ComSyn Lectures

Speaker: Katharina Hartmann (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Title: The interpretation of syntactic focus variation
Date: Thursday 21 February
Venue: Van Eyckhof 2/006
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs

Abstract:
In many West-African languages, non-subject focus in questions and answers is expressed in two varying syntactic forms, an ex situ form, and an in situ form. Ex situ focus is syntactically marked in one or several respects involving at least fronting of the focused constituent. In situ focus shows the canonical word order and usually no formal indication of focus. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate an information structural split between two types of focus relating in situ order to new information, and ex situ order to contrastive focus. Whether this semantic distinction is categorical or not, is a matter of contro-versial debate. Critics of the view that form and interpretation vary along the same coordinates have argued that the correlation between ex situ vs. in situ focus and contrastive vs. non-contrastive interpretation is only a tendency, and not a 1:1 correlation, e.g. Hartmann & Zimmermann (2007). Zimmermann (2008) and Zimmermann & Onea (2011) propose to derive the ‘contrastive’ effect of ex situ focus from a discourse-semantic strategy that allows the speaker to indicate unexpected discourse moves.

In this talk, I first discuss new data from Dagbani (Mabia), which support the claim in Titov (t.a.) on Akan that the alternative set represented by an ex situ focus is interpreted as discourse-salient but not exhaustively. Ex situ and in situ focus differ wrt. the discourse-salience of the elements from the focus alternative sets. In situ focus refers to an open set not expressing any expec-tation from the part of the speaker wrt. to the state of mind of the hearer. Ex situ focus on the other hand, refers to discourse-salient alternatives, which, according to Titov (t.a.), are D-linked. This interpretation is naturally compati-ble with a uniqueness interpretation of the focus constituent. Exhaustivity is syntactically coded by a cleft structure not regularly used in focus contexts.

Second, I will fathom the possibility of non-matching pairs of ex situ and in situ questions and answers in some Niger-Congo languages. I show that the se-quence Q in situ – A ex situ is often blocked. Departing from the assumption that the alternative sets of in situ and ex situ focus differ in size, I claim that the set denoted by the question must be equal to or contained in the set de-noted by the answer. This accounts for the unavailability of the mentioned sequence. I suggest that this may be derived from a presupposition failure.

References: • Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann (2007): Place – Out of Place: Focus in Hausa. Kerstin Schwabe and Susanne Winkler (eds.) On Information Structure: Meaning and Form. Amster-dam: John Benjamins. 365–403. • Titov, Elena (2018): Morphosyntactic Encoding of Information Struc-ture in Akan. To appear in Glossa. • Zimmermann, Malte (2008): Contrastive Focus and Emphasis. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55: 347–360. • Zimmermann, Malte and Edgar Onea (2011): Focus Marking und Focus Interpretation. Lingua 121: 1651–1670. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002

Speaker: Myrthe Bergstra (Utrecht University)
Title: Micro-variation, contact and change: the absentive in Frisian and Dutch
Date: Thursday 14 February
Venue: Van Eyckhof 2/006
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs

Abstract

Speaker: Caitlin Meyer (University of Amsterdam)
Title: Rule and order: using structure to acquire ordinal numerals
Date: Thursday 29 November
Venue: Van Eyckhof 3/002
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs
drinks: Cafe de Keyzer

Abstract:
This talk compares the acquisition of ordinals in Dutch and English, and argues that both groups of learners acquire ordinals in a rule-based fashion. This claim is based on data from 250 children (2;08–6;04), which show that children acquire irregular ordinals (such as derde ‘third’) after they acquire regular synthetic forms (such as vierde ‘fourth’) and even after analytic ordinals (e.g., boot zes ‘boat six’). This may seem unsurprising or even obvious: it only makes sense for children to prefer rule-based forms. Or does it?
This pattern is actually quite puzzling: children seem to skip a lexical learning stage before acquiring their ordinal rule. This makes ordinal acquisition unlike cardinal acquisition (where lexical learning is key, e.g., Le Corre & Carey 2007), and unlike the acquisition of inflectional or derivational morphology (where children initially store morphologically complex forms, cf. Clark 2104, Yang 2016). This begs the question: if not from stored evidence, where does this rule come from and how does this rule learning actually work? I argue that the interplay between transparent linguistic knowledge and abstract concepts is just the recipe for children to cook up ordinal meaning from structural ingredients.

Speaker: Siavash Rafiee Rad (Leiden University)
Title: The Semantics of Ellipsis in Persian Complex Predicates
Date: Thursday 15 November
Venue: Van Eyckhof 3/002
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs
drinks: Cafe de Keyzer

Abstract:
The study of Ellipsis has been of special interest to scholars of linguistics. One reason for this interest is the fact that the meaning of a sentence with ellipsis cannot purely be based on its antecedent. This talk intends to discuss ellipsis in Persian Complex predicate constructions in which parts of the verbal construction along with some of its arguments are elided. I will argue that ellipsis resolution in such constructions is licensed due to the logical form of such verbal constructions and the relationship that holds amongst parallel elements in the source and the target sentence. Finally, I will discuss how distinguishing between primary and secondary occurrences of anaphoric expressions in the logical form can account for the correct and grammatical reading of intended anaphoric expressions in elliptical sites.

Speaker: Deniz Tat (Leiden University)
Title: Can zero-derived nominals project an argument structure?
Date: Thursday 25 October
Venue: Van Eyckhof 3/002
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs
drinks: Cafe de Keyzer

Abstract:
In this talk, I will revisit the claim that zero-derived nominals cannot have an argument structure (Grimshaw, 1990; Borer, 2003; Alexiadou and Grimshaw, 2008) by looking at a class of such nominals in Turkish that assign accusative case. These nominals are always of foreign origin, mostly Arabic, but also French and Italian, while their Semitic or Romance derivational histories have no formal status in the synchronic grammar of Turkish. They not only assign structural case, but also allow aspectual and agent-oriented modification, event control within rationale clauses and binomial each, all indicating the presence of a verbal representation. They are analogous to English nominals, such as murder, collapse, repair and defeat, as in the example “the frequent murder of judiciary and governmental officials” (Harley, 2009: 341), which are crucially of Latinate/French origin (see also Alexiadou 2009: 257). I will thus conclude that nominals of foreign origin can be exceptions to the generalization that zero-derived nominals do not project an argument structure, and that models of lexical borrowing must refer to underlying morphosyntactic representations.

Speaker: Jan Casalicchio (Leiden University)
Title: The subject/object asymmetry and the origin of Romance clitics
Date: Thursday 4 October
Venue: Van Eyckhof 3/002
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs (drinks follow)

Abstract:
In this talk I discuss the differences between object and subject clitic (OCL and SCL) pronouns in Romance, and track their origin in the Middle Ages. These two types of pronouns differ because SCL generally behave as agreement markers, object clitics as real pronouns. In technical terms, subject clitics have only φ-features (i.e., agreement features), while object clitics also have D-features (pronominal features), Roberts (2010). This is shown by various tests, e.g. coordination, negation, etc (Poletto 2000).
In our analysis we propose that this difference is due to the origin of clitics: they first emerged in Old Romance in topicalisation contexts, to resume a dislocated element. However, dislocated objects are more distant from their usual, unmarked position than dislocated subjects (technically: objects have to cross a phase boundary, subjects do not). For this reason, objects have to be resumed by a richer pronominal element than subjects. Later on, the “poorer” structure of subject clitics lead to subject doubling, a common process in Northern Italian Dialects.

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Title: On Merge and Labeling
Date:Thursday 20 September
Venue: Van Eyckhof 3/002
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs

Abstract:

Most approaches to labelling assume that Merge does not yield a label itself, and that therefore an additional labeling algorithm needs to determine what the label of a merger is. In this talk, I present a view on merge and labelling, where the label is immediately generated. Instead of focusing on the question why some feature present on a daughter should project, I argue that the real question at stake is why not every feature projects upon Merge. Starting with the assumption that the distribution of every syntactic element is fully determined by the unordered set of its independent (previously known as ‘interpretable’) and dependent (previously known as ‘uninterpretable’) formal features, the central claim of my talk is that upon merger every feature on both of the merged elements percolates, unless an independent feature [F] and a dependent feature [uF] stand in a sisterhood relation. Then, neither of these two features percolate. This provides a proper labeling mechanism that can also account for the labeling of adjunction. The proposal further reinstalls c-selection and explains the effects traditionally attributed to abstract case in terms of DP-selection. It also reduces the set of categorial features to a few primitive independent features ([D], [T], [Pred]). In the final part of this paper, it is discussed how this proposal relates to, or even derives, syntactic operations, such as Agree, movement or valuation.

Speaker: Jan-Wouter Zwart (University of Groningen)
Title: Tense in infinitives: a non-cartographic approach
Date: Thursday 17 May
Venue: Van Eyckhof 2/003
Time: 15.15-16.30 hrs

Abstract:

The presence or absence of T inside infinitival clauses informs the structural analysis of infinitival complements. On a cartographic approach to syntactic structure, absence of T leads to the hypothesis of a truncated clause structure, where the infinitive fails to grow into a fullsized clause. On this approach, the structure of the clause with its functional projections is universally given, so that absence of a low functional projection necessarily implies absence of all higher projections in the universal structure.
This cartographic approach to infinitival clause structure underlies the analysis of Wurmbrand (2001) (and, to a lesser extent, also Ter Beek 2008), where the projection for licensing objects vP is lower than the projection of the tense operator TP. As we will see, objects in German and Dutch typically cannot be realized internal to an infinitival complement clause, suggesting to Wurmbrand that in those situations the truncation point is below vP, and absence of object licensing and absence of tense go hand in hand. But as we will see, an independent tense operator can be present inside the infinitival complement, even if objects cannot be licensed internal to the infinitival clause, suggesting that the cartographic approach, where size of the infinitival clause is determined by an implicational hierarchy, is unsuccessful in this domain.
This paper proposes an alternative, more dynamic approach to clause structure, capitalizing on the idea, tacitly assumed in most approaches, that a derivation must be a network of derivations (‘layered derivations’, cf. Zwart 2009), with subsidiary derivations feeding into a main derivation at various points. On this approach, infinitival tense points to the construction of a tensed verb cluster in a separate derivation.

Speaker: Anikó Lipták (Leiden University) and Güliz Günes (Leiden University)
(joint work with Jason Merchant)
Title: Dutch P-stranding under sluicing
Date: Thursday 7 June
Venue: Van Eyckhof 2/003
Time: 11.15-12.30 hrs

Abstract:
This talk provides an explanation for the surprising ban on preposition stranding by R-pronominals in sluicing in Dutch. While R-pronouns can strand their preposition in non-elliptical contexts at a distance, they cannot do this when the stranded preposition is contained in an elided clause (Merchant 2001). We show that the observed ban cannot be attributed to a prosodic problem, concerning either the (de)accentuation of the stranded preposition or that of the overt R-pronoun. Pointing out some problems with an existing syntactic account of the data, we propose that the source of ungrammaticality lies entirely in the morphology.

speaker: Artemis Alexiadou (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Title: Some puzzles about derivational morphology
Date: Wednesday 21 February (NOT THURSDAY!!)
Venue: Van Eyckhof 2/002
Time: 15.45-17.00 hrs

Please notice the change of the time and the place!!!

Abstract

In this talk, I will address two asymmetries observed in derivational morphology across languages. The first asymmetry, discussed in Baker (2003), is that while nominalization is extensive, verbalization is limited. The second one, discussed in Borer (2013), is that there are no zero-derived verb-noun pairs that involve overt affixes. I will approach these asymmetries by adopting a view on word formation couched within the framework of Distributed Morphology.