Category: Announcements

This Friday, our own Jim McCloskey will give the first colloquium talk of the fall quarter, titled “Clauses without Verbs: The Irish Landscape and Beyond”. The talk will take place on Friday, November 8, at 1:20 pm in HUM 1 – 210.

Jim’s abstract is as follows:

One of the ways (perhaps the principal way) in which contemporary Irish departs from the typological profile of a Standard Average European (SAE) language is in its intricate and rich subsystem of finite verbless clauses. This subsystem will be the focus of my talk.

There is existing work on the topic, but that work focuses almost exclusively on clauses which express copular relations (predicative, identificational, specificational). This talk will focus instead on the very large (and largely unstudied) class of predications which are verbless in their syntax but not copular in their semantics. It turns out that this sub-grouping includes many kinds of predication which have been of interest and importance in contemporary formal semantics and philosophy of language — almost all of the familiar modal expressions, comparative clauses, propositional attitude predicates, subjective attitude ascriptions, structures of weak quantification, predicates of temporal duration and frequency, predicates of knowledge, acquaintance and many other psychological states (but not physical states).

The first goal of the talk will be descriptive — to provide an overview (syntactic and semantic) of these predication types — with a view ultimately of answering the typological-theoretical question of what predication-types can in principle be expressed in a verb-free syntactic frame.

The second goal will be to develop a syntactic framework which can accommodate these patterns and make the correct distributional predictions and connections within the language.

The third goal will be to consider theoretical implications (some syntactic, some semantic), especially for the theory of extended projection and for the question of how roots are integrated into larger structures.

The 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), pronounced [wɪkfəl], will take place in and around Stevenson College on May 5-7. One of the premier international conferences on formal linguistics in North America, WCCFL has been held annually since 1982. The first WCCFL was at Stanford University, and UC Santa Cruz has hosted the conference four times before, in 1984, 1993, 2002, and 2012. 

Over the years, WCCFL has featured much groundbreaking research in the formal study of human language, and this year’s conference will be no exception. Conference attendees will hear from three invited speakers — Luke Adamson (Rutgers University), Dorothy Ahn (Rutgers University), and Eva Zimmermann (University of Leipzig), and other linguists from around the world will present 42 talks and 39 posters, on a wide range of topics in theoretical phonology, syntax, and semantics. These will include two special sessions: one on deixis and anaphora (How does human language make reference to the physical and linguistic context?) and one on phi-features (What semantic domains are represented featurally in human language, and how are these features represented in the syntax and morphology?)

The program for WCCFL 41 has just been posted, and conference information — including registration fees — can be found on the conference website.