Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
Spring 2019
May 30
Jack Duff (UC Santa Cruz)
Work in progress on subject agreement, focus, and Wh-movement in the Nakh-Dagestanian language Udi, spoken in Azerbaijan and Georgia.
May 9
Tom Roberts (UC Santa Cruz): “I can't believe it's not lexical: Deriving distributed factivity”
The verb believe poses a puzzle for strictly local theories of selection: while it ordinarily only permits declarative clausal complements, interrogative complements are allowed under can't. To make matters even more interesting, can't believe also has a factive interpretation, whereas believe on its own does not:
(1) a. I (can't) believe that Elaine won the election.
b. I *(can't) believe which candidate won the election.
Although believe is standardly given a Hintikkan proposition-embedding semantics, I argue that such an analysis is incompatible with the facts of can't believe and similar constructions cross-linguistically. Instead, I propose, following Theiler, Aloni & Roelofsen (2018), that believe is fundamentally question-embedding, but yields systematically trivial meanings with interrogative complements under most circumstances. But when believe occurs under can't, this triviality is obviated, and factivity arises, from a conspiratorial interaction between the excluded middle presupposition of the verb (Bartsch 1973, Gajewski 2007), and the semantics of negation and modality. I conclude that factivity need not be purely lexical: the right mix of semantic ingredients can yield a factive interpretation, even if those ingredients are distributed across multiple lexical items.
May 2
Ben Eischens (UC Santa Cruz): “Tonal negation and negative elements in San Martín Peras Mixtec”
In this talk, I outline the varied surface forms and hosts of the negative morpheme in San Martín Peras Mixtec, arguing that a single (but still mysterious) morphological process underlies them all, and I examine the ways in which negative dependencies are licensed in the language.