Linguistics Graduate Students Association

Putting our heads together: Icelandic deverbal event nouns and allosemy Grimshaw (1990) showed that when an event noun is derived from a verb, it is systematically ambiguous. In the “Complex … Read More

Ungrammaticality from triviality: deriving selectional restrictions of attitude verbs It's commonly assumed that ungrammaticality is a syntactic notion and should receive a purely syntactic explanation. Yet there are many proposals … Read More

Witness protection: A unified semantics for additive particles in assertions and questions The English additive particle also can appear in assertions and polar questions, but not in canonical wh-questions: (1) … Read More

Rethinking Questions We are actively trying to understand how to account for the distribution and interpretation of embedded questions: Why do know and wonder embed them but not (usually) think? … Read More

The shape, meaning, and sound of factivity In this talk grounded in Turkish data, I present empirical evidence that the factive inference must be derived and not encoded in the meaning … Read More

Semantic research in the signed modality  This seminar will provide an overview of aspects of the semantic research in sign languages, taking the recent discussions on indexical pointing used for … Read More

A competition mechanism for anaphoric expressions This talk explores a competition-based analysis of anaphoric expressions, which refer to familiar entities. I propose a unified semantic account, where all anaphoric expressions … Read More