Talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Daniel Aremu (GU Frankfurt) and Chinedu Anyawu (University of Jos) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take online over Zoom. Please enroll in the OLAT course of the syntax colloquium to get the link or write to Katharina Hartmann. Titles: More is going on upstairs than downstairs: There is a penthouse in Kuce Date: October 31 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: In this talk, we investigate polar interrogatives in Kuce (Kuche) or Ce (Che), a minority Plateau (Benue-Congo) language spoken in north-central Nigeria. The language employs a clause-final vowel lengthening strategy in polar questions (1-2). We, therefore, argue that: (a) the vowel quality of the question marker is determined by the final vowel of the clause; (b) the polar interrogative marking follows a strict-finality constraint; (c) the phenomenon is a main clause phenomena and (d) it is unavailable in focus construction. We show that unlike many lax prosodic languages with a single/uniform vowel, polar question marking....
Read More

Talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf)

We are happy to announce a talk by Martin Schäfer (Düsseldorf) in the Semantics Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Title: Interpretation and placement of English -ly adverbials: a case for a new quantitative approach Date: October 27 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: The interplay of position and interpretation of adverbials has received considerable attention over the last 20 years. But even for English, there is no clear consensus on which readings need to be distinguished, which orderings of adverbials are grammatical, and whether, in the case of -ly adverbials, the semantic analysis should be based on the semantics of the base form or not. The aim of my talk is to discuss the ways quantitative measures like collocations and distributional semantics can be leveraged to clarify this picture. After an overview of the problems, I will discuss three case studies illustrating three different approaches. The first case study shows that collocations of the base adjectives in attributive position annotated for the ontological category of the head allow a more finegrained look at the consistency of...
Read More

Talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium

We are happy to announce a talk by Zorica Puškar-Gallien (ZAS Berlin) in the Syntax Colloquium. The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301. Titles: On the theoretical and empirical challenges of multiple agreement with subjects and objects Date: October 24 Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct Abstract: This talk will focus on languages in which a finite verb agrees with the subject (S) and object (O), and in which O-agreement is argued to be conducted by a head high in the syntactic structure, such as T/Infl. Of particular interest are the verbal morphological templates in which O-agreement is realised by affixes closer to the verbal stem than S-affixes (Hungarian, Trommer 2003, E Kiss 2019; Tundra Nenets, Nikolaeva 2014; Khanty, Mansi, Mordvin, E Kiss 2019, Quechuan, Myler 2017, Nez Perce Deal 2017). Under Mirror Principle, this indicates that O-agreement applies before S-agreement, which is problematic for the standard Minimalist view of agreement, under which the subject should act as an intervener. The puzzle will...
Read More

Workshop on Word Order in the Nominal Domain (WONDo), November 10-11, 2022

The doctoral researchers of RTG ’Nominal Modification' are organising a two-day Workshop on Word Order in the Nominal Domain (WONDo): Factors, Perspectives & Approaches. The workshop will take place between November 10-11, 2022 on Campus Westend (Cas 1.811) of Goethe University (https://sites.google.com/view/wondo2022/homepage). The workshop will host talks both by doctoral researchers, GK alumni and invited speakers. Participation is free of costs but please make sure to register here by October 31, 2022: https://sites.google.com/view/wondo2022/registration. Keep an eye on the homepage for the program. WONDo_2022_description...
Read More

Guest Professor Seunghun J. Lee (Christian University, Tokyo) in July 2022

We welcome Seunghun J. Lee (Christian University, Tokyo) as this year's guest professor We are happy to welcome our guest Prof. Dr. Seunghun J. Lee from Christian University, Tokyo (https://sites.google.com/info.icu.ac.jp/linglab/home), who will be a guest researcher and lecturer at the Department of Linguistics in July 2022 as part of the International Campus Programme  (https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/56181581/International_Campus).    In the MA Programme "Linguistics", he will teach a course on "Prosody-Syntax-Interface: Theoretical and practical applications" - and everybody is welcome to participate. Registration for the course is via Olat. Here is the link to his class. https://qis.server.uni-frankfurt.de/qisserver/rds?state=verpublish&status=init&vmfile=no&publishid=334409&moduleCall=webInfo&publishConfFile=webInfo&publishSubDir=veranstaltung   Seunghun will be here the whole month of July. He is more than happy to discuss linguistic issues with colleagues and students. If anybody is interested in meeting him, just send him an email to s.lee@em.uni-frankfurt.de He can be reached in person in office IG 4.315....
Read More