Category: Talks

COPPOCK COLLOQUIUM

This Friday, May 4th, at 1:45 pm in Humanities 1, Room 210, there will be a colloquium by Liz Coppock (Boston). Her talk is entitled “Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most.” Afterward, there will be a reception at 3:30pm in the Silverman Conference Room. The abstract is given below:

This paper focuses on languages in which a superlative interpretation is typically indicated merely by a combination of a definiteness marker with a comparative marker, including French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Greek (‘DEF+CMP languages’). Despite ostensibly using definiteness markers to form the superlative, superlatives are not always definite-marked in these languages, and the distribution of definiteness-marking varies across languages. Constituency structure appears to vary across languages as well. To account for these patterns of variation, we identify conflicting pressures that all of the languages in consideration may be subject to, and suggest that different languages prioritize differently in the resolution of these conflicts. What these languages have in common, we suggest, is a mechanism of Definite Null Instantiation for the degree-type standard argument of the comparative. Among the parameters along which languages are proposed to differ is the relative importance of marking uniqueness vs. avoiding determiners with predicates of entities that are not individuals.

ROBERTS AND ZAITSU AT CLS

Anissa Zaitsu and Tom Roberts were in Chicago last weekend at CLS 54. Anissa presented a talk on why-VP constructions, bravely arguing in the Ellipsis session that they are derived non-elliptically. Tom gave a talk about experimental work on the pragmatics of biased polar questions in Estonian. They report a collegial environment, full of plenty of new friends and raucous multilingual karaoke.

WORKSHOP ON PRONOUNS AND COMPETITION

In the coming week (Friday April 27 – Saturday April 28) the department will host an international workshop on the theme of Pronouns and Competition.  The theme of competition (between more and less ideal expressions of the same content) has appeared constantly in both the theoretical literature on anaphoric relations and in the psycholinguistic literature which explores the real-time expression and comprehension of such relations. This workshop aims to ask if the concepts of ‘competition’ at work here are the same or different and to re-evaluate the status of competition in both domains. Over the two days of the workshop there will be 12 oral presentations and seven poster presentations, by researchers from Santa Cruz, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Harvard, Rutgers, London, Amherst, Seattle, Leipzig, Göttingen and San Diego. More information is
available here.

ZYMAN AT CHICAGO

Last Tuesday, graduate student Erik Zyman gave a talk at the University of Chicago on “The Rich Syntax of Grammatical Relations: Raising and Hyperraising in P’urhepecha.” He reports that he received a warm welcome and a great many helpful questions and suggestions, and that he had productive and enjoyable meetings with various faculty members and graduate students while there.

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