Linguistics Graduate Students Association

This is a meeting to discuss binding reconstruction within semantic theory. The primary reading is Chris Barker's paper "Evaluation order, crossover, and reconstruction".

Resisting prosodic ambiguity: the case of reduced relative clauses in Rutooro Lauren Clemens & Lee Bickmore (University at Albany) Rutooro is a Bantu language of Uganda that lacks lexical tone. Instead, prominence in Rutooro is marked with a High tone (H) on the penultimate syllable of the phonological phrase (φ-phrase). Like many languages in the … Read More

In this meeting, we will continue the discussion on learning started last semester. The relevant reading for the meeting is Clark and Eyraud (2007) on learning substitutable languages, which can learn non-regular languages that can model some aspects of syntactic structure. All are welcome!

I revisit the interpretation of the so-called definite determiner, nò in Akan. I contend that contrary to previous analyses, nò is not a definite determiner of type <<e,t>e>. Rather, I claim it is as a partial identity function which triggers an anaphoric presupposition. The main advantage of the present theory is that it presents a uniform semantics of the … Read More

Meg Gotowski. “What Quoi-sluices reveal about ellipsis and wh-clitics in French.” Shiori Ikawa. “Long-distance binding of the reflexive anaphor zibun in Japanese”