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Weekly Digest, 2/17/23
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Lyu defends
Jun Lyu successfully defended his PhD dissertation, titled “Syntactic and non-syntactic factors in reflexive pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese” on Tuesday, February 14. Next academic year, he will be starting a position as a tenure-track assistant professor at Peking University. Congratulations, Dr. Lyu!
Inked ✍️
Roumyana Pancheva and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta. To appear. “No tense: Temporality in the grammar of Paraguayan Guarani”. Linguistics and Philosophy. Link to paper.
Zuzanna Fuchs as expert guest on AirTalk
Zuzanna Fuchs made an appearance as an expert guest on a segment of LAist’s radio show AirTalk. The segment was titled “What’s Behind Some Children Rejecting Their Ethnic Identities & Native Languages At An Early Age And Choosing To Relearn It As Adults?” You can listen to the segment at the bottom of the page here.
Upcoming Events
Guest talk by Gary Thoms
Gary Thoms (NYU) will be visiting this Tuesday, Feb. 21. He will give a talk titled “Preserving the locality of selection with layering derivations” at 3:30pm in CPA 206 (please note the different location!).
Abstract: In this talk I review a number of problems for the well-regarded idea that selection is strictly local, in particular concerning the selectional inertness of determiners (and their ilk), and the phenomenon of “inserted” prepositions. Solutions vary from radical reassessments of nominal and PP constituency (Kayne 2004, Sportiche 2005) to rejection of the empirical results of 30 years on nominal functional structure (Bruening 2009, Bruening et al 2018), and I argue that none solve the central problems in a way that’s sufficiently satisfying. Building on insights in the Kayne/Sportiche tradition, I develop an alternative in terms of external remerge/sideward movement, where the constituency of DPs and (some) PPs is derived by means of derivations where functional structure is added to nominals “on the side” as they move to a higher licensing position. Finally I consider the question of why selection is the way it is, bringing my proposal together with ideas in recent work by Diercks and Bossi (2021).
Departmental colloquia
There are three more colloquia this semester. Keep an eye on your email for details, but for now mark your calendars for the following dates:
Thursday, Feb. 23 at 3:30pm
Monday, Feb. 27 at 3:30pm
Thursday, Mar. 2 at 3:30pm
Department Events
PhonLunch: no meeting next week
Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Steven Foley on “When comprehenders do and don’t posit agents: Maze evidence from Georgian
Friday, Feb. 24 at 1:30pm @ S-Side Story: paper discussion, check email for details
MeaningLab: no meeting next week
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