Tag Archives: Syntax

Linguistics Major Thomas Truong Selected as UMass Rising Researcher

It is our great pleasure to share the news that Linguistics Major Thomas Truong (Class of 2025) has been selected as one of this year’s Rising Researchers:

– https://www.umass.edu/gateway/research/stories/rising-researchers

As explained at the link above, the Rising Researcher Award is a University-wide honor that “recognizes undergraduate students who excel in research, challenge their intellect, and exercise exceptional creativity.”

Thomas was selected for the award based upon his independent research into the semantics of the past-marker ‘da’ in Vietnamese, research which he presented at this summer’s CreteLing and DGfS Summer School at the University of Goettingen.

For more information about Thomas’s work and his experiences as a UMass Linguistics Major, please check out the profile below:

– https://www.umass.edu/gateway/research/stories/rising-researchers/linguistics-language-semantics

Congratulations, Thomas!

Gary Thoms Linguistics Colloquium

The Linguistics Colloquium this Friday November 22nd will be given by Gary Thoms (NYU). Time and place: 3.30pm in ILC S211. Title and abstract below.

Counter-counter-cyclicity

One of the best ideas in Chomsky’s Minimalist critique was the proposal that structure building proceeds monotonically, captured via his Extension Condition. Somewhat unfortunately, it has become increasingly common for syntactic analysis to reject this proposal on empirical grounds and to allow a range of counter-cyclic derivations to capture a range of phenomena which seem to resist cyclic treatments given standard base representations. In this talk I argue against counter-cyclic derivations by means of a series of case studies — the ‘punting’ of interveners, ‘skipping’ derivations, late merge of adjuncts, and ‘tucking in’ in multiple wh-questions — and I argue that counter-cyclic proposals fail to capture the facts. I argue that multidominant representations (of the kind championed by Kyle Johnson) give us a means by which to capture these phenomena more effectively, with a particularly important role for rethinking the specifics of our base structures. 

Faruk Akkus’ book to be published at Oxford University Press

Faruk Akkus’ monograph (with David Embick and Mohammed Salih), titled “Case and the syntax of argument indexation”, has been accepted for publication at Oxford University Press (Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)!

The current version is available on lingbuzz: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007378

A short description of the monograph is below:


Abstract:
This book deals with case and the syntax of argument indexation. We argue for an approach in which case labels (‘Nominative’, ‘Ergative’, etc.) are shorthand for bundles of decomposed features; crucially, these features are part of the syntax, and also referred to in the morphology. A key idea in the approach is what we call Case Targeting: the idea that probes may target arguments with specific case features. Importantly, syntax and morphology can refer to these features differentially, leading to various interesting mismatches. This includes allowing Clitic Movement in syntax to produce both morphophonological clitic and affix on the PF side. Conversely, Agreement operation in syntax can produce morphophonological clitic and affix on the PF side. We focus primarily on Sorani Kurdish varieties (Iranian languages), but also investigate and apply our approach to other Iranian languages (Kurmanji, Zazaki, Laki, Persian, Rushani, Shughni), Indo-Aryan (Hindi, Nepali, Gujarati, Maithili), Semitic (Arabic, Neo-Aramaic), and Polynesian (Nukuoro). We elaborate on various implications of the approach for implicational hierarchies, case containment, case assignment mechanisms etc. We maintain that discussions of inherent vs dependent case approaches should be approached at a fine grain, one that is informed by the representation of case features that we argue for.