Category: Syntax

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....

We are happy to announce a talk by Rebecca Jarvis (Berkeley/Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room SH 2.102 Date: November 04, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Three paths to resumption in Atchan” Abstract: In this talk, I document a three-way split in resumption morphology in Atchan (Kwa, Côte d’Ivoire). I show that the morphology of resumptive elements depends both on the kind of A’-dependency involved and the identity of the peripheral element: topics are resumed differently than other elements, and in some positions and dependencies pronouns are resumed differently than lexical DPs. The dependency type split, I argue, is best analyzed by assuming that topics are base-generated in the clausal periphery, while other dependencies involve movement (as is cross-linguistically familiar; cf. Cinque 1977, Aissen 1992, Georgi & Amaechi 2022). Meanwhile, the split between pronouns and lexical DPs emerges in movement-derived dependencies. I argue that the particularities of this second split favor a view on which two...

We are happy to announce a talk by Vadim Dyachkov (LLACAN / CNRS, Paris) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: October 21, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Decomposing middle voice in Natioro” Abstract: My talk deals with the properties of middle voice in Natioro, an underdescribed Gur language spoken in Burkina Faso. In Natioro, middle voice forms (whose exponent is the lengthened vowel of the perfective stem) exhibit properties similar to those of passive constructions. Depending on the lexical class of a verb, Natioro middle forms also can have anticausative, detransitive, but not reflexive and reciprocal, meanings. However, the agent can never be expressed overtly, and there is no construction corresponding to English by-phrases. Nevertheless, standard tests applied to detect the presence of the agent (agent control, licensing of instrumental adjuncts, possibility to passivize causatives) show that it is indeed present in the semantic structure. In my talk, I discuss the results of these...

We are happy to announce a talk by Ur Shlonsky (University of Geneva) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: February 05, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "Clause-internal focus - movement and locality: Evidence from some African and some non-African languages” Abstract: I present several arguments in favor of a clause-internal (“vP-peripheral”) FocusP and provide some examples of movement to its specifier. Focus°, I additionally argue, is selected by a head. I discuss the properties of this additional structure and its role in the syntactic computation....