Talk by Viktor Köhlich (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Viktor Köhlich (Goethe University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Merging Position and Size of Indirect Modifiers in Japanese Date: May 30 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk takes a look at the questions what the size ob indirect modifiers in Japanese is, or rather what size it can be, and where they merge in the DP. Adopting a cartographic understanding of the DP (Cinque 2010. 2020), in principle adjectives are expected to merge as reduced relative clauses of size IP in a dedicated functional projection and verbal modifiers to merge in a functional projection for finite relative clauses. Japanese is an interesting case, as the size of the modifier, which is often argued to correlate with finiteness, cannot be readily determined. Modifiers in attributive position only exhibit one surface form and are in their morphological mark-up (mostly) identical to their counterparts in predicative position. While it...
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Talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Philipp Weisser (University of Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: The Limits of Umlaut in Sinhala: Matching domains across the syntax, morphology, and phonology (joint work with Paula Fenger, Leipzig University) Date: May 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk we study the patterns of verbal umlaut in the Indo-Aryan language Sinhala (spoken in Sri Lanka), which seems to be constrained by an intricate combination of (i) lexical, (ii) morphosyntactic, and (iii) phonological factors. We study this phenomenon and show that it can be used as a window into the morphological makeup of complex words. In particular, we defend  the following claims: 1. Contrary to some claims in the literature (see e.g. Garland 2005), we argue that the limits of umlaut show that Sinhala verb morphology is, underlyingly, concatenative and in order to describe where umlaut appears and where it doesn’t, we need to refer to the notion of the morpheme. 2....
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Talk by Imke Driemel (Humboldt University Berlin)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Imke Driemel (Humboldt University Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title:Implicit arguments and their morpho-syntactic effects Date: May 9 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Implicit arguments are covert elements whose syntactic representations questioned in some way or another (Bhatt and Pancheva 2017). While much of the literature of implicit arguments is focused on thematic arguments such as PRO, pro, or the agent of passives, this talk will present two case studies on implicit non-thematic arguments: i) the perspectival center of the come/go alternation in the Northwest Caucasian language Adyghe, and ii) the speaker/hearer representation in allocutive marking languages of East Asia and South America. For i), it will be shown that the licensing of the perspectival center matches the language's strategy to signal PCC effects. For ii), we will investigate an interaction of gender and honorific marking which runs parallel to DOM effects. Not only will the case...
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Talk by Johannes Mursell (Goethe University Frankfurt)

by Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Johannes Mursell (Goethe University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Title: Evidentials in German Date: April 25 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Room: IG 4.301 Abstract: In this talk, I discuss various properties of elements in German that have been argued to encode evidential meaning, i.e. meaning related to information source, such as the discourse particle wohl and modals sollen/wollen. Starting with the discourse particle wohl, various authors (Modicom, 2012; Göbel, 2018; Eckardt and Beltrama, 2019) argue that it serves as inferential evidential, suggesting that the source of the information expressed is based on reasoning from one’s knowledge. ✓ You’re asked where your keys are. You hear the noise of keys inside your bag. ✗ You’re asked where your keys are. You usually leave them in your bag but you can’t quite remember if you did this time. (1) Sie sind wohl in meiner Tasche.      they are WOHL in my bag     ‘They’re in my bag (I...
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