ComSyn Lectures

The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 12 February.

Speaker: Petra Sleeman ( University of Amsterdam)
Title: Local and non-local gender agreement in French (joint work with Tabea Ihsane, University of Geneva)
Time: 15:15- 16:30
Venue: Lipsius 235b

Abstract

Whereas in English there are no gender distinctions for the noun, in Romance languages masculine and feminine nouns can be distinguished, both for animate and inanimate nouns. Although for inanimate nouns gender is always completely arbitrary, for animate nouns morphological gender does not always correspond to natural semantic gender, as illustrated by French (la sentinelle (f.) ‘the sentinel’ and le médecin (m.) ‘the doctor’, le professeur (m.) ‘the professor’, le mannequin ‘the model’: all refer to men and women).

            To account for this dual behavior of nouns (arbitrary or natural gender), it has been proposed in recent literature (Kramer 2009; Atkinson 2012) that gender is expressed in two positions within the DP, and not in one (either the root or n, as in Alexiadou 2004 or in Lowenstamm 2008, resp.): as an uninterpretable feature on the root (accounting for arbitrary gender: le magasin (m.) ‘the shop’; la sentinelle (f.) ‘the sentinel’) or as an interpretable feature on the head of the functional projection nP (accounting for natural/semantic gender: un homme (m.) ‘a man’; une chatte (f.) ‘a (female) cat’; une enfant (f.) ‘a (female) child’; un enfant (m.) ‘a (male) child’). Determiners and adjectives agree with the ±masc. feature on n (une chatte (f.) blanche ‘a white cat’), or with the gender feature that is specified on the root (un vieux magasin (m.) ‘an old shop’, la malheureuse sentinelle (f.) ‘the poor sentinel’). In the case of the non-specified noun un enfant ‘a (male or female) child’ / un chat ‘a (male or female) cat’, the determiner and the adjective agree with the root, which gets default masculine gender.

            This analysis seems to account quite nicely for the local agreement between D, adjectives, and the noun in D-A-N or D-N-A configurations. In this paper we put this analysis, however, under scrutiny by investigating whether it can also account for less local agreement configurations in French. We argue that if agreement takes place with an element outside the strict DP phase, gender on the root can (1), must (2) or cannot (3) be overridden by a supplementary interpretable gender feature on n. We base our account on valuation and the interpretable/uninterpretable character of the gender feature (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007).

The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 4 December.

Speaker: Erik Schoorlemmer (LUCL)
Title: The Prohibition that never was. Extraction, blocking and genitive noun complements in Serbo-Croatian.
Time: 15:15-16:30
Venue: Lipsius 235c

Abstract

In Serbo-Croatian, sentences in which a genitive form of the Serbo-Croatian counterpart of who is extracted out of a noun complement position are ungrammatical (Zlatić 1997, Bašić 2004, Bošković 2011). This has been taken as evidence that there is a general prohibition on the extraction of noun complements in Serbo-Croatian (see among others Bošković 2011). In this talk, I, however, claim that such a prohibition doesn’t exist. Instead, I will show that the ungrammaticality of extracting genitive who is due to a more general effect: the use of a genitive form is blocked if a prenominal possessive form can be used. I will propose a tentative account of this blocking in terms of head movement.

The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 20 November.

Speaker: Luisa Meroni (Universiteit Utrecht)
Title: Specific indefinite objects in bilingual acquisition.
Time: 15:15-16:30
Venue:  Lipsius 235c

Abstract

Crosslinguistic influence in simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) has been claimed to lead to delay and acceleration (Paradis & Genesee 1996). Whilst various studies have demonstrated the existence of delay, the evidence for acceleration is rather limited (cf. Meisel 2007). Furthermore, most studies in this area focused on the acquisition of morphosyntax and syntax-pragmatics; to date, few examine the area of syntax-semantics (but cf. Serratrice et al. 2009, Unsworth 2012). This paper seeks to fill these gaps by investigating whether crosslinguistic influence in the form of acceleration takes place in the interpretation of specific indefinites in sentences with negation by 2L1 Dutch-Italian children.

Previous research has shown that Dutch-speaking 4- to 6-year-old children pass through a stage, where, unlike adults, they treat the scrambled sentence in (1) as ambiguous between a specific (1a) and a non-specific (1b) interpretation (Unsworth et al., 2008).

(1) Ian heeft een kaarsje niet uitgeblazen
a. There is a candle Ian did not blow out (a>not)
b. Ian did not blow out any candle (not>a)

In a recent study, Unsworth (2012) shows that English-Dutch 2L1 children pass through a similar stage and they furthermore restrict (1) to its target specific interpretation within the same timeframe as monolinguals (L1). Here, we examine data from Italian-Dutch 2L1 children. Following Su (2001), we argue that, unlike English, indefinite objects in negative sentences in Italian (2) are unambiguously specific as a result of the same form (‘un/uno/una’) being used for both indefinite and numeral (i.e., ‘one’).

(2) Sandro non ha spento una candelina
‘Sandro did not blow out a candle’
a. There is a candle Sandro did not blow out (a>not)

We hypothesize that at the stage where child Dutch allows (1) to be associated with both specific and non-specific interpretations, and, in Italian, (2) is interpreted specifically, the availability of the specific interpretation in Italian will facilitate its acquisition in the Dutch of Italian-Dutch 2L1 children, i.e., we expect crosslinguistic influence in the form of acceleration.

We first show that (2) is indeed unambiguous by using a (picture) Truth Value Judgment task where sentences like (2) were evaluated in a situation in which Sandro blew out all the candles except one : L1 Italian (4;6-5;11; n=7) children almost always accepted the specific interpretation (92 % (32/35)). Subsequently, the same task was used in both languages with 2L1 Dutch-Italian (4;4-6;1; n=13) and in Dutch with age-matched L1 (n=13) children. The results, cf. Figure 1, show that: (i) like monolinguals, 2L1 children almost always accepted the specific interpretation in Italian (96 % (62/65); U(20)=35, p=.45); (ii) this was also the case for Dutch (acceptance rate: 97% (63/65)); and (iii) crucially, the 2L1 children accepted the specific reading significantly more often than the age-matched monolinguals (cf. 48% (34/65); U(26)=30, p=.001).

The data demonstrate crosslinguistic influence in the area of syntax-semantics and are in line with previous work on scope preferences in heritage learners (Lee et al. 2010; O’Grady et al. 2011); however, in contrast to this work, our data show acceleration rather than delay.

The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Thursday 8 November.

Speaker: Daniel Altschuler (Heinrich Heine Univesität, Düsseldorf)
Title: ‘Sequence of tense’ as absence of cessation
Time: 15:15-16:30
Venue:  Vrieshof 4 / 012

Abstract 
It has become generally accepted in the research on the syntax-semantics interface that some features (e.g. person/number/tense) on bound-variables are not semantically interpreted; they are there for purely syntactic reasons (e.g. agreement). Such a view is adopted in the tense domain due to the so-called sequence of tense phenomenon; a syntactic feature manipulation mechanism (e.g. feature checking or feature transmission) is posited to render a bound past tense semantically inert, i.e. without an anteriority meaning. The arguments for the sequence of tense analysis that we are familiar with rely on an unstated assumption that states have first moments. In this talk I argue that if this assumption is not made, or if is semantically neutralized, we can and should maintain the view that tense features are always interpreted. The outline of the talk is as follows. I first motivate a constraint that correlates the holding of a state at an interval with the truth of a stative predicate at a moment within that interval. The corollary of this constraint is that if a stative predicate holds of a moment, it necessarily holds of a preceding moment, regardless of whether or not the described state has a first moment. I then show how this corollary underwrites the entailment from PRES-ϕ to PAST-ϕ and use this fact to derive a cessation implicature: the utterance of PAST-ϕ implicates that no state of the kind described currently holds. The proposed analysis makes use of an existential quantifier for tense with a domain restriction variable over reference time concepts. The presence of a cessation implicature is predicted in both matrix and embedded clauses when the reference time concept does not—by itself—make PRES-ϕ false. I suggest that the intuitions often used to motivate the sequence of tense analysis are really intuitions about the absence of the cessation implicature.

The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Tuesday 23 October  2012.

Speaker: Allison Kirk (LUCL)
Title: The diachrony of Greek relative clauses
Time: 15:15-17:00
Venue:  Lipsius/2.35c

Abstract
This talk focuses on changes in the structure of relative clauses (RCs) from Ancient to Modern Greek, with discussion of five periods of Greek: Homeric (texts from 8^th century BC), Classical (texts from 5^th century BC), Koine (texts from 1^st century), Medieval (texts from 7^th – 10^th centuries) and currently spoken Modern Greek. From Homeric Greek until middle Koine Greek, headed relatives equivalent to ‘the boy who I saw is tall’ are attested alongside correlatives equivalent to ‘which boy I saw, this one is tall’. In Modern Greek, the former are predominant and the latter are almost obsolete. It has been claimed that the correlative is the ‘predecessor’ of the headed relative in the related language Latin, as a result of a series of syntactic re-analyses (Bianchi 2000). The goal is to provide synchronic analyses of RCs in the various stages of Greek and then determine the pathways for the changes. In particular, I argue that headed relatives from Homeric to (middle) Koine Greek are not embedded under main clause NP ‘heads’, but that the RCs are all adjoined to main clauses in these stages. I argue for a standard head-raising approach to Modern Greek RCs, and that that the changes in structures correspond to changes in the lexico-syntactic properties relative morphemes. In particular, the re-analysis of the old relative pronoun from a maximal projection to a Dº category corresponds to the new embedded head-external RC. This re-analysis also corresponds to the loss of XP ‘splitting’ in RCs. 

Throughout the talk I will address various methodological issues in diachronic syntax and current theories of syntactic change, and when applied to the Greek facts, what they contribute to the longstanding observation that there is a unidirectional ‘cline’ from ‘paratactic’ to ‘hypotactic’ sentence structures (Hopper 1993, among others).

The first ComSyn meeting will take place on 9 October  2012.

Speaker: Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (University of Iceland)
Title: Case variation: Formal vs. semantic
Time: 15:15-17:00
Venue:  Lipsius/2.35c

Abstract
Variation in case licensing is a robust phenomenon in languages that have a rich case system like Icelandic. The major claim of this talk is that there are two kinds of case variation in such languages. One type is what we can call formal variation, i.e. variation between two semantically equivalent cases. Formal variation is strongly associated with the erosion of idiosyncratic case, as exemplified by the variation between accusative and dative experiencer subjects in Icelandic (so called Dative Substitution). Formal variation can be diagnosed via “mixed” case marking, the possible use of two cases where case agreement is expected to be obligatory. The other type can be labelled semantic variation because it involves a fairly subtle semantic contrast between two case variants, bearing inherent vs. structural case. This type of variation is harder to detect than the first and consequently it is much less studied. Still, I will argue that semantic variation is different from formal variation in some non-trivial ways. Moreover, semantic variation affords a good vantage point to inspect the semantic determinants of argument realization.

Drinks afterwards!