Category: Faculty News

Faculty Roumyana Pancheva recently published a journal article titled “Morphosyntactic variation in numerically-quantified noun phrases in Bulgarian” in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

See a short abstract attached:

Bulgarian masculine nouns have a special form – a ‘count’ form – different from singular and plural, which is used in numerically-quantified nominal phrases. The count form is analyzed here as accusative singular. Several empirical arguments are offered in support of this un usual account, and potential challenges are addressed. The account places Bulgarian among an understudied group of languages, where singular vs. plural marking on nouns in numerically-quantified nominal phrases varies by noun class.

Congrats, Roumi!

Professor Ivy Sichel was invited to give a talk at the Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle on Friday (Feb 2), titled “Parasitic gap licensing without movement”.

A leading empirical claim in the study of parasitic gaps (henceforth, PGs) is that they are licensed by an A-bar movement chain which stands in a particular structural relation to the PG (Engdahl 1983, and many others). Here I argue, based on the distribution of PG licensing by Hebrew RPs, that the requirement is actually weaker, and should be recast in terms of a licensing A-bar chain, which may or may not involve actual movement. I will show that a non-movement A-bar dependency culminating in a resumptive pronoun (RP) may also license a PG, as long as the structural condition on the relation between the licensing chain and the PG is met. This structural condition is identical to classical cases of PG licensing (Nissenbaum 2000) dubbed by Arregi & Murphy (2023) Parasitic Scope (following Barker 2007):

(1) Parasitic Scope for PG licensing: The PG-containing XP must take the scope of the binder of the licensing variable.

Crucially, I show that the variable may be realized as an A-bar Operator bound RP *which does not involve movement*. In the talk, I present differences and similarities in distribution between Hebrew PGs licensed by gaps and PGs licensed by non-movement RPs. The differences follow, I argue, from differences in the placement of the Operator heading the chain and determining the placement of the PG-containing XP (1). Whereas in movement chains launched from the complement of V, the immediate binder is the trace of movement left in specvP (Nissenbaum 2000), in A-bar binding chains which do not involve movement, the immediate binder is in specCP. Since the PG-containing phrase must take the scope of the licensor’s binder, this derives the core difference in PG-licensing: PGs contained within vP-level clausal adjuncts are licensed by a movement chain but not when the RP is not associated with movement (Sells 1984, and more recently Hewett 2023, based on much broader cross-linguistic coverage) – the binding Operator is too high. In other environments, where the Op binder does satisfy (1), these RPs do license PGs, showing that a movement derivation is not absolutely required.

Professor Roumyana Pancheva recently gave two colloquium talks at the University of Göttingen and UC Berkeley. The talk at Göttingen was given on Jan 24, entitled “Numeral variations“. The talk at Berkeley was given on Feb 12, entitled “Numeral syntax and nominal number“.

Assistant Professor Jess Law recently published her joint work “Force shift: a case study of Cantonese ho2 particle clusters” with Haoze Li (Visiting Professor ’23-24) and Diti Bhadra (Minnesota) in Natural Language Semantics.

Congrats, Jess and Haoze!