Weekly digest — 02/09/2021

Check out some of the department updates below!

SCAMS II at USC, 02/06/2021

USC hosted the second meeting of the Southern California Annual Meeting in Syntax (a.k.a. SCAMS). The meeting, organized by a group of grad students, was hosted virtually on Zoom this past Saturday. The workshop opened at 9am PST so attendees could mingle and catch up and continued until 5.30pm (of course there were breaks in between). There were three main blocks of presentations:

1. Movement and Construction

2. Featural Systems of The World’s Languages

3. Form and Interpretation

Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee opened the workshop with an introductory speech and he was also the first speaker of the morning. Tommy gave a talk entitled Licensing VP movement and ellipsis in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Colin Davis gave also a talk in the first block. His talk was entitled The ban on fronting English possessive pronouns and its consequences for their morphosyntactic structure.

Daniel Plesniak presented part of his dissertation research on a talk entitled Binding Demonstrative Phrases.

Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez gave the last talk of the afternoon. The title of the talk was A seeming violation of the Monotonicity Constraint: evidence from Spanish verbal comparative.

We would like to thank everyone involved in the organization, the presenters and the attendees!

*Full disclosure: since the name SCAMS is a bit misleading, it was agreed that the next host would have the power to change the name of the workshop. Stay tuned for ideas or if you have them, get in touch with the organizers.

Roumi Pancheva at University of Frankfurt, 02/04/2021

Roumi Pancheva gave an invited talk at the Semantics Colloquium at the Department of Linguistics, University of Frankfurt, on February 4, 2021, on the topic of ”Temporal reference without tense” (joint work with Maria Luisa Zubizarreta).

Paper accepted at Linguistic Variation

Luis Miguel Toquero Pérez‘s paper Revisiting extraction and subextraction patterns from arguments has been recently accepted at Linguistic Variation. Check the final version of the manuscript on lingbuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005183

This week at USC…

• Syntax +, Wednesday 02/10 at 12pm PST, Muyi Yang (UConn) is giving an invited talk entitled Revisiting wh-questions in Sinhala.

No other lab meetings this week

Tea Time keeps on tea timing!

Tea time is still happening!

When? Thursday 02/11 3.30-4.40pm PST

Where? the zoom tea room (ask Deniz Rudin for the link)