CAN YOU BELIEVE WHO DEFENDED ON FRIDAY?

Congratulations to Tom Roberts for successfully defending his Qualifying Exam, “I can’t believe it’s not lexical: Deriving distributed factivity” on Friday, May 3rd. Tom’s QE provides a compositional analysis of “can’t believe,” an odd construction that is both factive and embeds questions — something that “believe” on its own does not. He’ll be presenting this work at SALT at UCLA later this month.