Category: Student News

SAMKO SUCCESSFULLY DEFENDS DISSERTATION

Also last Wednesday (May 18), Bern Samko endured her final trial in the long journey towards the doctorate. Bern defended (successfully and in style) her dissertation — “Syntax and information structure: The grammar of English inversions” — before a large crowd of well-wishers and critics. The dissertation investigates some important theoretical questions about the driving forces of movement and, more broadly, about how syntactic processes and discourse-centered information structural processes interact with one another. The questions are addressed by way of a focus on some non-canonical word orders in English (participle preposing and VP preposing) and is notable both methodologically (it combines theoretical work with large-scale corpus work) and theoretically (informed equally by current strands in minimalist thinking about syntax and by the work in theoretical pragmatics that the SPLAP group has been reading and doing). Bern has been a leading member of SPLAP since its inception and her presence at its meetings will be sorely missed.

MARGULIS MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP ESTABLISHED

The Departments of Philosophy and Linguistics and the Summer Session office recently announced the creation of the Matthew Margulis Memorial Scholarship. Established in honor of Matthew, a linguistics and philosophy double major who passed away unexpectedly last November, the scholarship will provide $500 to three students enrolled in summer session classes. All eligible students will be automatically entered into consideration: additional information can be found here.

HIRAYAMA, KRAUS, AND RUDIN SUCCESSFULLY DEFEND QPS, MILLER MA THESIS

This past week saw several succesful qualifying paper and MA thesis defenses:

  • Hitomi Hirayama: “Parasitic gaps in Japanese” (Maziar Toosarvandani, chair, Jim McCloskey, and Matt Wagers)
  • Kelsey Kraus: “Sluicing under code switching” (Jorge Hankamer, chair, Sandy Chung, and Maziar Toosarvandani)
  • Chelsea Miller: “Limited syntactic reactivation in noun phrase ellipsis” (Matt Wagers, chair, Pranav Anand, and Adrian Brasoveanu)
  • Deniz Rudin: “Head based syntactic identity in sluicing” (Jim McCloskey, chair, Pranav Anand, and Sandy Chung)

Congratulations to all four!

SAMKO TO DEFEND DISSERTATION

Graduate students Bern Samko will defend her PhD dissertation this Wednesday (May 18). It is entitled “Syntax and information structure: The grammar of English inversions”:

The goal of this dissertation is to discern the patterns of interconnectedness between syntax and pragmatics by way of a close examination of participle preposing and VP preposing (VPP) in English. For the latter, I argue that what we call VPP is the accidental confluence of three independent components: verum focus, feature-driven movement to the left periphery, and, optionally, an intonational contour that contributes emphasis. In doing so, I bring together two analytic traditions that have rarely commented on one another: a syntactic tradition that has used VPP as a diagnostic tool rather than considering its properties sui generis, and a pragmatic one that has listed discourse effects without considering why those effects are associated with the particular form of VPP. I propose an analysis in which the familiar pragmatic G[ivenness] feature participates in the syntax as a driver of movement. This approach holds the promise of allowing a better understanding of why the properties of VPP cluster as they do, an understanding that goes beyond simply listing the relevant properties.

The defense will take place at 1:30 pm in Humanities 2 (Room 259).

ZYMAN IN S-CIRCLE

This Friday (May 13), graduate student Erik Zyman will present in S-Circle on “Hyperraising to object and the mechanics of Agree”:

In English and other familiar languages, A-movement can occur out of an infinitival clause, but not out of a finite clause:

(1a) Sue1 seems [__1 to be embezzling money].
(1b) *Sue2 seems [__2 is embezzling money].

On one prominent analysis, this is because an element must bear an unvalued feature to be an eligible goal for Agree (the Activity Condition, Chomsky 2000, 2001). On this view, in (1b) — unlike in (1a) — Sue gets Case in the embedded clause and, having no more unvalued features, becomes invisible to higher A-probes such as matrix T. Here, I present novel data illustrating the Janitzio P’urhepecha (JP) “accusative + complementizer” construction (e.g., ‘They want Xumo-acc that build a house’) that strongly suggest the Activity Condition is not an inherent constraint on Agree (cf. Nevins 2004). I show that the accusative DP is in the matrix and truly A-moves out of the embedded CP (i.e., this is hyperraising, not prolepsis or object control). Crucially, a hyperraised accusative DP can be linked to a nominative floated quantifier in the embedded CP—showing that nominative Case is available in the embedded CP, but its subject A-raises out of it nonetheless, challenging the Activity Condition.

The findings have further theoretical consequences. First, I argue that existing analyses of hyperraising (e.g., Martins and Nunes 2010, Carstens & Diercks 2013, Halpert 2016, Petersen & Terzi to appear) cannot extend to the JP case, and propose that JP allows hyperraising to object but English does not because in JP, but not in English, the finite embedding C can optionally bear the feature [uD[epp]] (cf. Cable 2012). Secondly, I argue that JP hyperraising to object can be accounted for straightforwardly on an altruistic (target-driven) analysis of movement (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2004, McCloskey 2001), but not under Greed (Bošković 1995, 2002, 2007) or Labeling (Chomsky 2013, 2015).

As usual, S-Circle will take place at 2 pm in the LCR.

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