Category: Syntax

We are happy to announce a talk by Fabian Heck (Leipzig University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: January 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Empty expletives and the EPP Abstract: Since its introduction in Chomsky (1981), the EPP has remained a mistery. In particular, there is no consensus on what the EPP could derive from, or why it should exist (but cf. Haider 2010 for an interesting approach). Within the last 20 years, various proposals have been made that try to connect the EPP to some phonological property. In particular, there is a class of approaches claiming that the EPP requires that SpecT be filled by some *phonologically overt* category (e.g. Holmberg 2000, Bobaljik 2002, Landau 2007, Richards 2016, McFadden & Sundharesan 2018). Such a view appears to be incompatible with the very concept of an empty expletive. In my talk, I argue that there are reasons to assume that empty expletives exist. If...

We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: January 09 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Association with Focus Sensitive Particle only in Kasem and Kusaal Abstract: The syntactic properties and distribution of Focus Sensitive Particles (FSPs) (alternative-sensitive particles, à la Hartmann & Zimmermann 2008) like only, also, even, too, almost, etc., have been a cross-linguistic conundrum for some decades. Although two approaches/analysis have been muted: adnominal analysis (the adjunction of the FSP to the focused DP) (Ross & Cooper 1979), and adverbial analysis (adjunction to the Extebded Verbal Projections (EVPs)) (Jackendoff 1972; Jacobs 1983; Büring & Hartmann 2001; Mursell 2020), the choice of analysis is not an easy one to make. In fact, languages which seems to show an adnominal positionon the surface, have been argued to involve an EVPs adjunction (eg. German, Büring& Hartmann 2001; Mursell 2020) (cf. König 1991). Even what seems to be a clear dichotomy in...

We are happy to announce a talk by Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Locality in focus marking Abstract: In this talk, I present an application of Graf's (2022) formalization of syntactic dependencies that suggests that (most) syntactic dependencies are based on adjacency, just like dependencies in phonology and morphology. Graf develops a tier-based strictly local  language (TSL) for these purposes. The talk will provide an  introduction into the complexity issue of language based on the Chomsky Hierarchy and then move on to explain Graf's TSL. Finally, the talk will apply the formalization to focus data from Likpakpaanl  trying to develop a diagnostic for the status of the focus particle. Concretely, I present an argument that the focus particle "le/la" in Likpakpaanl is a head....

We are happy to announce a talk by Sascha Alexeyenko (Universität Göttingen) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 05 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Modelling the direct-inverse system of Mapudungun Abstract: The direct-inverse system of Mapudungun/Mapuche (Araucanian; Chile, Argentina) presents a puzzling pattern of verbal marking in the so-called local scenarios, i.e. scenarios in which the arguments of a transitive clause are 1/2P speech act participants. In particular, the otherwise regular direct-inverse marking pattern breaks down, new markers emerge that do not otherwise appear in the paradigm, and the agreement system becomes sensitive to the cumulative number of the participants involved. The aim of this talk is to show that existing analyses of direct-inverse systems in terms of person licensing, most notably those by Bruening (2001) and Béjar and Rezac (2009), fall short in accounting for Mapudungun data and to offer an alternative account, which incorporates some of their insights, but differently from any...

We are happy to announce a talk by Leonie Barabas-Weil (Universität Leipzig) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 28 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Long distance wh-movement in Turkana Abstract: In this talk, I will present novel wh-movement data from Turkana, an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in the North of Kenya. Turkana has VSO word order which allows focus and wh-element movement to the preverbal domain. In sentences with two CPs with wh-movement from the lower CP, the lower CP may have a copy of the wh-element in the pre- or postverbal position but the copy is not obligatory. However, as soon as the sentence has three CPs, the sentence becomes ungrammatical unless there is at least one copy of the wh-element in the intermediate or the lowest CP in either the pre- or postverbal position. The sentence is also grammatical if each CP has a copy of the wh-element, however, the sentence...