Whamit!

Speaker: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)
Title: Ellipsis and accommodation: the (morphological) case of sluicing
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

In this talk I examine instances of sluicing whereby the ellipsis site is not structurally isomorphic to its antecedent. The data are presented in three incremental steps: (1) copular clauses can be used in sluicing to circumvent preposition stranding violations in non- preposition stranding languages; (2) such copular rescue is blocked in languages with morphological case marking; (3) this blocking is overruled when (a) the underlying copular clause is case-sensitive, or (b) the sluiced wh-phrase is syncretic between the case assigned by the preposition and the case found in a copular clause. As none of the existing constraints on accommodation of ellipsis antecedents (Fox 1999, 2000; Sauerland 2004; Hardt 2004, 2005) can account for this data pattern, I propose a new constraint, which states that an ellipsis remnant has to be in the licensing potential (cf. Chung, Ladusaw and McCloskey 1995) of both the actual and the accommodated antecedent. This proposal will be shown to receive support from pragmatically controlled sluicing and the interaction between spading and morphological case in dialect Dutch.

Phonology circle returns next week with a talk by Diana Apoussidou. The schedule for the remainder of the semester is as follows:

4/6 Diana Apoussidou
4/13 Bronwyn Bjorkman
4/20 Patriots Day
4/27 Eulàlia Bonet
5/4 Peter Graff
5/11 Jelena Krivokapi?

Joey Sabbagh (PhD 2005), who has been teaching at Berkeley and Reed, has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas/Arlington. Joey’s dissertation discussed Non-verbal argument structure : evidence from Tagalog and his most recent publication is an article in Linguistic Inquiry on Right Node Raising and Extraction in Tagalog. Congratulations, Joey!!

This week’s Ling Lunch presentation has been cancelled— Ling Lunch will resume next Thursday with a talk by Shigeru Miyagawa.

Speaker: Maria Giavazzi
Title: Output driven morpho-phonological alternations in the adjectival paradigm? Preliminary results from a study with French Huntington Disease patients.
Time: Mon 3/16, 5pm
Location: 32-D831

Join us for this week’s installment of Ling Lunch, featuring a presentation by Patrick Grosz:

Speaker: Patrick Grosz
Title: “Movement and Agreement in Right-Node Raising Constructions”
Time: Thurs 12:30-1:45
Place: 32-D461

Speaker: Anna Szabolcsi (NYU)
Title: Raising Verbs as Quantifiers
Time: Friday, Mar 20, 3:30-5:00pm
Place: 32-141

Quantification over times and worlds in natural language is traditionally considered to be syntactically implicit. More recently tenses and modals have been treated as syntactically explicit quantifiers. I propose that new kind of evidence for the explicitly quantificational character of raising verbs of the “begin” and “threaten” type can be obtained from their scope interaction with the subject.

Consider the following two scenarios:

“HI scenario”
Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: no; Susan: no; Eva: yes
after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: yes

“LO scenario”
Who is getting good roles before April? Mary: yes/no; Susan: no; Eva: yes
after April? Mary: yes; Susan: no; Eva: no

The following English sentence may describe either situation (the ambiguity is enhanced by the presence of the temporal adjunct). Notice that HI and the LO readings are logically independent.

In April only Mary began to get good roles.

HI: ‘only Mary went from not getting good roles to getting them’
LO: ‘it began to be the case that only Mary is getting good roles’

Other languages, Hungarian and Shupamem among them, have verb-initial orders that unambiguously carry the LO reading. They do that in two different ways. In Hungarian, “only Mary” is a nominative subject inside the infinitival complement (see Szabolcsi 2009). This talk will focus on the Shupamem type, where the fronting of “begin” appears to assign “begin” wide scope over the operator subject that has properly raised to the tensed clause. I will argue that “begin” does not only have quantificational content but explicitly quantifies over a time argument. Possibly the argument carries over to “threaten” type verbs binding a world argument.

Kusumoto 2005, On the quantification over times in natural language. Natural language Semantics 13: 317-357.
Lechner 2007, Interpretive effects of head movement. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000178
Schlenker 2006, Ontological symmetry in language: A brief manifesto. Mind and Language 21: 504-539
Szabolcsi 2009, Overt nominative subjects in infinitival complements in Hungarian. To appear in den Dikken & Vago, eds. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jBkM2QxZ/

Speaker: Herbert H. Clark (Stanford University)
Title: Rational Ways of Using Language
Time: Fri 3/20 4:00 PM, Singleton Auditorium, 46-3002

Ezra Keshet, MIT PhD 2008, has accepted a tenure track offer from the Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is currently a visiting assistant professor. Congratulations, Ezra!

Mark your calendars! This year’s SNEWS (“Southern New England Workshop in Semantics”) will be held on Saturday, April 25th, at UMass/Amherst. It is an informal workshop where students can present their ongoing work. There are still slots available. If you are interested in presenting/participating, please contact Patrick at grosz@mit.edu.

Detailed information will be posted on the website: http://people.umass.edu/harris/snews/snews.html.

Weekly meetings of the Phonology Circle will resume next week (3/16, 5pm) with a presentation by Maria Giavazzi.

Tamina Stephenson will present on Wednesday at 3:00 PM in room 34-303. For more information about the schedule for the semester, see the LF Reading Group webpage.

Mark your calendars! The Spring meeting of the MIT/UMass Meeting in Phonology will take place on May 9th at MIT. More details will be forthcoming as the date approaches.

Ling Lunch will resume its weekly installments on Thursday, Mar 19.

Speaker: Asaf Bachrach
Title: Syntactic Sharing and Semantic Interpretation
Time: 5:30-7pm, 32-D831

In recent minimalist literature, transformations (Move) have been re-conceptualized as iterative applications of the basic syntactic operation Merge. We will begin by adapting Heim and Kratzer’s (1998) semantic treatment of movement in light of this new state of affairs. We will then propose a generalization of the movement interpretation rule that can handle cases of multidominance other than the canonical movement configuration. Finally we will propose a modified and generalized Predicate Composition and Modification rule which will also depend on syntactic sharing. These new rules will provide an original insight into a number of well known syntactic and semantic puzzles such as extraposition, ECM, object control, small clauses and complex causative constructions.

(Work in progress with Roni Katzir)

“Nominal Voices”, a paper co-authored by Tali Siloni and MIT third-year student Omer Preminger, has just appeared in the volume Quantification, Definiteness, and Nominalization, edited by Anastasia Giannakidou and Monika Rathert and published by Oxford University Press.

Second-year student Jeremy Hartman’s paper “The semantic effects of non-A-bar traces: evidence from ellipsis parallelism” has been accepted for presentation at the conference Semantics and Linguistic Theory (a.k.a. SALT) at Ohio State.

A paper by second-year graduate student Pritty Patel, third-year student Patrick Grosz, Ted Gibson and Evelina Fedorenko entitled “Experimental evidence against a strict version of the Formal Link Condition on E-Type Pronouns” has been accepted as a poster presentation at the 2009 CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing

Guillaume Thomas will give a talk titled “Against the use of counterpart functions in the analysis of proxy counterfactuals” on Wednesday at 3:00 PM in room 34-303. We hope to see you there! More information, including a tentative schedule for the semester, can be found on the LF Reading Group’s webpage.

Raj Singh (MIT linguistics PhD 2008, currently postdoc in Brain & Cognitive Science at MIT) has accepted an assistant professorship at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Congratulations, Raj!

SNEWS (“Southern New England Workshop in Semantics”) will be held in Amherst this coming spring. It is an informal workshop where students can present their ongoing work. This year MIT contact person for SNEWS is Patrick (grosz@mit.edu). If you are interested in presenting/participating at this coming SNEWS, please let Patrick know. Also, let him know if you have a (dis)preference for any of the following dates when SNEWS might be held: March 28; April 11; April 25; May 2.

Speaker: Lisa Travis (McGill University)
Time: Friday, March 6th, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141

The Malagasy cleft: what and why

There are two goals of this talk. One is to discuss the particular characteristics of a certain construction in Malagasy that is used both for focus and for wh-questions. The second goal is to investigate the different ways one can go about creating an analysis for a construction that, on the surface, can look similar to an English construction but in a language that is otherwise quite different from English. Malagasy has a construction, sometimes called a no-[nu]-construction, named for the no particle that it contains. It has the following format where the pre-no material encodes new information.

Rasoa no mividy ny vary
Rasoa no pres.at.buy det rice
‘It is Rasoa who buys the rice.’

Many papers have been written on the Malagasy no construction since Keenan’s (1976) seminal paper (e.g. Law 2005, Paul 2001, Pearson 2006, Potsdam 2004), but the exact nature of the construction is still being debated. Much of the controversy has centred around three issues.

(i) the nature of the [no XP] (clause or DP?),
(ii) the nature of no (Det, Focus head, or Comp?), and
(iii) the relation between the pre-no constituent and the following material (movement, predication, or something else?).

In this talk I revisit these issues and bring new data into the discussion arguing in the end that (i) the [no XP] is nominal, (ii) no is in Det, and (iii) the pre-no constituent has not moved from the [no XP].

While the details of the analysis are partly driven by the data, they are also partly driven by the inherent nature of Malagasy within a language typology delineated by a movement typology. I have argued elsewhere (Travis 2005, 2006) that languages differ as to whether a feature triggers XP or X0 movement. In a language like English (or Italian), a V feature triggers X0 movement while a D feature triggers XP movement, and in a language like Malagasy, the reverse is true (there is VP and D0 movement). Given that Malagasy differs fundamentally from English, we might expect that a surface similar construction would have a fundamentally different analysis.

References
Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Remarkable Subjects in Malagasy. In Subject and Topic, ed. Charles Li, 249-301. New York: Academic Press.
Law, Paul. 2005. Questions and clefts in Malagasy. In Proceedings of Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, eds. Jeffrey Heinz and Dimitris Ntelitheos, 195-209. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics.
Paul, Ileana. 2001. Concealed pseudo-clefts. Lingua 111:707-727.
Pearson, Matt. 2006. What’s No? Clause linking in Malagasy. San Diego: Workshop on Comparative Austronesian Syntax.
Potsdam, Eric. 2004. Wh-questions in Malagasy. In Proceedings of the 11th Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association ed. Paul Law, 244-258. ZAS Working Papers in Linguistics.
Travis, Lisa deMena. 2005. VP, D0 movement languages. In Negation, Tense and Clausal Architecture: Cross-linguistic Investigations, eds. Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger and Paul Portner. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Travis, Lisa deMena. 2006. Voice Morphology in Malagasy as Clitic Left Dislocation or Malagasy in Wonderland: through the looking glass. In Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages, eds. Hans-Martin Gärtner, Paul Law and Joachim Sabel, 281-318. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.