Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
Spring 2018
November 16
Steven Foley (UC Santa Cruz): “Economy, Minimal Compliance, and cross-derivational competition in Georgian agreement”
Some languages display 'agreement displacement' (Béjar & Rezac 2009): the phenomenon in which features from multiple arguments compete for realization in a single morphological slot. A prototypical example comes from Georgian. In this language, systematic blocking relationships obtain between subject and object proclitics, ensuring that only one clitic appears on a verb. I advance an analysis of the Georgian facts rooted in cross-derivational competition. The Principle of Minimal Compliance (Richards 1998) admits derivations that only involve subject cliticization, or only object cliticization. Independently motivated post-syntactic constraints filter out the derivations with sub-optimal morphological properties (Foley 2017). This approach is more economical than an alternative in which both arguments cliticize, and one is deleted post-syntactically (Halle & Marantz 1993), and it is empirically superior to an analysis which derives Georgian agreement displacement from purely syntactic mechanisms (Béjar & Rezac 2009).
November 11
Jed Pizarro-Guevara (UC Santa Cruz)
Much ink has been spilled on the restriction on extraction in Austronesian languages. In Tagalog, this restriction is said to be symmetric: only arguments cross-referenced by voice morphology are eligible to undergo A'-movement (Schachter, 1977; Rackowski & Richards, 2005; Aldridge, 2012, 2017). That is, when the verb exhibits agent voice (AV), only agent-extraction is licit; and when the verb exhibits patient voice (PV), only patient-extraction is licit. Recently, others have argued that this restriction is in fact asymmetric (Ceña & Nolasco, 2011, 2012; Tanaka, 2016; Hsieh, 2018). Some speakers in some types of dependencies allow agent-extractions under PV.
In this talk, I hope to do the following: (i) provide some naturally occurring examples of this asymmetry; (ii) present experimental evidence consistent with an asymmetric view, and computational evidence consistent with a split-grammar hypothesis; (iii) outline modifications to existing accounts to account for the grammars of those who allow agent-extractions under PV; and (iv) describe in-progress follow-up acceptability judgment studies looking at the extraction restriction in other voices.
October 26
Pranav Anand and Maziar Toosarvandani (UC Santa Cruz): “Now and then: Perspectives on positional variance in temporal demonstratives”
As long recognized, now need not be indexical to the utterance time (Kamp and Rohrer 1983):
(1) An education at Oxford appealed to a new class of rich and well-to-do men[...]The Colleges were now therefore able to charge fees.
Consequently, most contemporary approaches have treated now as simply anaphoric (Kamp and Reyle 1993, Smith 2006, Altshuler 2016) or as discourse relational (Hunter 2012, cf. Asher & Lascarides 2003 on then). Comparing now to then, we resuscitate an indexical theory of these adverbs as proximal and distal temporal demonstratives, sensitive crucially to an assessment context (Doron 1991, MacFarlane 2003, Sharvit 2008, a.o.). We show that this semantics, coupled with a labile mapping between utterance and assessment contexts, can derive a range of perspectival restrictions on the interpretations of now and then.