Talk by Viktor Köhlich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Viktor Köhlich (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 18, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "te-no clauses in Japanese” Abstract: In this talk, I look at a type of noun-modifying clause in Japanese that has not received much attention in the literature. Although verbs can DP-internally never co-occur with the element -no, which is otherwise obligatory with most other word classes, they do when the suffix -te is attached beforehand, normally used for coordination of clauses among others. An example is (1). (1) [masuku-wo tsuke-te-no] jugyō mask-ACC put.on-TE-NO class `a class in which you wear your mask' Compared to ordinary relative clauses, this type of clauses is subject to more restrictions. The modified noun for instance cannot be an argument of the modifying clause and needs to depict an event. After presenting all relevant facts about this construction, I will attempt at a tentative analysis. Specifically, I will propose that these clauses are instances of TPs...
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Talk by Bernd Möbius (Saarland University, Saarbrücken) in the Phonology Colloqium

By Tina Bögel Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Bernd Möbius in the Phonology Colloqium on Wednesday, 13.12.2023, 16-18 ct. in IG 4.301. Title: Information Density and Phonetic Variation. Abstract: In this talk I will take an information-theoretic perspective on speech production and perception. I will explore the relation between information density and phonetic encoding and decoding. Information density of a linguistic unit is defined in terms of surprisal (the unit's negative log probability in a given context). The main hypothesis underlying our experimental and modeling work is that speakers modulate details of the phonetic encoding in the service of maintaining a balance of the complementary relation between information density and phonetic encoding. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the effects of surprisal on phonetic encoding, in particular on dynamic vowel formant trajectories, stop consonant voicing, syllable duration, and vowel space size, while controlling for several basic factors related to the prosodic structure, viz. lexical stress and major prosodic boundaries, in the statistical...
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Talk by Elena Herburger (Georgetown University) in the Semantics Colloquium

By Lennart Fritzsche Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Elena Herburger (Georgetown University) 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.  Title: Negative Concord and NPI licensing: their semantic and historical relation Date: December 7, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk I ask how Negative Concord comes into existence and how it changes over time. Focusing largely on Romance, I explore how treating Negative Concord as but a name for a lexical ambiguity between a negative reading and a corresponding existential(-like) reading with the distribution of an NPI (e.g. Herburger 2001) can help shed light on the fact that Negative Concord terms often originate from NPIs, and can gradually come to be ‘more negative’. This process is argued to be more advanced in French than in Spanish, a difference that I attribute to a difference in the realization of sentential negation (no vs. pas)....
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Talk by Daniel Aremu (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium

By Anke Himmelreich Comment Closed
We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talks will take place in person. Room IG 4.301 Date: December 04, 2023 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Title: "A tale of two ‘onlys’ in Mabia” Abstract: A tale of two ‘onlys’ in Mabia Earlier studies on the syntax-semantic mapping of the exclusive particle ‘only’ have proposed that while adverbial-only (1) corresponds to the semantic property/meaning of ‘only’, as a proposition operator, adnominal-only (2) poses a problem with respect to the proposition meaning of ‘only’. A proposal for salvaging the problem is to assume that adnominal-only is capable of type-shifting to compose with its DP associate, and then undergoes quantifier-raising to a scope-taking position at LF- the QR Approach (cf. Chomsky 1976, Rooth 1985, 1992, Wagner 2006). However, recent studies have shown that the problem can addressed in a more syntactic way. Thus, Adnominal-only maintains its structural position, while a (c)overt exclusive operator occupies a scope position higher in the clause. In other words,...
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