ComSyn Lectures

We are excited to announce a new programme of ComSyn talks that will be taking place from September to November 2024. As usual, we will meet on Thursdays, 16:15-17:30 CET, but please take into account that the final talk of this semester will happen half an hour earlier, 15:45-17:00 CET (note the room change as well). Below you will find an overview of the upcoming talks!

We are looking forward to seeing you there!
Irina & Maarten

It has been brought to our attention that the talk planned for Thursday 11 July—by Jesús Olguín Martinez—has come to overlap with the farewell event for our Grant Officer (announced last Tuesday). Since many of us will want to be present at this event, the talk will be moved to a different date.

After consulting with the speaker, we’ve concluded that our best option is to postpone the talk to next semester. It will take place on Thursday 12 September. The full program for next semester will be announced later.

This means that the talk by Yu-Yin Hsu, on Monday 8 July, will be the final ComSyn talk of this semester. We’ll toast to the end of the semester following Yu-Yin’s talk!

Speaker: Yu-Yin Hsu 許又尹 (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Title: Interaction of syntax and information structure: Focus-driven T-to-C movement of modal auxiliaries in Mandarin Chinese
Date: Mon 8 July (note day change)
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Zoom: Link / Meeting ID: 626 6867 6455 / Passcode: @7ZYhz.q
Time: 16:15 – 17:30

In this talk, I present some less-discussed empirical observations regarding the interpretive effects and structural restrictions of modal auxiliaries that occur in sentence-initial positions in Manarin Chinese. These data suggest that a new analysis of modals in Mandarin Chinese should be considered; that is, overt head-movement of a modal auxiliary to the sentence periphery, i.e. T-to-C movement, to value strong focus features and to focus-mark either the proposition or the subject of a sentence. In this presentation, I will share my views on how this proposal explains the markedness exhibited by such sentences, correctly predicts the structural and semantic restrictions of modal sentences, and directly explains the scopal interactions observed between modals and various types of focus constructions. The results shed new light on how Chinese, though typologically distinct from Germanic and Romance languages, exemplifies a similarly fine-grained structure in the sentence-internal domain, parallel associations of scope-bearing units with the sentences’ left periphery, and a neat interaction of syntax with discourse configurations. This also shows that changes in Mandarin word order are not simply optional or free in syntax, and that information structure roles are represented as formal syntactic features.

Speaker: Bridget Copley (SFL – CNRS/Paris 8)
Title: Causal theory as the “B side” of modal theory: The English progressive as case study
Date: Fri 21 June (note day change)
Location: Lipsius 1.31 (note room change)
Zoom: Link / Meeting ID: 651 0051 9185 / Passcode: !bqD6E0N
Time: 16:30 – 17:45 (note time change)

Back when record companies used to send radio stations vinyl records, the “A side” of the record would be the intended hit single, and there would be another song, not necessarily good enough to be a single, on the “B side”. Similarly, it’s been said that modality and causation are “two sides of the same coin” (Ilić 2014), or perhaps the same record. There’s no denying that David Lewis’ possible world semantics for modality has gone platinum – it’s a powerful theory. Causation has not gotten nearly as much play in formal semantics. However, theories of causation can be quite powerful as well, and in particular, can easily represent counterfactuality and normality (see work by Leonard Talmy and separately, by Judea Pearl). In this talk, I will put on the B side of the record, and propose that causal relations, appropriately and dynamically represented, can be more useful than quantification over possible worlds, in particular for the English progressive. Not only are they as powerful as modal theory for truth conditions, but they also make our semantics align more closely with what is known about grammaticalization and the syntax-semantics interface for English be -ing.

Speaker: Stéphane Térosier (LUCL)
Title: Common ground management and its morphosyntactic reflexes in Martinican Creole wh-questions
Date: Thu 13 June
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Zoom: Link / Meeting ID: 661 6808 0486 / Passcode: 3$i2CutS
Time: 16:15 – 17:30

This talk focuses on two types of wh-questions found in Martinican Creole, as illustrated by the minimal pair in (1),

(1) a. Kisa     Jan        di    ’w?
what    John      say   2sg
‘What did John tell you?’

b. Kisa     Jan        di     ’w    la?
what    John      say   2sg  la
‘What did John tell you (given our shared knowledge that John told you something)?’

As reflected by these examples, the differences between these two types of wh-questions are both superficial and pragmatic. Superficially, what sets the two types of wh-questions apart is the presence/absence of la in sentence-final position. Pragmatically, la-marked wh-questions (1b) possess two distinctive properties: (i) they may not be uttered out of the blue, and (ii) they do not tolerate negative answers. This leads me to propose that la plays a crucial role in common ground management insofar as it is used by the speaker to refer to a previously established QUD. Based on distributional evidence, I further claim that la is merged in Wiltschko’s (2021) GroundP layer and sits above CP. This falls in line with the observation that there is no syntactic difference between la-marked wh-questions and their non-la-marked counterparts.

Interestingly, la is also found in the nominal domain, where it has been analyzed as a definite determiner (Bernabé 1983; Déprez 2007; Gadelii 2007; Déprez 2007; Zribi-Hertz & Jean-Louis 2014; Térosier 2021). Its most likely source is the French postnominal deictic reinforcer là ‘there’. Its extension to the clausal domain suggests that speakers of Gbe languages played a crucial role in the emergence of Martinican Creole. For instance, Fongbe, one of these Gbe languages, possesses a multifunctional marker, ɔ́, which is found in both the nominal and clausal domain (Lefebvre 1992, 1998). I thus argue that the initial reanalysis of French là as a definite determiner set the way for its later extension to the clausal domain, as evidenced in la-marked wh-questions.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have to cancel the ComSyn talk by Marcel den Dikken, scheduled for 6 June.

Jesús Olguín Martinez’ talk on 11 July will be a Zoom talk rather than an in-person talk.

The rest of the schedule remains unchanged, so the next ComSyn talk is on 13 June:

Speaker: Jens Fleischhauer (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Title: ‘My mother’, ‘Your father’: Suppletive kinship terms in African languages
Date: Thu 16 May
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Zoom: Link / Meeting ID: 619 5663 5565 / Passcode: W$3VScD%
Time: 16:15 – 17:30

Many languages exhibit a high degree of morphological irregularity in the domain of kinship terms. These terms are inherently relational and thus fall morphosyntactically within the realm of possession. For instance, languages with an alienability split tend to realize kinship relations as inalienable.

In a comparative study of languages in Papua New Guinea, Baerman (2014) identified another type of widespread morphological irregularity. Numerous languages have suppletive noun stems depending on grammatical features of the possessor. A common pattern is distinguishing egocentric possession (‘my mother’) from non-egocentric possession (‘your mother’, ‘her mother’).

Suppletive kinship terms can also be found in African languages. So far, this topic has not been studied comparatively for the languages of the African continent. In this presentation, I will present the results of a typological study of suppletive kinship terms in African languages based on a sample of around 90 languages. The results show that this form of morphological irregularity seems to be relatively widespread in Africa as well, but different suppletion patterns dominate compared to the languages of Papua New Guinea.

References
Baerman, Matthew. 2014. Suppletive kin term paradigms in the languages of New Guinea. Linguistic Typology 18 (3): 413-448.

Speaker: George Walkden (University of Konstanz)
Title: Adult language acquisition and syntactic change
Date: Thu 2 May
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Zoom: Meeting ID: 617 3017 2255 – Passcode: 1qx8Vm4?
Time: 16:15 – 17:30

This talk will assess the place of adult language acquisition as an explanatory factor in syntactic change, making the case that certain changes can only be understood fully from this perspective. I will present a theory of syntactic “L2-difficulty” in terms of feature interpretability, and some preliminary results from the STARFISH project that bear on it, dealing with negation in the history of Low German and null subjects in the history of Latin American Spanish.

Speaker: Karen De Clercq (CNRS/LLF/Université Paris Cité)
Title: The internal structure of sentential negation: A view from suppletion
Date: Thu 18 April
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Time: 16.15 – 17.30

There are four different ways in which TAM-morphology and sentential negators (SNs) may interact, summarised in (1).

A first possible situation is one in which TAM conditions the SN, and the SN conditions TAM (Type A), resulting in suppletive negative and TAM morphology. This is the situation in Bengali (Ramchand 2004, De Clercq 2020) or Bambara (Koopman 1992, De Clercq 2020). Type B is one where only TAM-morphology conditions the SN (Horn 2001, Dahl 1979). This is the case in Latin, which has non as a standard negator, but resorts to the suppletive modal marker ne (Pinkster 2015, Lakey 2015, Gianollo 2016) in the context of the subjunctive to give rise to wish clauses and prohibitives (Baunaz & Lander 2023). Type C concerns languages where the presence of the SN changes the way TAM-morphology is expressed on the verbal predicate (Miestamo 2005). This is for instance the case in Tamazight (Ouali 2012:ch. 8), where the presence of the SN ur triggers suppletion in the perfective form of verbal root. A last logical option is one in which neither TAM nor SN seem to interact morphologically, as is for instance the case in Dutch or standard English (Type D).

In this talk I will discuss 1° the first results of a large-scale ongoing typological study on the interaction between TAM and sentential negation, and 2° the internal structure of sentential negative markers from the perspective of the suppletion that arises between negation and the TAM-domain. To this end, I will zoom in on case studies of Bambara/Bengali (Type A), Latin (Type B) and Tamazight (Type C).

There’s one final addition to the program: Bridget Copley will give a talk on Friday 21 June, 16:30-17:45 in Lipsius 1.31 (note day, time and room changes). This is directly following the final class of the LOT school.

Furthermore, George Walkden (2 May) will deliver his talk in person rather than remotely. All (in person) talks will also be livestreamed on Zoom. Links will be sent out via our mailing list, be sure to join!

The final program for the remainder of this semester is: