Whamit!

Speaker: Michael Kenstowicz
Title: Accent Classes and Lexical Drift in Kyungsang Korean
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Oct 31, 5:00pm

In the Kyungsang dialects nouns fall into several lexically contrasting tonal patterns: three for monosyllables and four for di- and tri-syllabic stems. In this presentation (based on collaborative research with Youngah Do and Chiyuki Ito) we report some of the results of a survey of five native speakers with respect to c. 1,900 native lexical items. The following questions are addressed. How regular are the correspondences between the contemporary accent classes and their attested Middle Korean sources? Which classes have expanded and which have contracted? Have any segmental factors biased the observed changes? What role does lexical frequency play in the correspondences? How do the accentual changes align with the much-discussed segmental analogies in coronal codas? Finally, can the statistical profiles in the lexicon account for the default accent that is assigned to loanwords?

Speaker: Yusuke Imanishi
Title: How to Merge a Possessor WH in Kaqchikel (Mayan): Null Resumption and Non-Uniform Merge
Time/Date: Tuesday, Nov 1, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

This is a practice talk for NELS 42.

In this talk I will claim that a possessor WH in Kaqchikel undergoes non-uniform Merge: One type of the possessor WH is External-Merged into Spec-CP, while the other type undergoes movement to Spec-CP via Internal-Merge. If this claim is correct, it can be argued that a possessor WH in Kaqchikel takes on different forms, depending on how it is merged: it is sensitive to the manner of Merge in a similar manner to the complementizer system in Modern Irish (McCloskey 1979, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009).

Step 1: I will support this proposal by looking at extraction out of PP.

Step 2: It will be shown that the proposed non-uniform Merge of the possessor WH can make correct predictions about independent syntactic properties of the two wh phrases. It will be also demonstrated that Kaqchikel provides further evidence that the chain formation including movement and resumptive chains must be successive-cyclic and that UG allows for mixed chains of movement and resumption in a single non-local dependency.

Step 3: To explain why the resumptive strategy is only possible in a possessor position in the language, I will argue that extractability obeys the Agreement Hierarchy (Bobaljik 2008).

Joseph Aoun, 1982 Linguistics PhD, eminent syntactician, and President of Northeastern University, received the 2011 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award last Wednesday. The award (created by Robert Muh (SB ‘59) to honor the 50th anniversary of the the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) is presented every two years to an MIT alumnus who has made “made extraordinary contributions during a career in the arts, humanities, or social sciences”.

The award was presented by Deborah Fitzgerald, Dean of the School, who praised Aoun for his “outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics as well as educational leadership”. Introducing Joseph, David Pesetsky noted the ways in which his research had repeatedly uncovered “a deep unity between subsystems of grammar thought to be distinct”, and read a letter of congratulations from Noam Chomsky, who described the award as a “well-deserved honor for your remarkable contributions, not only to our own field but to the general intellectual and academic community”. David also noted that Joseph was an outstandingly distinguished member of an outstandingly distinguished PhD class that entered in 1978, three members of which (Prof. Carol Neidle of Boston University, James Huang of Harvard and our own Donca Steriade) were present in the hall. Joseph’s Muh Alumni Award Lecture, which followed the presentation of the award, had the rather non-linguistic title “The Future of American Higher Education in the Global Knowledge Marketplace” — but in fact began with a very personal intellectual autobiography that described some of the links between Joseph’s career in linguistics and his decision to enter university administration. It was interesting, engaging and at times moving event (video here). Congratulations Joseph Aoun!

Speaker: Lisa Bylinina
Title: Low degrees, comparatives, and how they are related
Location: 32D-831
Time: Friday, Nov 4, 1:00PM-2:30PM

Abstract:

Very little is known about the diachronic sources of comparative morphemes. Even in cases when the origin of a comparative morpheme is clear, the development is quite often hard to make sense of.

The case I will discuss is hypothesized in (Dixon 2008): “It is possible that a diminutive affix could develop into an Index of comparison. No examples of such a path of development are currently known.”

Tatar and Bashkir are examples of precisely this pattern, modulo terminology: morpheme “-rak” performing low degree modification in both of them also marks gradable predicates in comparative constructions. However, while in Bashkir “-rak”-comparative has replaced the common Turkic unmarked comparative, in Tatar the two strategies co-exist in free variation.

Another pair of languages to consider is Russian and Bulgarian. Bulgarian comparative morpheme “po” is a relative of Russian low degree modifier “po-” that appears on comparative forms of adjectives.

Interestingly, there are certain comparative contexts in which Tatar “-rak” and Russian “po-” are obligatory — all of these are contexts without (overt) standard of comparison. Exploring the landscape of these “incomplete comparatives”, I suggest that the relevant ones are so-called “superlative comparatives”, as in “the taller building in the picture” (Gawron 1995). I will try to push the idea that the meaning of superlative comparatives makes them particularly useful for reasoning about small differences within a domain in a way that neither positives nor superlatives are; this is where low degrees and comparatives meet.

Speaker: Laura McPherson
Title: Morphological distance and optional harmony in Tommo So
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Oct 24, 5:00pm

Tommo So (Dogon, Mali) has two harmony processes: backness harmony and ATR harmony, which are both exceptionless in stems. Stem harmony is gradiently correlated with the order of derivational and inflectional suffixes. Broadly, the propensity to harmonize decreases as we move away from the stem, with a range of obligatory harmony, followed by optional harmony, followed by no harmony; backness harmony shuts off more quickly than ATR harmony. The range of optional backness harmony further breaks down into different rates of harmony, with a set of suffixes harmonizing 90% of the time, followed by a suffix with 35% harmony, followed by a suffix with 7%, again correlating with distance from the stem, which is measured in abstract morphological distance based on affix ordering, not on phonological distance. This talk addresses issues of optionality, gradience, and opacity in the system, suggesting an analysis of vowel harmony based on lexical access and decomposition.

Speaker: Bronwyn Bjorkman & Claire Halpert
Title: In search of (im)perfection: the illusion of counterfactual aspect
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 25, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

This is a practice talk for NELS 42. The full abstract is available (PDF).

Puzzle: We examine the puzzle of “fake” imperfective aspect in counterfactual conditionals (CFs). “Fake” tense and aspect (Iatridou, 2000) – i.e. morphology that does not seem to make a temporal interpre- tive contribution – is used in many languages to mark CFs. The following example from Greek illustrates both past and imperfective morphology used to mark a future-less-vivid conditional:

[An peθene      o   arχiɣos] θa  ton θavame       stin   korifi tu  vunu
 if die.PST.IMP the chief    FUT him bury.PST.IMP on.the top    the mountain
‘If the chief died, we would bury him on the top of the mountain.’
(Iatridou, 2000, ex. (14))

The use of “fake” past morphology associated with CF interpretations has been well-documented (Steele, 1975; James, 1982; Iatridou, 2000, a.o.). Several proposals analyze fake past as the locus of CF semantics, either by construing “past” as a marker of modal, rather than temporal, remoteness (Steele, 1975; Iatridou, 2000; Ritter and Wiltschko, 2010) or by deriving CF meaning from a purely temporal past (Ippolito, 2002; Arregui, 2009). It has been claimed that fake imperfective is also involved in the marking of counterfactu- als, though its use is less well-understood: for Iatridou (2000, 2009) imperfective in CFs is a default aspect; Arregui (2004) claims that it reflects incompatibility between perfective and CFs; while Ippolito (2004) pro- poses that a “modal imperfective” reflects a speaker’s indirect evidence for a proposition. Iatridou (2009) proposes that imperfective-marked CFs occur in a subset of the languages with past-marked CFs, a general- ization she based on the fact that Slavic languages have “fake” past but “real” aspect in CFs. We argue that a full typology includes languages with “fake” perfective aspect in CFs as well, to which we return below.

Proposal: We argue that the apparent requirement for imperfective in CFs in some languages is illusory, merely a morphological reflex of the need to realize a true PAST feature. We argue that “past imperfective” morphology inthese languages actually expresses only PAST; itreceives animperfective interpretation dueto contrast with a true PERFECTIVE morpheme. In CFs, this “past imperfective” morphology reflects only CF “past”; in other words, it does not reflect syntactic IMPERFECTIVE features. We illustrate this proposal with the morphological paradigm of three types of languages: (1) Greek, Romance, and Zulu, where imperfective is default and occurs in CFs; (2) Arabic, where perfective is default and occurs in CFs; and (3) Slavic, where PAST is specified independently of aspect, and CFs preserve full aspectual contrasts.

Speaker: Dennis Ott (University of Groningen)
Title: Peripheral fragments: an ellipsis approach to dislocation
Time/Date: Thursday, Oct 27, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

Germanic-type dislocation constructions, in which a dislocated XP (dXP) appears at the periphery of a clause containing a resumptive anchor, have been a long-standing problem for syntactic theory. In both Contrastive Left-dislocation (CLD; extensively studied since Cinque’s 1977 and Vat’s 1981 seminal works) and its counterpart Right-dislocation (RD; largely neglected in theoretical works, but see Zwart 2001, Averintseva-Klisch 2008, and Truckenbrodt forthcoming), the dXP is an optional “add-on” to a complete (gapless) clause, suggesting that it is base-generated clause-externally. At the same time, however, the dXP shows connectivity into the clause (case agreement with the pronominal anchor, reconstruction). This paradoxical situation has typically been ‘resolved’ by resort to stipulative mechanisms relating a clause-external adjunct (the dXP) to the movement chain comprising the pronominal anchor and its trace (cf., e.g., van Riemsdijk & Zwarts 1974, Zaenen 1997, Wiltschko 1997, and Frey 2004).

In this talk, I propose an alternative to these approaches, according to which the dXP in CLD and RD is a remnant of clausal ellipsis (cf. Tanaka 2001, a.o., on Japanese RD). That is, the underlying structure of dislocation constructions involves two juxtaposed clauses which are structurally parallel, modulo dXP vs. anchor. At PF, one of the two clauses (the “left” one in CLD, the “right” one in RD) undergoes IP-ellipsis (as familiar from sluicing, fragment answers, etc.; see Merchant 2001, 2004), leaving only the dXP. On this approach, connectivity effects in CLD and RD are due to ordinary reconstruction of the dXP internally to the reduced clause (cf. den Dikken et al. 2000 on pseudoclefts). I show that this analysis straightforwardly explains all central properties of CLD and RD, reducing the phenomenon traditionally labeled “dislocation” to A-bar movement and IP-ellipsis at PF.

WHO: Igor Yanovich
WHAT: Standard contextualism strikes back
WHEN: Oct 28, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

WHAT EXACTLY:

Lately, “standard contextualist” analyses of epistemic modals (think Kratzer 1977, 1981, 1991, on the linguistic side) have been attacked, and even judged to be inadequate on the basis of some data from dialogues. Instead, various authors (to name a few, MacFarlane 2011, von Fintel & Gillies 2011) proposed fancier theories, which can deal with the problematic data.

In this talk, I won’t argue that the fancier theories are wrong. But I will propose a new variant of standard contextualism which accounts for the relevant data.

Speaker: Edward Flemming (Joint work with Hyesun Cho)
Title: The phonetic specification of contour tones: The rising tone in Mandarin
Location: 32D-831
Time: Monday, Oct 17, 5:00pm

In this talk I will report on joint work with Hyesun Cho investigating how contour tones are specified phonetically. It has been proposed that all tones are realized by point targets for pitch, so the pitch movement associated with a rising tone is simply the result of interpolation between low and high point targets. Other analyses argue that pitch movements in contour tones are governed by targets, e.g. specifying the slope of the pitch movement. We investigate this question through a case study of the Mandarin Chinese rising tone. The patterns of variation in the realization of the rising tone as a function of speech rate indicate that the specifications of this tone involve targets pertaining to both the pitch movement and its end points: the slope of the f0 rise, the magnitude of the rise, and the alignment of the onset and offset of the rise. In addition, this analysis implies that the rising tone is over-specified in the sense that the targets conflict and thus cannot all be realized. The conflict between the tone targets is resolved by a compromise between them, a pattern that is captured by formulating the targets as weighted, violable constraints.

Upcoming Phonology Circle Talks:
Oct 24 - Laura McPherson
Oct 31 - Michael Kenstowicz
Nov 7 - Suyeon Yun
Nov 28 - Donca Steriade

We were ecstatic to learn that Seth Cable (PhD 2007) has won the 2012 Early Career Award of the Linguistic Society of America. This award (inaugurated in 2011) goes each year to “a new scholar who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of linguistics.” Seth’s dissertation, which was the source for his recent book The Grammar of Q (Oxford University Press) presents a theory of the syntax and semantics of wh-questions in which pied-piping effects arise without any actual notion of pied-piping in the grammar — a proposal about the structure of languages in general suggested by Seth’s own fieldwork on Tlingit, a Na-Dené language of Alaska. After MIT, Seth spent a post-doctoral year as a Killam Fellow at the University of British Columbia, and is now an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UMass Amherst, where his current work explores many aspects of semantics and syntax in a wide variety of languages. Congratulations Seth!!

Speaker: Claire Halpert
Title: Surprising Subject Agreement in Zulu: Some new facts about raising
Date/Time: Tuesday, Oct 18, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

I’ll be discussing a novel variation on the raising-to-subject construction in Zulu. I’ll present evidence that this construction involves movement of the embedded subject to a preverbal A position in the matrix clause without the matrix subject agreement that typically is required with nominals in such positions (cf. Buell 2005). Instead, the verb bears the same agreement marker found in expletive constructions. A comparison with the standard raising case, in which agreement with the raised subject does occur, yields no interpretive differences between the two constructions, which suggests that agreement with the raised subject is optional in this construction. I’ll compare this construction with one other instance of apparent optional subject agreement—the case of complex NP subjects—and explore potential explanations that unite the two constructions, including the possibility that the “expletive” agreement in both constructions is actually agreement with a CP.

WHO: Ayaka Sugawara
WHAT: First language acquisition of Antecedent-Contained Deletion
WHEN: Friday 21 October, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Abstract:

In this talk, I will report the previous studies on first language acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion (ACD) sentences and will discuss some thoughts about possible follow-up/refined experiment.

ACD is a version of VP-ellipsis, in which the elided VP is a part of the relative clause within its antecedent, as shown in (1a). ACD is problematic if we do not assume QR, because the elided VP will never be identical to the antecedent VP without QR (1b). In order for the structural identity between the antecedent VP and the elided VP to be realized, the operation QR is necessary to interpret ACD sentences (1c).

(1) a. John read every book that Bill did.
      b. John [_aVP read [_DP every book that Bill did <_eVP read every book that Bill did <…>]]
      c. (after QR) [every book that Bill did <read t>] John read t.

Previous studies (Kiguchi & Thornton (2004), Syrett & Lidz (2009)) show that 4- and 5-year-old kids can correctly interpret ACD sentences in which Binding Principles are relevant such as (2). This suggests that QR is innate (given that the input of ACD sentences is quite rare for kids and we cannot interpret ACD without QR), and that kids have adult-like knowledge of the Binding Principles.

(2) a. The Mermaid baked him_i the same food that Cookie Monster_*i did.
      b. Dora gave him_i the same color paint that Smurf’s_i father did.
      c. He_i jumped over every fence that Kermit_*i tried to.

Syrett & Lidz (2011) conducted experiments to test whether people (adults and kids) can target the embedded VP and the matrix VP as the landing site of QR. Their results, in my opinion, are not very clear.

(3) a. Miss Piggy wanted to drive every car that Kermit did.
      b. (targeting the embedded VP) … Kermit did .
      c. (targeting the matrix VP) … Kermit did .

Adding to introducing those papers in more detail, I would like to discuss some thoughts about what will be a better experiment. Reading those three papers I mentioned will be very helpful (references below).

• Kiguchi, Hirohisa & Rosalind Thornton (2004) “Binding Principles and ACD Constructions in Child Grammars,” Syntax 7, 234-271.
• Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz (2009) “QR in Child Grammar: Evidence from Antecedent-Contained Deletion,” Language Acquisition 16, 67-81.
• Syrett, Kristen & Jeffrey Lidz (2011) “Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children,” Linguistic Inquiry 42, 305-337.

Speaker: Barbara Citko (Visiting Scholar, University of Washington)
Title: In Search of MDDs (Multidominance Diagnostics)
Location: 32-D461
Time: Thursday, Oct 13, 12:30-1:45p

Many existing multidominant (MD) proposals have focused, either directly or indirectly, on various types of coordinate structures, such as right node raising (Wilder 1999, De Vries 2009, Johnson 2007, among others), across-the-board wh-questions (Citko 2005, in press, De Vries 2009, among many others), gapping (Goodall 1987, Kasai 2007, among others), questions with coordinated wh-pronouns (Gracanin- Yuksek 2007), determiner sharing (Citko 2006, Kasai 2007). However, the presence of coordination is not a reliable diagnostic of MD for two reasons. First, there exist coordinate structures that do not involve MD (simple coordinate structures with no ellipsis or movement whatsoever), and second, there are many non-coordinate structures that can be (and have been) analyzed in a MD fashion. These include (but are not limited to): free relatives (Van Riemsdijk 2006, Citko 2000, in press), parasitic gaps (Kasai 2007), serial verb constructions (Hiraiwa and Bodomo 2008), amalgams (Kluck 2008), comparatives (Moltmann 1992), discontinuous idioms (Svenonius 2005). Thus, given the fact that multidominance is independent from both coordination and ellipsis, the search for reliable diagnostics of a MD structure continues.

The intuition that all MD approaches build on is that the shared element has to simultaneously satisfy the constraints imposed by it by the two elements between which it is shared. In other words, it must match these two elements. In this talk, I explore the nature of this matching requirement with an eye towards developing a set of diagnostics for a MD structure. More specifically, I address the following three questions:

A.	What kind of matching do MD structures require?
B.	What kinds of mismatches do MD structures tolerate?
C.	Why are different types of MD structures appear to be subject to different matching requirements?

Drawing on data from Polish, I compare the matching requirements in four types of arguably multidominant constructions: two coordinate ones (right node raising and across-the-board wh-questions) and two non-coordinate ones (parasitic gaps and free relatives), focusing on the differences between them and ways to account for these differences.

David Pesetsky writes:

“Irene Heim has been elected a 2012 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. Each year since 2006, the LSA honors several of its members for “distinguished contributions to the discipline”. Irene is the third current MIT faculty member to be honored in this fashion, following in the footsteps of Morris Halle (2006) and Noam Chomsky (2007). Four former faculty are also fellows, and about a third of the current fellows (21 of 75) are alumni of our PhD program.

The induction ceremony will take place at the LSA meeting in Portand on Friday, January 6, 2012, as part of the Business Meeting.

This is a great honor for Irene, richly deserved. I’m sure you join me in expressing our warmest congratulations!!”

WHO: András Kornai
WHAT: Lexical semantics by machines
WHEN: Friday 14 October, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Abstract:

A simple information-theoretic argument shows that about 90% of the information in a sentence is carried by the choice of words, and only 10% depends on function-argument structure. In light of this, it is somewhat surprising that 90% of formal semantics (basically, all of Montague Grammar and its descendants) deals with the compositional aspects of meaning, with lexical semantics relegated to the fringes of formal work. In this talk we discuss how a classical piece of algebra, Eilenberg’s (1974) theory of machines, can be used to provide a nontrivial formal theory of word meaning, and how the resulting model interfaces with compositional tecto- and phenogrammar.

References: (* = suggested reading)

S. Eilenberg (1974) Automata, Languages, and Machines. Academic Press [This book is excellent background for those interested in the algebraic theory of finite state automata, transducers, and machines that this work puts to use for semantics.]

*A. Kornai (2010a) The treatment of ordinary quantification in English proper. Hungarian Review of Philosophy 2010 54/4 150-162 [This is a summary of what is wrong, in this author’s view, with MG and related theories of formal semantics. Formal issues are discussed, but no heavy machinery is used.]

*A. Kornai (2010b) The algebra of lexical semantics. In C. Ebert, G. Jaeger, J. Michaelis (eds) Proc. 11th Mathematics of Language workshop (MOL11) Springer LNCS 6149 174-199 [This is the intro to the new approach.]

*A. Kornai (2011) Eliminating ditransitives. To appear in M. Egg, P. de Groote, M-J Nederhof, F. Richter (eds) Selected Papers from the 15th and 16th Formal Grammar Conferences, Springer LNAI, in press. [One area where the algebraic approach shows some promise.]

Graduate student Kirill Shklovsky writes:

I just wanted to make MIT linguists aware that I have a free syntax tree-drawing program available on my webpage. According to Guillaume Thomas it is the best program available for Windows :) It doesn’t reach the sophistication possible with various LaTeX packages, but it is reasonably good with your basic trees and movement arrows. There are various options for formatting the text in your trees and labels the arrows.

And from the program description:

EMFTree is a program for drawing syntactic trees on the Windows OS. The way it works is as follows: you type in the code that will generate your tree, hit Enter, and your tree is drawn. You can then copy the image and paste it into Microsoft Word, Open Office, or any other program.

Since the pictures produced by EMFTree are vector graphics, they should look good both on the screen and on the printed page when scaled to your liking.

SPEAKER: Anders Holmberg — Newcastle University
TIME: 3:30 PM, Friday 10/14
LOCATION: 32-141
TITLE: On the Syntax of Yes and No in English

Abstract:

The paper discusses systems of answering yes/no- questions in general, as background to a discussion of two theories articulating the idea that answers to yes/no-questions are derived by propositional ellipsis under identity with the proposition of the question. The first theory is articulated by Kramer & Rawlins (2009,2010), the other is based on Holmberg (2001, 2007). The paper focuses on a particularly vexing case of answers to negative questions in English: the ambiguity of yes as an answer to negative questions with the negation not (called ‘negative neutralization’ by Kramer & Rawlins). It is argued that the ambiguity is due to the structural ambiguity of not, as either negating the sentence or constituent-negating the predicate. An argument is also presented that affirmative declaratives have an affirmative polarity head, a counterpart of the negative polarity head of negative declaratives.

Martina Gracanin-Yuksek (Ph.D 2007) and Shigeru Miyagawa were invited speakers at the Workshop on Functional Categories and Parametric Variation, held October 6-7 at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Martina’s talk was “Properties of negation in Croatian,” and Shigeru’s talk title was “Minimal variation.” Meltem Kelepir (Ph.D 2001) was a co-organizer of the meeting.

Please join us for Syntax Square on Tuesday. Coppe will be discussing some data from Sorani Kurdish and dialects of Neo-Aramaic to do with split ergativity and PCC effects.

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: Split Ergativity in dialects of Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic
Date & Time: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Speaker: Ivan Sag (Stanford)
Title: Sex, Lies, and the English Auxiliary System
Location: 32-D461
Time: Thursday, Oct 6, 12:30-1:45p

Ever since the grammar of the English auxiliary system presented in LSLT/Syntactic Structures, it has been widely believed that movement operations must be part of grammatical theory. Moreover, it is generally accepted within Minimalism and related fields informed by it that human biology determines that movement rules are ‘structure dependent’. I will show why both of these claims are false. In addition, the construction-based analysis of the auxiliary system that I will present treats generalizations and exceptions that have never been properly analyzed (or else have not been analyzed at all) in transformational terms.

WHO: Rick Nouwen
WHAT: The projection of appositives
WHEN: Friday 7 October, 1:00PM-2:30PM
WHERE: 32-D831

Nominal appositives (NAs) have non-trivial projection behaviour. For instance, Wang et al. 2005 observed that while NAs are normally interpreted with widest scope, the nominal appositive in (1) restricts the if-clause. This reading is unavailable with an appositive relative in that same position.

(1) If a professor, a famous one, writes a book, he will earn a lot of money.

I discuss a potential approach to the projection behaviour of NAs that on a syntactic and semantic level is identical to Schlenker’s 2010 proposal for non-restrictive relative clauses, but which differs with respect to pragmatic conditions. In a nutshell, what accounts for the complex projection behaviour is that nominal appositives have flexible syntactic attachment, are interpreted as conjuncts with an e-type subject pronoun and prefer wide-scope interpretations.

SPEAKER: Ivan Sag — Stanford University
TIME: 3:30 PM, Friday 10/07
LOCATION: 32-141
TITLE: Sluicing without Ellipsis

Abstract:

This talk examines various arguments that have been made by Merchant (2001, 2004, 2008, to appear) against the direct-interpretation theory of Sluicing and Bare Argument Ellipsis put forth by Ginzburg and Sag (2000) [GSOO] (see also Culicover and Jackendoff, 2005). With more careful examination of GS00’s proposal, however, specifically in relation to the role of salient utterance (SAL-UTT) and the maximal question under discussion (MAX-QUD) supplied by context, the arguments made against the direct-interpretation approach are seen to lose their force. We also examine data from a number of languages which are problematic for any deletion-based analysis of Sluicing, showing how the direct-interpretation approach avoids these difficulties. Finally, we show how GS00’s analysis interacts with Ginzburg’s (in press) theory of dialogue to provide an account of `sprouting’ that answers the arguments against GS00 offered in Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey, to appear.