Category: Talks

The next S-Circle meeting will be this Friday, March 15th, 4 pm in the Linguistics Common Room. The speaker will be Anie Thompson, whose talked is titled “Toward Understanding Japanese Argument Anaphors”. Find the abstract here.

Linguistics Research Center visitor Francis Corblin (Universite Paris – Sorbonne) will give an S-Circle talk on Monday, March 11 at 4 pm in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249). The full S-Circle schedule for this quarter is available here.

S-Circle is back this week with a talk by Judith Aissen titled “Partial agreement in Tzotzil”. Find the abstract below. As usual, S-Circle meets at 4 pm on Friday (March 1) in the Linguistics Common Room (Stevenson 249).

Abstract: This paper starts with a simple morphological observation: in Tzotzil (Mayan), plural agreement with 1st and 2nd persons, though generally obligatory, can sometimes be omitted. Roughly, omission of number marking is possible when the plurality of the same referent is marked on a distinct ‘nearby’ element. The main descriptive issue addressed here is what ‘nearby’ means. Various possibilities come to mind. One is that ‘partial agreement’ is a discourse phenomenon – that plural marking can be omitted when the plurality of the referent has been morphologically established in nearby discourse. Another is that partial agreement is basically morphological and reflects a dis-preference for double plural marking on nearby elements. We will show that partial agreement in Tzotzil is neither of these. Rather it is fundamentally syntactic, for the possibility of partial agreement is determined by locality conditions which are unmistakably syntactic in character. Hence, while the optionality of plural marking for 1st and 2nd persons is in itself a simple morphological alternation, it provides a surprisingly rich window on syntactic structure in Tzotzil and the nature of syntactic locality.

There will be a colloquium by Joseph Sabbagh (UT Arlington) this Thursday, February 21st, at 12:00 noon, in the Humanities 1 Bldg, Rm 210. The title of his talk is “Specificity and Objecthood in Tagalog”, and you can find the abstract here.

There will be a colloquium by Maziar Toosarvandani this Thursday, February 7th, at 12:00 noon, in the Humanities 1 Bldg, Rm 210. The title of his talk is “Gapping is VP Ellipsis”, and you can find the abstract here.

There will be a colloquium by Martin Walkow this Thursday, January 31st, at 12:00 noon, in the Humanities 1 Bldg, Rm 210. PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL DAY, TIME AND LOCATION. The title of his talk is “(Conjunct) Agreement between Syntax and PF”, and you can find the abstract here.

There will be a colloquium by Michael Diercks this Thursday, January 24th, at 12:00 noon, in the Humanities 1 Bldg, Rm 210. PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL DAY, TIME AND LOCATION. The title of his talk is “The Great Escape: Raising out of finite clauses in Bantu languages”, and you can find the abstract here.