colloquium Friday February 21 at 3:30

Faruk Akku?, University of Pennsylvania, will present Lessons from “make” causatives in Sason Arabic in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 21. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
This talk investigates the syntax of an indirect causative construction embedded under the verb “make” in Sason Arabic, with a focus on the syntax of the embedded structure, and the syntactic and semantic status of the implicit embedded agent. I demonstrate that this construction embeds both an active and passive VoiceP despite the absence of any morphological reflex. I also contend that the implicit agent in the active complement of “make” may be introduced (i) as a full DP in Spec,VoiceP, being subject to Romance ECM-type restrictions, and thus providing striking evidence of A’-movement feeding licensing relationships, or (ii) as a free variable à la Heim (1982) generated on the Voice head itself. The latter possibility raises implications regarding licensing, suggesting that licensing of a thematic object is dissociated from the projection of a specifier

Roeper talk at University of Illinois

Tom Roeper delivered a talk on “Multiple Grammars and Minimal Interfaces” at University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, on January 24th.

There is a particularly lively and sophisticated group of scholars studying Information Structure and Syntax in L2 and code-switching under the leadership of Luiz Lopez.

Tessier talk and book party, Tuesday Feb 18 2:30 N458

Anne-Michelle Tessier, University of British Columbia, will present “Learning morpho-phonology with Gradient Symbolic Representations: Stages and errors in the acquisition of French liaison” at 2:30pm Tuesday February 18 2020, in N458. Abstract

Things will turn decidedly more festive at 3:15, when we will celebrate Anne-Michelle’s book “Phonological Acquisition: Child Language and Constraint-Based Grammar“. Light refreshments will be served, to be followed by dinner at Michael Becker’s house.

 

 

Kusliy’s defense a success

We’re extremely proud to share the news that on January 31st, 2020, Petr Kusliy successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “The Emptiness of the Present: Fronting Constructions as a Window to the Semantics of Tense.” Petr’s dissertation is the first to offer an in-depth study of the semantics of tense within fronted constituents, the features of which are argued to show that (among many other things) (i) English present tense can receive a ‘vacuous’ interpretation, and (ii) subordinate CPs when combining with attitude verbs have a semantics similar to that of weak indefinites.
The attached photo shows Petr triumphantly raising the departmental fish, alongside committee members Rajesh Bhatt, Barbara Partee, Kyle Johnson, Seth Cable (chair), and Alejandro Pérez Carballo.

Sundaresan colloquium Friday February 14 at 3:30

Sandhya Sundaresan, Universität Leipzig, will present “Indexical Shift and the grammar of intensionality” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 3:30 Friday February 14. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract
In classic cases of indexical shift, attested in languages like Amharic, Zazaki, Nez Perce, Turkish, and many others, a sentence like “Jill said that I am sick”, uttered by Marie, can actually be a statement about Jill’s sickness rather than Marie’s. I.e. the reference of the indexical pronoun ‘I’ is context-shifted, such that it doesn’t refer to Marie (speaker of the utterancecontext) but to Jill (speaker of the context associated with the matrix speech event).
In this talk, I will present two types of evidence that show that the landscape of indexical shift is far more nuanced than is typically assumed:
(i) exceptions to Shift Together (the restriction that all shiftable indexicals in a local domain must shift together) in Tamil, Korean and potentially other languages including Late Egyptian, which crucially co-exist with Shift Together holding as a robust restriction in many languages; and
(ii) evidence, from dialectal microvariation in Tamil (based on personal fieldwork) and crosslinguistic variation from 28 languages, which shows not only that indexical shift is subject to considerable selectional variation, but also that such variation is implicationally structured, privileging speech predicates over all others (making indexical shift an embedded root phenomenon).
I show that current theories of indexical shift cannot handle these challenges and develop a new syntax and semantics of this phenomenon, which does. This new theory derives indexical shift without overwriting the utterance-context but also makes such shift sensitive to Relativized Minimality; it also redefines the contextual operator or “monster” that effects shift as a special type of intensional complementizer, merged at different heights along the clausal spine, reflecting differences in the nature of the embedded attitude. The new model also makes several testable empirical predictions which are fulfilled:
a. that indexical shift cannot obtain in structures that lack a complementizer;
b. that it can obtain in the absence of attitude verbs; and
c. that it interacts with other embedded root phenomena (like allocutivity).
Through it all, we will see that the new theory also has the welcome consequence that it demystifies indexical shift: this is no longer an esoteric phenomenon that applies to “exotic” languages. Rather, all languages are indexically shifting in some way, with variation simply being relegated to which contextual coordinates are shifted, and which indexicals are shiftable, in a given structure or language. Indexical shift can thus be fruitfully deployed as an empirical lens to diagnose the structures involved in intensionality and finiteness across dialects and languages.

Bjorkman colloquium Tuesday February 11 at 4:00

Bronwyn Bjorkman, Queen’s University, will present “Realizing Syntax” in the Linguistics colloquium series at 4:00pm Tuesday Feb. 11. An abstract follows. All are welcome!
Abstract

This talk looks at interactions among linearization, prosody, and vocabulary insertion, focusing on cases of verb doubling that appear to be motivated not by syntactic movement, but by the need for an otherwise-unsupported clitic to have a host.

Drawing on examples of verb doubling in Ingush (Nakh-Dagestanian) and Breton (Celtic), I argue first that the linearization of syntactic structures is accomplished via the interaction of ranked and violable constraints, as in OT, rather than via a deterministic linearization algorithm of the type often assumed in syntax. Second, I argue that linearization and prosodification proceed in parallel, allowing verb doubling as a trade-off between prosodic well-formedness (the need of a clitic for a host) and optimal linearization—but that this evaluation occurs prior to both Vocabulary Insertion and the subsequent competition of segmental phonology.

The final sections of the talk discuss the implications of this model for doubling more generally, and more particularly for our ability to explain the fact that certain movement configurations appear to lead to doubling in some languages but not in others. I discuss verb doubling in predicate focus, clitic doubling, and several other instances of apparent multiple realization.