The Department of Linguistics Fifteenth Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture

Caroline Heycock (Professor of Syntax, The University of Edinburgh)

"The Unbearable Lightness of be: Some of the strange and illuminating things that happen when we use nouns as predicates"

Monday, April 25 | 3:00 pm | See your email for Zoom link (or request here)

Abstract: Some of the strange and illuminating things that happen when we use nouns as predicates”The typical configuration that we expect for a clause is that it consists of a subject and a predicate, and the typical predicate is built around a verb. There is a whole range of “copular” clauses, however, where the predicate is built around a noun. These cases raise many challenging questions for linguists: some obvious, others less so. In this talk I’ll discuss some of the questions that these nominal copular clauses pose in particular for our understanding of syntax: how larger meaningful units are built out of words, and what constraints are placed on the processes of combination. These questions include whether there is a structural difference between noun phrases that can function as predicates and those that cannot; whether expressions of identity/equation in natural language are in fact symmetrical; and how far we have to go in deconstructing the concept of “subject” if we are to make sense of anything like the full range of syntactic and morphological properties that we find in copular clauses in even closely related languages.

GSAS Indo-European and Historical Linguistics Workshop

Oisín Ó Muirthile (Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University)

"A leopard "Cant" change its spots: On the dating and development of Irish Travellers' Gammon-Cant (Shelta) and its relationship to other Gaelic-based argots"

Friday, April 29 | 5:00-6:30 pm | Boylston 335