Linguistics Graduate Students Association

Many phonological processes apply across large amounts of intervening material, including, e.g., vowel harmony, consonant harmony, and long-distance patterns of dissimilation. These phenomena have long posed a challenge for phonologists, and have served as motivation for incorporating tiers or projections into various theoretical frameworks. In this talk, I will argue that when treating long-distance dependencies … Read More

The fusion between some constituents in the eastern Dan sentences Bleu Gildas Gondo (Rutgers University) The present work aims to carry out an analytical reflection on the process of the fusion between some constituents in the eastern Dan sentences. In fact, the fusion in Dan sentences which happens between subject and complement and verbs and complement … Read More

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