Author: Anke Himmelreich

We are very happy to let you know that in the first week of February, some colleagues from the Universidad de Alcalá will be visiting. They were so kind to agree to present some of their work at a small workshop. The workshop will take place in the afternoon on Thursday, February 2 and include the following talks:   14.05 Silvia Gumiel-Molina & Norberto Moreno-Quibén What does it take to grammaticize a judgement: semicopulative verbs and evaluativity  15.10 Isabel Pérez-Jiménez & Irene Areses & Gonzalo Escribano Pseudocopular verbs as subjectivity markers in Spanish: the case of “se me hace” 16.00 Coffee break  16.30 Irene Areses Hybrid agreement in Spanish: the case of “collective” nouns 17.15 Jennifer Tan On what is (un)known in Spanish: the case of “se conoce”   Title: Selected Topics in Spanish Syntax Time: 2pm - 6pm, 02 February, 2023 Place: IG 4.201  ...

We are happy to announce a talk by Jiro Inaba (Tokyo University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: January 23 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: A contrastive analysis of verb ellipsis in German and Japanese Abstract: Inaba_abstract...

We are happy to announce a talk by Fabian Heck (Leipzig University) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: January 16 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Empty expletives and the EPP Abstract: Since its introduction in Chomsky (1981), the EPP has remained a mistery. In particular, there is no consensus on what the EPP could derive from, or why it should exist (but cf. Haider 2010 for an interesting approach). Within the last 20 years, various proposals have been made that try to connect the EPP to some phonological property. In particular, there is a class of approaches claiming that the EPP requires that SpecT be filled by some *phonologically overt* category (e.g. Holmberg 2000, Bobaljik 2002, Landau 2007, Richards 2016, McFadden & Sundharesan 2018). Such a view appears to be incompatible with the very concept of an empty expletive. In my talk, I argue that there are reasons to assume that empty expletives exist. If...

We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: January 09 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Association with Focus Sensitive Particle only in Kasem and Kusaal Abstract: The syntactic properties and distribution of Focus Sensitive Particles (FSPs) (alternative-sensitive particles, à la Hartmann & Zimmermann 2008) like only, also, even, too, almost, etc., have been a cross-linguistic conundrum for some decades. Although two approaches/analysis have been muted: adnominal analysis (the adjunction of the FSP to the focused DP) (Ross & Cooper 1979), and adverbial analysis (adjunction to the Extebded Verbal Projections (EVPs)) (Jackendoff 1972; Jacobs 1983; Büring & Hartmann 2001; Mursell 2020), the choice of analysis is not an easy one to make. In fact, languages which seems to show an adnominal positionon the surface, have been argued to involve an EVPs adjunction (eg. German, Büring& Hartmann 2001; Mursell 2020) (cf. König 1991). Even what seems to be a clear dichotomy in...

We are happy to announce a talk by Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 12 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: Locality in focus marking Abstract: In this talk, I present an application of Graf's (2022) formalization of syntactic dependencies that suggests that (most) syntactic dependencies are based on adjacency, just like dependencies in phonology and morphology. Graf develops a tier-based strictly local  language (TSL) for these purposes. The talk will provide an  introduction into the complexity issue of language based on the Chomsky Hierarchy and then move on to explain Graf's TSL. Finally, the talk will apply the formalization to focus data from Likpakpaanl  trying to develop a diagnostic for the status of the focus particle. Concretely, I present an argument that the focus particle "le/la" in Likpakpaanl is a head....