Program
8:30: Coffee and breakfast
8:55-9:00: Welcome 9-10:30: Vicki Carstens, "Grammatical Gender and Parameter Theory" 10:30-10:50: Coffee break 10:50-12:20: David Embick, "Affixing and Packaging Morphemes: Two themes" 12:20-1:30: Lunch 1:30-3: Ruth Kramer, "Switching Grammatical Gender in the Plural: Three Case Studies from Afroasiatic" 3-3:20: Coffee break 3:20-4:50: Maria Polinsky, "How do I know I am in the right field?" 4:50-6:15: Student poster session |
Talk Abstracts
Vicki Carstens: Grammatical gender and parameter theory
Grammatical gender or noun class is a property on which there is striking cross-linguistic variation, but parameter-theoretic research has largely overlooked it. This is true despite the fact that phi-features are recognized to play a role in parametric syntax including most prominently the null subject parameter (Rizzi 1986, Holmberg 2010 among many others).
This talk will argue that grammatical gender is a parametric choice with significant syntactic consequences. It interacts with other factors such as +/- N-to-D movement, the presence or absence of Case, and the distribution of gender concord to yield major contrasts in patterns of agreement and word order.
David Embick: Affixing and packaging morphemes: Two themes
A line of research that extends back to early versions of generative grammar seeks to provide a constrained theory of possible "mismatches" between syntax and phonological form. Many of the mismatches of primary interest to this work involve affixation phenomena, construed broadly here to include clitics along with typical affixes. Building on earlier proposals, this paper identifies two central themes that arise in theories of affixation. The first theme is that at least some instances of affixation behave as if they obey linearly-defined locality conditions (immediate adjacency), not syntactically defined (hierarchical) locality. A second theme is that the syntax manipulates morphemes- not words- an observation that calls for a theory of how morphemes are packaged for PF purposes (i.e. as "affixes", or "clitics", or "words"). The importance of these two themes is examined and illustrated in three parts, which comprise the main part of the talk.
In Part 1, I look at the role of linear adjacency in affixation, with particular emphasis on the idea that linear rules interact in crucial ways with syntactic derivations (phase cycles) and representations (features of morphemes etc.).
Part 2 presents in summary form a case-study of clitic placement in Sorani Kurdish, which speaks to both themes noted above. For the first theme, it is shown that clitic placement ultimately involves linear rules, but cannot be understood without reference to the complex clause structures and alignment patterns of the language. For the second theme, I concentrate on some packaging properties of Sorani Kurdish. In particular, the language appears shows both morphemes that are moved as clitics being realized as "agreement", and morphemes that arise via Agree being realized as "clitics".
Part 3 extends some of the "packaging" conclusions of Part 2 to some speculations about apparent locality problems with the realization of voice morphology in many languages. The main idea is that a particular kind of mismatch might arise with the expression of voice due to certain features being packaged in a "clitic-like" way in some languages.
Maria Polinsky: How do I know I am in the right field?
This paper has two related goals: to analyze the relationship between two verb-initial orders, VSO and VOS, and to compare several ways of deriving extended right periphery of a clause in a verb-initial language.
With respect to the first goal, this paper starts by examining the relationship between two verb-initial orders, VSO and VOS, in the Polynesian language Tongan, as shown below:
(1) Na’e kaukau’i ‘e he ta’ahine ‘a e kulī.
PST wash ERG DET girl ABS DET dog
‘The girl washed the dog.’
(2) Na’e kaukau’i ‘a e kulī ‘e he ta’ahine.
PST wash ABS DET dog ERG DET girl
‘The girl washed the dog.’
In comparing two possible derivations of VOS, the paper shows that the analysis of VOS as derived from VSO via A-scrambling (as proposed in Otsuka 2005) is untenable. Instead, it argues for an alternative analysis according to which Tongan VOS is a structure with a base-generated righthand topic. In principle such a derivation can be achieved by different mechanisms; the paper compares several analyses leading to the appearance of a righthand topic and demonstrates that the analysis in terms of distributed (scattered) deletion (Fanselow & Cavar 2001) is best in capturing the facts of Tongan.
On a theoretical level, this paper offers new arguments against rightward movement as possible operations in syntax, thus arguing for a more austere syntactic model (cf. Abels & Neeleman 2012). On a methodological level, this paper relies on the combination of segmental and prosodic evidence in support of a particular account and considers new ways of adducing prosodic facts in support of syntactic analyses.
Ruth Kramer: Switching Grammatical Gender in the Plural: Three Case Studies from Afroasiatic
Typically, a noun triggers the same grammatical gender agreement (has the same grammatical gender) whether it is singular or plural. However, in some languages, a plural noun can or must trigger agreement in a different gender than it does in the singular. I refer to this phenomenon as “grammatical gender switch” and it automatically raises certain questions. Is it an odd type of syncretism, where the agreement exponents of one gender are ‘re-used’ for the other? Or is it a syntactic effect, where a new gender feature is introduced in the syntax for certain nouns? And how can we tell the difference between these two types of analyses?
In this talk, I investigate these questions using three case studies from Afroasiatic languages. I argue that gender switch is a type of syncretism in Amharic and Sidaama, whereas gender switch is syntactic in Saudi Arabic. I develop detailed analyses of gender switch in each language, proposing diagnostics for distinguishing between morphological and syntactic gender switch. I also show how this array of facts conforms exactly to predictions made by a Distributed Morphology approach to syncretism – specifically, that any switch to a non-default gender must be syntactic. Overall, then, the talk supports a Distributed Morphology approach, explores how to distinguish syntactic and morphological phenomena, and contributes to the description and analysis of several understudied Afroasiatic languages.
Grammatical gender or noun class is a property on which there is striking cross-linguistic variation, but parameter-theoretic research has largely overlooked it. This is true despite the fact that phi-features are recognized to play a role in parametric syntax including most prominently the null subject parameter (Rizzi 1986, Holmberg 2010 among many others).
This talk will argue that grammatical gender is a parametric choice with significant syntactic consequences. It interacts with other factors such as +/- N-to-D movement, the presence or absence of Case, and the distribution of gender concord to yield major contrasts in patterns of agreement and word order.
David Embick: Affixing and packaging morphemes: Two themes
A line of research that extends back to early versions of generative grammar seeks to provide a constrained theory of possible "mismatches" between syntax and phonological form. Many of the mismatches of primary interest to this work involve affixation phenomena, construed broadly here to include clitics along with typical affixes. Building on earlier proposals, this paper identifies two central themes that arise in theories of affixation. The first theme is that at least some instances of affixation behave as if they obey linearly-defined locality conditions (immediate adjacency), not syntactically defined (hierarchical) locality. A second theme is that the syntax manipulates morphemes- not words- an observation that calls for a theory of how morphemes are packaged for PF purposes (i.e. as "affixes", or "clitics", or "words"). The importance of these two themes is examined and illustrated in three parts, which comprise the main part of the talk.
In Part 1, I look at the role of linear adjacency in affixation, with particular emphasis on the idea that linear rules interact in crucial ways with syntactic derivations (phase cycles) and representations (features of morphemes etc.).
Part 2 presents in summary form a case-study of clitic placement in Sorani Kurdish, which speaks to both themes noted above. For the first theme, it is shown that clitic placement ultimately involves linear rules, but cannot be understood without reference to the complex clause structures and alignment patterns of the language. For the second theme, I concentrate on some packaging properties of Sorani Kurdish. In particular, the language appears shows both morphemes that are moved as clitics being realized as "agreement", and morphemes that arise via Agree being realized as "clitics".
Part 3 extends some of the "packaging" conclusions of Part 2 to some speculations about apparent locality problems with the realization of voice morphology in many languages. The main idea is that a particular kind of mismatch might arise with the expression of voice due to certain features being packaged in a "clitic-like" way in some languages.
Maria Polinsky: How do I know I am in the right field?
This paper has two related goals: to analyze the relationship between two verb-initial orders, VSO and VOS, and to compare several ways of deriving extended right periphery of a clause in a verb-initial language.
With respect to the first goal, this paper starts by examining the relationship between two verb-initial orders, VSO and VOS, in the Polynesian language Tongan, as shown below:
(1) Na’e kaukau’i ‘e he ta’ahine ‘a e kulī.
PST wash ERG DET girl ABS DET dog
‘The girl washed the dog.’
(2) Na’e kaukau’i ‘a e kulī ‘e he ta’ahine.
PST wash ABS DET dog ERG DET girl
‘The girl washed the dog.’
In comparing two possible derivations of VOS, the paper shows that the analysis of VOS as derived from VSO via A-scrambling (as proposed in Otsuka 2005) is untenable. Instead, it argues for an alternative analysis according to which Tongan VOS is a structure with a base-generated righthand topic. In principle such a derivation can be achieved by different mechanisms; the paper compares several analyses leading to the appearance of a righthand topic and demonstrates that the analysis in terms of distributed (scattered) deletion (Fanselow & Cavar 2001) is best in capturing the facts of Tongan.
On a theoretical level, this paper offers new arguments against rightward movement as possible operations in syntax, thus arguing for a more austere syntactic model (cf. Abels & Neeleman 2012). On a methodological level, this paper relies on the combination of segmental and prosodic evidence in support of a particular account and considers new ways of adducing prosodic facts in support of syntactic analyses.
Ruth Kramer: Switching Grammatical Gender in the Plural: Three Case Studies from Afroasiatic
Typically, a noun triggers the same grammatical gender agreement (has the same grammatical gender) whether it is singular or plural. However, in some languages, a plural noun can or must trigger agreement in a different gender than it does in the singular. I refer to this phenomenon as “grammatical gender switch” and it automatically raises certain questions. Is it an odd type of syncretism, where the agreement exponents of one gender are ‘re-used’ for the other? Or is it a syntactic effect, where a new gender feature is introduced in the syntax for certain nouns? And how can we tell the difference between these two types of analyses?
In this talk, I investigate these questions using three case studies from Afroasiatic languages. I argue that gender switch is a type of syncretism in Amharic and Sidaama, whereas gender switch is syntactic in Saudi Arabic. I develop detailed analyses of gender switch in each language, proposing diagnostics for distinguishing between morphological and syntactic gender switch. I also show how this array of facts conforms exactly to predictions made by a Distributed Morphology approach to syncretism – specifically, that any switch to a non-default gender must be syntactic. Overall, then, the talk supports a Distributed Morphology approach, explores how to distinguish syntactic and morphological phenomena, and contributes to the description and analysis of several understudied Afroasiatic languages.
Poster Session Presenters & Titles
Toby Hung (Georgetown): A cartographic analysis of the left periphery in Chaozhou, Cantonese, and Mandarin
Lindley Winchester (Georgetown): Definite Marker or Superlative Adjective: A Maltese case study
Akitaka Yamada (Georgetown): A phase-oriented pitch contour assignment
Bertille Baron (Georgetown): The nominal gender system in Senufo: A morphosyntactic account
Luke Adamson (UPenn): On Agreement and Coordination in Summatives: Lessons from Gender Switch
Lydia Felice (Georgetown): A morphosyntactic analysis of prepositions and case markers in Kabyle Berber
Lindley Winchester (Georgetown): Definite Marker or Superlative Adjective: A Maltese case study
Akitaka Yamada (Georgetown): A phase-oriented pitch contour assignment
Bertille Baron (Georgetown): The nominal gender system in Senufo: A morphosyntactic account
Luke Adamson (UPenn): On Agreement and Coordination in Summatives: Lessons from Gender Switch
Lydia Felice (Georgetown): A morphosyntactic analysis of prepositions and case markers in Kabyle Berber