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Week of April 4

Linguistics Circle Workshop (Virtual meeting)

Asia Pietraszko (University of Rochester)

Title: "Syntactic structure building: lessons from periphrasis"

Abstract: Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat auxiliary verbs (be/have) as lexical items that enter syntactic derivation like any other lexical item, i.e. via the operation Merge. An alternative view that has received much attention in recent years is that auxiliary verbs are not base-generated but rather Inserted in a previously built structure (i.a. Bach 1967; Embick 2000; Arregi 2000; Cowper 2010; Bjorkman 2011; Arregi and Klecha 2015). Evidence for the Insertion approach to periphrasis constitutes an argument for a separate structure-building operation, Insertion. I argue in this talk that a theory with just one structure-building operation, Merge, can be maintained. A distinct operation is not necessary to account for the last-resort nature of periphrasis that motivated the Insertion approach. The proposed Cyclic Selection account (Pietraszko 2017, 2020) is shown to be both empirically adequate and well-grounded in current syntactic theory: the merge of auxiliary verbs is the Merge-counterpart of cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac 2009) and the external-Merge-counterpart of long head movement (i.a. Koopman 1984, Lema and Rivero 1990, Vicente 2007).

Friday, April 8 | 12:00-1:30 pm | Check your email for Zoom link

 

Welcome Yasuyuki Kitao

Please join me in welcoming Professor Yasuyuki Kitao, a Visiting Scholar from the Department of English Studies, Aichi University, Japan.  Welcome!

 

Singerman to Syracuse

Lecturer Adam Singerman has accepted a tenure-track position at Syracuse University!  Congratulations, Adam!

 

Martin to Spotify

Josh Martin (PhD, class of 2022) has accepted a job as User Research Analyst with Spotify!  Congratulations, Josh!

 

Zhang Merit Fellowship

Yuhan Zhang has been awarded a BSAS Merit and Term-Time Research Fellowship for next year.  Congratulations, Yuhan!

 

Recent Conferences

Harvard linguistics people presented at the following conferences.

PLC 46

The 46th annual Penn Linguistics Conference, held virtually on March 18-20, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics.

  • Dasha Bikina: "How abstract in the abstract noun? Gender agreement in Russian restrictive relative clauses"
  • Ankana Saha: "Free choice and epistemicity in Bangla: A test for exhaustification based approaches"

HSP2022

The 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP2022), held virtually on March 24-26, hosted by UC Santa Cruz

  • Shannon Bryant: "Expectation as a predictor of pronoun acceptability in English prepositional phrases" (Poster)
  • Kathryn Davidsion: "Constructed depictions vs. eliminating possibilities: A framework for parallel sources of sentence meaning" (Plenary presentation)
  • Giuseppe Riccardi and Edward Gibson (MIT): "Non-canonical dative word orders license new information in the final NP," (Poster)
  • Moshe Poliak (College ' 22;  Psychology concentrator), Anthony Yacovone (G5 in Psychology) and Jesse Snedeker: "Between you and me: Use ERP decoding when between-participants variation is high" (Poster).
  • Margaret Kandel (G4 in Psychology), Anthony Yacovone (G5 in Psychology), Mieke Slim (Ghent University), and Jesse Snedeker: "Webcams as windows to the mind: comparing web-based eye-tracking methods" (poster)
  • Thomas C. Clark (MIT), Ethan Wilcox, and Roger P. Levy (MIT): "Evidence for an Availability-Based Production Account of the Russian Comparative Alternation via Corpus Analysis." (Plenary presentation)
  • Ethan Wilcox, Roger Levy (MIT), Kathryn Davidson: "How anaphoric are presupposition triggers? Evidence from cataphora" (Poster)  
  • Ethan Wilcox and Roger Levy (MIT): "Presupposition of Regulation Verbs" (Poster)