Speaker: Rodrigo Ranero (UCLA) Title: A new perspective on the syntax of silence: The view from Mayan Abstract: Ellipsis is structure and meaning without form. In the case of spoken languages, it is silence that requires a linguistic antecedent. An unresolved question concerns the precise nature of the relationship that must hold between the silence … Read More
Speaker: Maria Kouneli (University of Leipzig) Title: Upwards-oriented complementizer agreement: The view from Kipsigis Abstract: A number of African languages display upwards-oriented complementizer agreement, where the complementizer agrees in phi-features with the matrix subject (e.g., Diercks 2013, Carstens 2016, Letsholo & Safir 2019, Baker 2022). This pattern raises some non-trivial questions about the directionality and … Read More
Speaker: Justin Royer (UC Berkeley) Title: Binding and anti-cataphora in Mayan Abstract: The Binding Conditions are widely held to reflect a universal property of human language (e.g., Reinhart 1983; Grimshaw & Rosen 1990; Grodzinsky & Reinhart 1993; Reuland 2010, 2011). Yet, some Mayan languages seem to consistently violate them, casting doubt on a universal approach … Read More
Speaker: Kenyon Branan (Universität Göttingen) Title: Syntax-phonology interactions and the Left Edge Ban Abstract: Syntax is commonly supposed to be autonomous, in the sense that it operates independent of considerations of other modules of the grammar, such as the phonology or the semantics. In this talk I develop an argument against the autonomy hypothesis: the … Read More
Speaker: Prof. Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst) Title: Principle B: The view from comprehension and production Abstract: Experimental research has shown that the grammatical constraints reflected in (e.g.) the Binding Theory … Read More