Alumna Min-Joo Kim (2004) recently published The Syntax and Semantics of Noun Modifiers and the Theory of Universal Grammar: A Korean Perspective in the Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory series (#96) by Springer.
Congratulations, Min-Joo!
We’re thrilled to share the news that PhD student Kimberly Johnson has been awarded a Phillips Fund grant from the American Philosophical Society.
This highly competitive grant funds not only linguistic, but also historical and ethno-historical research on Native Americans both in the US and in Canada. Kimberly’s grant will support her ongoing semantic fieldwork on the Creek language.
We are delighted to announce that the following dissertation defense will be taking place next week:
Ekaterina Vostrikova
Veneeta Dayal of Yale University will present “The Fine Structure of the Interrogative Left Periphery” in the GLSA Linguistics colloquium series Friday April 12th at 3:30. All are welcome!
Abstract: In this talk I explore the possibility that there are three points on the left periphery where interrogative meaning is built up, CP+WH, Force-P+Q, SAPASK:
[SAP SA0ASK [Force-P Force0+Q [CP C0+WH [TP]]]]
At CP, the +WH specification takes the TP denotation and creates a set of propositions, the semantic type for questions. At SAP, the question is anchored to the context of utterance via speaker and addressee co-ordinates. CPs are canonically what we find in complement positions, SAPs what we find in matrix questions and quotations. This two-way distinction, I would venture to say, is relatively uncontroversial or at least less radical sounding than the postulation of a three-way distinction.
I argue for a third structural position, in between CP and SAP, with a distinct semantic profile. I call this position Force-P+Q. While the term Force-P is familiar from Rizzi (1997), the characterization of this position is likely different from what has so far been assumed in the literature. I argue that Force0+Q takes a set of propositions (a question denotation) and turns it into a centered question, a question that is crucially active for someone. This allows Force-P to either feed into SAP, and be linked to a contextually provided anchor, or enter into a complementation relation with a predicate and be linked to an argument of that predicate.
The empirical justification for the three-way distinction in interrogative syntax-semantics comes from the following inter-related phenomena, which will be discussed in some detail in the course of the talk: embedding predicates, subject-aux inversion, biased questions, (polar) question particles, intonational contours, alternative vs. polar questions. In doing so, I draw on earlier collaborative work with Jane Grimshaw (Dayal and Grimshaw 2009) and Rajesh Bhatt (Bhatt and Dayal 2014 and subsequent versions), while absolving them of all responsibility for anything in this proposal that they may not have signed on to.
First year Linguistics Ph.D. student Anissa Neal has been awarded a highly competitive NSF GRFP Fellowship. Anissa is interested in syntax, African American English, and psycholinguistics, with a special interest in filler-gap processing, island constraints, and zero conditionals. This fellowship will support her exciting, interdisciplinary research program. Congratulations, Anissa!
María Biezma (PhD 2011, now faculty in UMass Hispanic Linguistics) will present “And the party is where? Non-optional wh-in-situ utterances” in ILC N400 at 2:30 as the first SuSurrus talk of the semester. All are welcome!
The GLSA is happy to announce the publication of the SULA 10 proceedings, edited by Kimberly Johnson and Alex Göbel. The volume is now available on Amazon and contains 15 papers on the semantics of a diverse set of under-represented languages.
A book edited by Luiz Amaral, Marcus Maia, Andrew Nevins, and Tom Roeper on “Recursion across Domains” was recently published by Cambridge University Press. As Tom Roeper notes:
This book has a large UMass footprint — editors: Luiz Amaral, Tom Roeper — contributors include many former students, faculty and visitors: Suzi Lima, Bart Hollebrandse, Ana Perez, Uli Sauerland, Yohei Oseki, Terue Nakato, Rafael Nonato, Luiz Amaral, Tom Roeper
Summary: Recursion and self-embedding are at the heart of our ability to formulate our thoughts, articulate our imagination and share with other human beings. Nonetheless, controversy exists over the extent to which recursion is shared across all domains of syntax. A collection of 18 studies are presented here on the central linguistic property of recursion, examining a range of constructions in over a dozen languages representing great areal, typological and genetic diversity and spanning wide latitudes. The volume expands the topic to include prepositional phrases, possessives, adjectives, and relative clauses – our many vehicles to express creative thought – to provide a critical perspective on claims about how recursion connects to broader aspects of the mind. Parallel explorations across language families, literate and non-literate societies, children and adults are investigated and constitutes a new step in the generative tradition by simultaneously focusing on formal theory, acquisition and experimentation, and ecologically-sensitive fieldwork, and initiates a new community where these diverse experts collaborate
Table of Contents:
Foreword (Ian Roberts)
A Map of the Theoretical and Empirical Issues (Amaral, Maia, Roeper, & Nevins)
Speech Reports, Theory of Mind and Evidentials
Recursion along the Clausal Spine
Recursive Possession and Relative Clauses
Recursion in the PP Domain
A new article by Seth Cable has just been published in the December 2018 issue of Natural Language Semantics. Titled “The Good, the ‘Not Good’ and the ‘Not Pretty’: Negation in the Negative Predicate of Tlingit”, the article offers a formal syntactic/semantic analysis of a curious set of negative gradable predicates in the Tlingit language (Na-Dene; Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon).
The following is a link to the PDF of the article (browser-viewable only).
On December 2, UMass hosted the annual rendition of the Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) (https://snewsling.wordpress.com/snews-2018/). Among talks from graduate students from Harvard, MIT, UConn and Yale, there were two presentations by UMass first year Jonathan Pesetsky (“If yes, If so, and Hypothetical Commitments”) and third year Kimberly Johnson (“Graded past and evidentiality in Muskogee Creek”).