Category: Syntax

We are happy to announce two talks by Melissa Jeckel (Frankfurt) and Nelly Kerezova (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: Towards a unifying analysis for (varieties of) the Person-Case-Constraint (Melissa Jeckel)             Factors for null object resolution in European Portuguese. (Nelly Kerezova) Date: July 04 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: Jeckel: Towards a unifying analysis for (varieties of) the Person-Case-Constraint In this talk I present the mechanics and typology of the Person-Case-Constraint (PCC). The PCC is a phenomenon that occurs in many languages that are genetically unrelated, for instance Spanish, Classic Arabic, Shambala, Maltese, Basque, Greek, Southern Tiwa and many more. The restriction of the PCC is given in (1) and illustrated in (2). (1) (Strong) PCC (Bonet, 1991: 182) In a combination of a phonologically weak direct and indirect object, the direct object has to be third person. (2) Je le/*te lui ai présenté.     I  3.SG.ACC/*2.SG.ACC 3.SG.DAT have introduced     'I introduced him /*you...

We are happy to announce a talk by Carla Spellerberg (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: Towards an adverbial-only analysis of Bulgarian focus-sensitive particles Date: June 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: pdf  ...

We are happy to announce two talks by Daniel Aremu (Frankfurt) and Samuel O. Acheampong (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: The syntax of Verb Phrase Ellipsis in Likpakpaanl (Sam Acheampong)             Association with focus in Mabia languages (Daniel Aremu) Date: June 20 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct...

We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu, Katharina Hartmann, Anke Himmelreich, and Johannes Mursell (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Morphological marking of focus in Mabia Date: June 13 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In Mabia, focus is not marked by intonation but by focus particles and word order. We discuss the ex-situ and in-situ focus strategies in the four Mabia languages Dagbani, Dagaare, Likpakpaanl, and Kusaal. We demonstrate that some, but not all the languages provide morphological evidence for a low focus projection. Further we show that, despite the languages being closely related, the focus strategies differ a lot. We end with some speculations about how the strategies should be analyzed and end with some further questions....

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...