Kategorie: Syntax

We are very happy to announce two talks by Jochen Zeller from the University of Kwa Zulu Natal The first talk will be held in the Syntax Colloquium on Monday, July 14th, 4-6 p.m., room IG 4.301. The title of this talk is: "Linear order affects agreement with conjoined noun phrases: experimental evidence from isiZulu".   Abstract:  "In this talk I discuss different aspects of negation in the Bantu language isiZulu (Nguni; Guthrie code S42), which is the home language of almost  a quarter of South Africans (Census 2022). The talk begins with a brief overview of negation strategies in Bantu languages more generally, and in isiZulu specifically. I then discuss three different constructions that can be used in isiZulu to negate a transitive sentence. In the unmarked strategy, an object marker is attached to the negated verb that agrees in noun class with the object. When the object marker is omitted, the object (or the VP) is contrastively focused. In the third strategy,...

We are happy to announce a talk by Julia Bacskai-Atkari (Amsterdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: January 13, 2025 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Peripheral cases: Deviations in morphological case at the clausal edge" Abstract: bacskai-atkari.pdf ...

We are happy to announce a talk by Roland Hinterhölzl (Venice) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 16, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Privileged Access, Verb Second and the that trace effect" Abstract: In this talk, I present a novel approach to the that trace-effect that is based on the insight that subjects stand out in having privileged access to the C-domain. Paradoxically, this privilege of subjects that is visible in various effects appearing with local, that is, clause-internal movement leads to a handicap in long distance movement. I argue that the effect is due to an economy condition operative with flexible phase edges in the C-domain. Flexible phase edges are also visible in V2-languages, which distinguish each other between low and high V2, corresponding to a low (FinP) or high (ForceP) phase edge in the C-domain.  ...

We are happy to announce a talk by Alexandrine Dunlap (GU/Florida) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 18, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Operator Agreement in Sentential Negation" Abstract: In this talk I will put forward possible analyses that can account for Gweno’s unique agreeing negation. In Gweno main clause sentential negation, a post-verbal negation particle is inflected for the phi features of the subject. Additionally, Gweno uses an alternate negation strategy for certain clause types, specifically relative clauses and conditionals which encode negation with a post-initial prefix. Given the strict relationship between the negation particle and subject inflection on the verb, I explore the possibility of movement of the entire TP into the specifier of NegP and the role an operator may play in facilitating this pattern....

We are happy to announce a talk by Samuel O. Acheampong and Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: November 11, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "On the interaction between coordination and focus marking: The case of Mabia languages” Abstract: In this talk we present data from two Mabia languages, Likpakpaanl and Dagbani, that show that the marker for clausal coordination is identical to the ex-situ focus marker. Further, in a clausal coordination construction, focus marking is impossible in the second conjunct. We discuss the idea that the focus construction and the clausal coordination construction are structurally identical in the sense that the marker links two elements of different syntactic categories and we show how this can derive the empirical observations about clausal coordination in the Mabia languages....