Syntax & Semantics Circle

University of California, Santa Cruz

spring 2014

June 6

Filippa Lindahl: "Extraction from Object Relatives in Swedish: Multiple Specifiers of Relative C?"

Swedish exhibits long-distance dependencies in which an antecedent outside an RC is associated with a position inside the RC. If this phenomenon involves movement, it defies commonly assumed locality conditions like Subjacency (Chomsky 1973) and its modern counterpart, the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001). Some previous accounts (Kush 2011; Kush, Omaki, & Hornstein 2013; Platzack 1999, 2000) rely on the assumption that these dependencies cross only subject relatives. I present evidence that they cross object relatives as well, a fact noted by Engdahl (1997), Koch Christensen (1982), and others. I argue on the basis of strong crossover, connectivity effects, and the licensing of parasitic gaps that these dependencies are derived by A-bar movement, and that an approach involving silent resumptive pronouns in the spirit of Cinque (1990) is untenable for Swedish. From this I conclude that, if we are to maintain that A-bar movement proceeds successive cyclically through Spec,CP, relative C in Swedish must tolerate multiple specifiers.

May 16

Pete Alrenga: "At Least, At Most, and Speaker Ignorance"

Modified numerals of the form at least n and at most n often give rise to ignorance inferences: from an utterance of (1a) or (1b), a listener will typically infer that the speaker does not know exactly how many students passed.

(1) a. At least three students passed the exam.
b. At most three students passed the exam.

Interestingly, these inferences may disappear in certain embedded contexts: under their most salient readings, neither of the sentences in (2) need convey the speaker's ignorance regarding what is required or allowed.

(2) a. Your paper is required to be at least ten pages long.
b. You are allowed to submit at most three supporting documents with your application.

Following Büring (2008), much recent work takes these inferences to be pragmatic in nature, and seeks to account for their (non-)appearance within a general framework for implicature calculation. While the resulting analyses perform admirably well in predicting the distribution of ignorance inferences triggered by at least, they encounter serious difficulties when applied to at most. In my talk, I explore a new approach to the semantics and pragmatics of these numeral modifiers, one which preserves its predecessors' successes with at least, while simultaneously providing a fresh perspective on the problems posed by at most.

April 25

Nico Baier: "Long Distance Wh-movement in Seereer: Implications for Intermediate Movement"

In this paper, I examine novel data from long distance wh-dependencies in Seereer, a North Atlantic language of Senegal. In addition to providing striking evidence that long distance wh-movement proceeds successive cyclically through the edge of each clause, I argue that the Seereer data show that movement to all CP phase edges is motivated agreement with features on C, contra claims in the literature (e.g. Bošković 2007). Long distance wh-questions in Seereer are characterized by (a) the presence of an obligatory pronoun at the edge of each embedded clause and (b) the presence of special morphology on each verb along the path of the extraction. I show that this verbal morphology spells out a valued Op-probe on C, which triggers the movement of a wh-phrase to its Spec (McCloskey 2002). I argue that the embedded pronouns are overtly spelled out copies of the moved wh-phrase. Evidence for this analysis comes from island constraints, reconstruction effects, and quantifier float. I further argue that overt copies surface at the edge of the CP precisely because they enter into a feature valuation relationship. Specifically, I propose that valuation of an Op-probe defines a copy as the head of an A′-chain. Thus, the application of successive cyclic movement does not result in one long chain, but instead in a series of smaller chains. This principle, when combined with the independently motivated principle of spelling out the heads of chains (Nunes 2004), results in the spelling out of intermediate copies in Spec-CP in long distance movement chains, as those copies are involved in a feature checking relationship.

April 4
Jason Ostrove: "The Extended vP Domain in a Songhay Language"