Category: Syntax

We are happy to announce a talk by  Johannes Mursell and Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: June 19, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Imperfective marking in Sisaali and Gurene Abstract: In this talk we present patterns of imperfective marking in two Mabia languages: Gurene and Sisaali. In both languages, the morphology of the imperfective depends on its interaction with movement. The generalization is that the imperfective marker takes on a special form if material inside the VP (objects or adverbials) undergoes A-bar movement (wh-movement or focus movement) to the sentence-initial position. If there is no A-bar movement or if the subject undergoes A-bar movement, the default imperfective marker is chosen. Additionally, in the Tumulung dialect of Sisaali, the form depends on the linearly preceding element: A pronominal subject or a focus marker are followed by a special kind of imperfective marker, while non-pronominal subjects trigger the default marker. In...

We are happy to announce a talk by  Daniel Hole (Universität Stuttgart) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: June 12, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Towards explaining clause structure Abstract: This talk sets out to explain the overall structure of clauses in natural language. In the syntactically lowest portion of clauses, the event is built up. On top of that follow aspectual and modal specifications, closed off by deictic tense. Then follow speaker/hearer-dependent categories. A hierarchy of indexical categories is determined according to the level in the syntactic structure from which on upwards an indexical category is available for interpretation. This hierarchy is then reduced to generalizations about actual language use in dialogue. In later portions of the article, anaphoric context dependence is integrated into the picture. It is a characteristic of the work reported on here to bring together strands of research from generative syntax and formal semantics that do not usually...

We are happy to announce a talk by  Ken Hiraiwa (Meiji Gakuin University Tokyo) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: May 22 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: Sluicing and Countersluicing in Japanese Abstract: Ross (1969) showed that In sluicing, everything but a fronted wh-phrase is deleted. It has been controversial, however, how sluicing is derived in wh-in-situ languages like Japanese. I first outline Hiraiwa and Ishihara’s (2012) cleft analysis of sluicing, rejecting a wh-movement analysis (Takahashi 1994) and an in-situ analysis (Abe 2012). Crucial evidence comes from parallel patterns that immobile elements show in clefting and sluicing. After establishing that Japanese sluicing is built on clefting, I discuss what I call countersluicing. Countersluicing is a peculiar type of elliptical question in Japanese that is quite frequently used but has never been documented before. I show that it is exactly the opposite to sluicing in that (almost) everything but a wh-phrase survives deletion. I argue...

We are happy to announce a talk by  Helene Streffer (Leipzig University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: May 15 Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: Incorporation as a repair mechanism: Evidence from the Turkana DP Abstract: Incorporation as a repair mechanism_Evidence from the Turkana DP...

We are happy to announce a talk by  Imke Driemel (HU Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person and on Zoom. Room IG 0.454 Date: May 12 (Friday not Monday!) Time: 2 pm – 4 pm ct Title: Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch, and English child language Abstract: Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like Standard German and English consistently interpret sentences with negative concord as conveying a single semantic negation (Thornton et al. 2016, Nicolae and Yatsushiro 2020). Corpus-based investigations (Miller 2012, Thornton and Tesan 2013, Thornton et al. 2016, Nicolae and Yatsushiro 2020, Hein et al. 2023) for English, German, and Dutch show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. We review syntactic Agree-based analyses (Zeijlstra 2004, Zeijlstra 2011, Penka 2007, Penka 2011) and discuss the challenges they face in accounting for the typological variation and the child data. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of...