Talk by Leonie Barabas-Weil (Universität Leipzig) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
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...
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Roundtable discussion by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt), Carla Umbach (Cologne), and Louise McNally (Barcelona)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a roundtable discussion by Cécile Meier (Frankfurt), Carla Umbach (Cologne), and Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Ways of adjectival modification Date: November 24 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This week we will have a round table discussion on the topic of nominal modification. Participants are Louise McNally, Carla Umbach and me, Cécile Meier. Louise McNally is currently a Mercator Fellow at Frankfurt University and Carla Umbach is a Goethe Teaching professor at Frankfurt University. We are all concerned with the semantics of noun phrases, modification and reference to kinds. Semantic research states that there are different types of kinds. Carlson introduced well-established kinds, Dayal and Krifka discuss regular kinds, atomic kinds and sub-kinds, and taxonomic readings of kind-referring expressions (see also Pelletier’s work).  What is not well-researched is the effect of modification. McNally argues that there are so-called relational adjectives modifying kinds instead of tokens, and Umbach argues that ad-hoc kinds...
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Talk by D. Aremu, K. Hartmann, A. Himmelreich, J. Mursell (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by D. Aremu, K. Hartmann, A. Himmelreich, J. Mursell (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 21 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: When long distance dependencies are actually short: The case of Mabia languages  Abstract: Mabia languages (formerly Gur, Northern Ghana), all SVO, exhibit morpho-syntactic reflexes with short A'-movement. In this talk, we observe that these reflexes are absent in long distance (LD) A'-dependencies. We argue that this follows from the general absence of LD movement in Mabia languages. We propose that the extracted XP is base-generated at the phase edge of the embedded clause and that it moves clause-internally to the main clause periphery. We further discuss how this type of analysis fits to the presence or absence of long-distance A'-movement in other non-related languages and we point out some of the theoretical challenges that the data present....
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Talk by Samuel Acheampong (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Samuel Acheampong (GU Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 14 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: The syntax of sluiced constructions in Likpakpaanl  Abstract: This talk discusses a preliminary analysis of the syntax of sluicing in Likpakpaanl, a Mabia language spoken in the Eastern corridors of Ghana and Western Togo. The talk describes an ellipsis phenomenon in which an entire clause is deleted, but the wh- remnant survives. I show that while the overt focus markers wɛ̀ and o in wh-questions in Gungbe and Nupe, respectively, escape the ellipsis [e]-site, the focus marker lè in Likpakpaanl ex-situ wh-questions, is contained in the ellipsis site. Thus, Likpakpaanl sluices violate the ‘Wh-sluicing correlation hypothesis’ of Van Craenenbroeck and Lipták (2013), which proposes an obligatory movement to spec-FocP for languages with overt focus markers because the E-feature in such languages is on the Foco. Such an analysis does not...
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Talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt)

by Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Caro Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: What is this teacher skillful at? Accounting for the meaning of skillful-type adjectives Date: November 10 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, I would like to update on two aspects of a chapter of my dissertation. In the first part of the talk, I address the observation that when a skillful-type adjective combines with an individual denoting noun, the noun is able to serve as the basis for the interpretation of the adjective in some cases (e.g. in skillful teacher, which can be paraphrased as skillful as a teacher), and in others it is not able to do so (e.g. in skillful man, which cannot be paraphrased as skillful as a man). I will assume that this difference is due to an event variable being present in the semantics of teacher, but not man (see Rapp 2015, but compare Larson 1998,...
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