Two talks by Daniel Aremu (Frankfurt) and Samuel O. Acheampong (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce two talks by Daniel Aremu (Frankfurt) and Samuel O. Acheampong (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: The syntax of Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Likpakpaanl (Sam Acheampong)             Association with focus in Mabia languages (Daniel Aremu) Date: June 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct...
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Talk by Aremu, Hartmann, Himmelreich, Mursell (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu, Katharina Hartmann, Anke Himmelreich, and Johannes Mursell (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Morphological marking of focus in Mabia Date: June 13 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In Mabia, focus is not marked by intonation but by focus particles and word order. We discuss the ex-situ and in-situ focus strategies in the four Mabia languages Dagbani, Dagaare, Likpakpaanl, and Kusaal. We demonstrate that some, but not all the languages provide morphological evidence for a low focus projection. Further we show that, despite the languages being closely related, the focus strategies differ a lot. We end with some speculations about how the strategies should be analyzed and end with some further questions....
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Talk by Viktor Köhlich (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Viktor Köhlich (Goethe University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Merging Position and Size of Indirect Modifiers in Japanese Date: May 30 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk takes a look at the questions what the size ob indirect modifiers in Japanese is, or rather what size it can be, and where they merge in the DP. Adopting a cartographic understanding of the DP (Cinque 2010. 2020), in principle adjectives are expected to merge as reduced relative clauses of size IP in a dedicated functional projection and verbal modifiers to merge in a functional projection for finite relative clauses. Japanese is an interesting case, as the size of the modifier, which is often argued to correlate with finiteness, cannot be readily determined. Modifiers in attributive position only exhibit one surface form and are in their morphological mark-up (mostly) identical to their counterparts in predicative position. While it...
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Talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The Limits of Umlaut in Sinhala: Matching domains across the syntax, morphology, and phonology (joint work with Paula Fenger, Leipzig University) Date: May 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk we study the patterns of verbal umlaut in the Indo-Aryan language Sinhala (spoken in Sri Lanka), which seems to be constrained by an intricate combination of (i) lexical, (ii) morphosyntactic, and (iii) phonological factors. We study this phenomenon and show that it can be used as a window into the morphological makeup of complex words. In particular, we defend  the following claims: 1. Contrary to some claims in the literature (see e.g. Garland 2005), we argue that the limits of umlaut show that Sinhala verb morphology is, underlyingly, concatenative and in order to describe where umlaut appears and where it doesn’t, we need to refer to the notion of the morpheme. 2....
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