Talk by Alexandrine Dunlap (GU/Florida) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
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....
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Talk by Samuel O. Acheampong and Anke Himmelreich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
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....
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Talk by Cornelia Ebert (Frankfurt) and Markus Steinbach (Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Cornelia Ebert (Frankfurt) and Markus Steinbach (Göttingen) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: November 7, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: The semantics of semi-conventionalized lexical depictions in spoken and sign languages Abstract: Typological research has shown that many unrelated spoken languages have ideophones such as English helter-skelter or German plitsch-platsch. Ideophones form a special class of words which are used in specific registers (often vivid narrative contexts) and can be defined as “an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2019). They have been argued to be depictive items which establish an iconic relationship of the form of an ideophone (including the utterance of it) and its meaning, which lies in the domain of sensory imagery encoding information about movement, sound, sentiment or mental state. In addition, ideophones typically contribute...
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Talk by Rebecca Jarvis (Berkeley/Potsdam) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
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...
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Talk by Magnus Poppe (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Magnus Poppe (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.  Date: October 31, 2024 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t. Title: Dynamic Binding and Pronoun Dis-agreement Across Modalities Abstract: In multimodal discourse, pointing gestures introduce referents that enhance pronoun resolution, even when grammatical agreement between pronoun and gesture-introduced referents is absent. This study examines the role of "pointing" versus "non-pointing" gestures in pronoun binding by manipulating gesture type and pronoun agreement. Results indicate that pointing gestures facilitate pronoun resolution across both agreeing and non-agreeing contexts, while non-pointing gestures lack this referential impact. Supported by Gutzmann’s (2020) insights, which suggest that gender features on pronouns add a supplementary layer of meaning rather than being central to the main discourse, the findings indicate that gestures may allow pronouns to bind even with a gender mismatch, without altering the truth of the primary...
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