Whamit!

We are delighted to announce that a paper entitled  ”Possession and syntactic categories: An argument from Äiwoo” by 5th-year student Giovanni Roversi has just been published in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.  Congratulations, Giovanni!

Here’s the abstract:

This paper argues that possession is syntactically category-flexible. While it is clear that in many languages possession is mostly grounded in and operates in the nominal extended projection (Szabolcsi 1983; Kayne 1993), I show that this cannot be universal. The empirical part of this article is a case study of Äiwoo, which I argue has an inherently verbal counterpart of English ’s, an abstract transitive verb I label POSS. This verb can be used by itself to form clausal possession: ‘I POSS this boat’ ≈ ‘this boat is mine.’ Possessed DPs also contain the verb POSS: the object of this verb is extracted, forming a relative clause. Informally, ‘my boat’ really is ‘the boati ’ ≈ ‘the boat that is mine.’ Given this, Äiwoo simply lacks true nominal possessives. The theoretical consequence is that possession can be mapped onto different syntactic categories in different languages. This is a welcome result, as it makes the syntax-semantics mapping as flexible as it needs to be: if possession is just a tool to assert that a certain relation holds between two entities, nothing in our theory of grammar predicts that such a notion should only be limited to a specific syntactic category.

The paper is open access: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-024-09623-7

The MIT Linguistics community and its alums were well-represented at NELS 55, hosted by Yale University on October 17 & 18. Our distinguished alum Coppe van Urk (PhD 2015) of Queen Mary University of London, was one of the invited speakers, and spoke about “The cycle within a syllable: The role of the vP phase in Dinka morphophonology”.  The following talks and posters were presented by our current students and visitors:

• Ioannis Katochoritis (2nd year) - Long-distance pivot movement measures Phase Unlocking: Malagasy vs. Dinka
• Magdalena Lohninger (Visiting student) - The A’/A signature: systematic patterns in composite A’/A probing
• Paul Meisenbichler (2nd year) - Interactions of worlds, times, and locations: On the expressive power of index shifting
• Oddur Snorrason (Visiting student) - HAVE-omission in Swedish: Towards a theory of auxiliary omission
• Anastasia Tsilia (4th year) - (In)direct evidential futures in Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian
  
  … and these were the talks and posters by alums of the past decade …
• Klaus Baki, Anthony D. Yates and Sam Zukoff (PhD 2017) [UCLA] - A phonology–morphosyntax interface explanation of the “nasal infix” in (Proto‑)Indo-European
• Suzana Fong (PhD 2021) [Memorial University of Newfoundland] - Reciprocal binding and syntactic ergativity in Adyghe
• Andrew Hedding and Michelle Yuan (PhD 2018) [UCLA] - Distinct pathways to possessor Ā-extraction in Mesoamerican languages
• Fulang Chen (PhD 2023) [Gridspace]  and Ka-Fai Yip - Facilitator effects in Mandarin topicalization: Evidence for a crossing-based view of antilocality
• Luke Adamson and Stanislao Zompì (PhD 2023) [Potsdam] - Polite Pronouns and the PCC
• Peter Grishin (Postdoc, PhD 2023) [MIT] - Impersonal impersonals and personal third persons: An argument for binary [±PART]
  
  … and their predecesors!
• Karlos Arregi (PhD 2002) [University of Chicago] and Matthew Hewett - Singular they and the syntax of pronominal imposters
• Daiki Asami and Benjamin Bruening (PhD 2001) [University of Delaware] - Subjectless readings of again and the Kratzerian model of argument structure
• Jon Gajewski (PhD 2005) [University of Connecticut] - On the pragmatics of propositional anaphora
• Isabelle Charnavel, Tom Meadows and Dominique Sportiche (PhD 1984)  [UCLA] - Meaningful Agreement Features: Evidence from indexical binding
  
  

Our colleague Michael Kenstowicz is the author or coauthor of three separate articles in the just-published Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, from Oxford University Press: “Vowel harmony in pre-Generative phonology”, “Vowel harmony in Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages”, and “Palatal harmony” (with Charles Kisseberth).  Our most harmonic congratulations!!

MIT Press has just announced the publication of a monograph by our newest faculty colleague Elise Newman, entitled When Arguments Merge, in its Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series.  The book presents “a novel theory of argument structure based on the order in which verbs and their arguments combine across a variety of languages and language families” — and has been praised as “refreshingly original and carefully argued”, “deeply thought through”, with “far-reaching theoretical and empirical consequences”.  Congratulations, Elise!

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)
Title: Long-distance pivot movement measures Phase Unlocking: Malagasy vs. Dinka
Time: Tuesday, October 22, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: Austronesian Malagasy and Nilotic Dinka Bor share non-trivial parallels: (i) an Austronesian voice/pivot system, where one (any) DP argument of the clause is promoted to a syntactically and discourse-wise prominent pivot position; (ii) clausebound promotion to pivot exhibits core properties of A-movement; (iii) promotion to pivot may be long-distance, so that a matrix pivot is thematically linked to an embedded gap; (iv) long-distance pivot movement proceeds via Phase Unlocking.

Based on fieldwork in Malagasy, I present two empirical findings: (i) The Malagasy-Dinka parallelism breaks down in long-distance pivot movement: in Dinka it retains its A-properties, whereas in Malagasy it suddenly only exhibits core A’-properties relative to arguments of the matrix clause; (ii) In Malagasy, embedded CP complements that either become the matrix pivot themselves or allow their own pivot to be extracted to the matrix clause, must first undergo (covert) A-movement to the matrix pivot position.

To explain their difference, I make the two following proposals: (i) Dinka and Malagasy differ in the structural height of Phase Unlocking: it happens by matrix v in Dinka, but by matrix C in Malagasy; (ii) their difference in the locus of Phase Unlocking is a conspiracy of three factors: (1) head V-movement in Dinka vs. phrasal roll-up VP-movement resulting in smuggling of the theme pivot in Malagasy; (2) different ’alignment’, contingent on the order of Agree and Merge at the v/Voice cycle: ACC-like in Dinka, split-ERG-like in Malagasy; (iii) Dinka’s composite pivot probe is not sensitive to partial A-intervention, whereas Malagasy’s is.

The analysis has several implications: (i) the Dinka pivot is a clausal topic with A-properties, dissociated from subjecthood, whereas the Malagasy pivot is both a topic and surface subject; (ii) Phase Unlocking may exceptionally undo the scope-island status of CPs for (covert) QR, allowing cross-clausal inverse scope; (iii) Phase Unlocking is not an ‘altruistic’ primitive of the grammar, but only occurs if the unlocking Agree operation is independently available locally: unlike Dinka, Malagasy v/Voice does not unlock the CP complement phase because it never gets the chance to directly Agree-interact with the internal argument during the derivation.

Speaker: Johanna Alstott (MIT)
Title: On two types of aspectual coercion and before-/after-clauses: Evidence from processing
Time: Thursday, October 2412:30 PM
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: As originally observed by Anscombe (1964) and Heinamäki (1974), certain sentences with before and after are prima facie ambiguous between a strong reading and a weak reading. There is an entailment relation between the two purported readings, and as such two types of theories of these sentences have been proposed. Deflationary theories (Heinamäki 1974, Beaver & Condoravdi 2003, Krifka 2010) posit that the sentences in question are not actually ambiguous: their only LF corresponds to the weak reading, and the strong reading falls out as a subcase. Coercion-based ambiguity theories (Condoravdi 2010; Rett 2020), by contrast, claim that the LF for one reading of the sentences in question has a coercion operator that the other lacks.

This work-in-progress tests an online processing prediction that Rett’s (2020) coercion-based theory makes and deflationary theories do not. Rett’s (2020) theory, which relies on two coercion mechanisms (inchoative coercion and completive coercion), makes processing predictions because coercion has a distinctive psycholinguistic profile (Piñango et al. 1999; Brennan & Pylkkänen 2008, etc.): parsers show processing slowdowns in a coercion sentence upon realizing that insertion of a coercion operator is necessary for its grammaticality or felicity. Past work has tested coercion-based theories of various data via processing experiments, arguing for coercion if the claimed coercion cases have an online cost; however, no past work has tested Rett’s (2020) theory in this way. We do just that, presenting two self-paced reading experiments and pilot results for a third that probe for the existence of Rett’s inchoative and completive coercion operators. We find initial evidence for Rett’s completive coercion operator but no comparable evidence for inchoative coercion (cf. Brennan & Pylkkänen 2010).

Speaker: Shrayana Haldar (MIT)
Title: Deriving Uniqueness of Definites from Contradiction
Time: Wednesday, October 23, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: This is Part I of a two-part talk. In this Part I, I explore a hypothetical: what if definites are not that different from indefinites syntactically? More specifically, extending an idea of Omri Doron’s, I will propose that we give definites and indefinites exactly identical make-up — with an existential quantifier taking a restrictor and a nuclear scope — except that definites be given an extra PEX operator embedded in the restrictor argument of the existential quantifier that indefinites lack. The trivalence resulting from this PEX operator projects from out of the restrictor to the matrix level, and this trivalence, I argue, is what is conventionally understood as the uniqueness presupposition of a definite. Crucially, I will show that the oddness perceived during the violation of the uniqueness presupposition of a definite can be analytically captured by such a PEX-based view of the definite-indefinite distinction because it predicts that, exactly in the cases that lead to such a violation, the truth condition of the whole sentence is a contradiction. This talk is the basis for Part II, where I will show some data from Bengali which point exactly to this effect: that definites and indefinites are not all that different after all.