Talk by Frank Sode – Thursday 6th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Frank Sode (Goethe Universität). Please find an abstract below. Title: The syntax and semantics of suppletive "wenn"-clauses: Evidence from V2 Room: IG 4.301 Date: February 6th Time: 4pm - 6pm Abstract: As Williams (1974) observed, the sentence in (1-a) can have a reading that can be paraphrased as in (1-b). (1) a. I would be happy if Bill were here.      b. I would be happy that Bill was here, if he were. Pesetsky (1991) argues that Williams' paraphrase is "more than a mere paraphrase". According to Pesetsky (1991), something like (1-b) is an actual syntactic representation of (1-a) at some level of the derivation. It is well-known that V2-clauses in German can alternate with suppletive "wenn"-clauses in construction with preference predicates, see for example Frank (1998), Meinunger (2004), Meinunger (2007). (2) a. Es ist besser, wenn du kommst.           It is better if you come       b. Es ist besser, du kommst.           It is better you come       Both: 'It is...
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FEAM Workshop, January 31-February 1

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce the Workshop on Formal and Experimental Approaches to ADJECTIVAL MODIFICATION on January 31-February 1, 2020. Please mark your calendars, spread the word to the interested students & colleagues and don’t forget to register! For further information and registration please visit the Workshop Website: https://sites.google.com/view/feamfrankfurt/. Program: program_FEAM   You are cordially invited!...
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Talk by Johannes Mursell, Monday 16th 4-6 pm

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are very happy to announce the next last talk of this semester’s Syntax Colloquium, which will take place on Monday, Dezember 16, 4 – 6 pm in IG 4.301. Johannes Mursell will talk about „Association with focus in German“. Abstract: In this talk, I discuss association with focus in German, i.e. examples like (1), mostly with respect to possible adjunction sites of the focus sensitive particle nur ‘only’. (1) Peter hat nur MARIA ein Geschenk gegeben. I will argue that the strong claim of Büring and Hartmann (2001) (B&H), building on early work from Jacobs (1983), can be maintained, namely that in German, nur can only be adjoined to extended verbal projections (VP/vP, TP, CP). I will pay particular attention to two problematic cases from the literature. Starting with extraposed CPs (Reis, 2005), the behavior of which forced B&H to weaken their proposal significantly, followed by a discussion of reconstruction data (Smeets and Wagner, 2018), I will show that B&H’s approach can easily account for the data when combined with some...
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