Marcin Dadan “What do you think? What does move and how?’. Wh-scope marking in Hindi and Polish: partial movement, after all.”
This short talk addresses the wh– scope constructions and argues against the full movement approach proposed in Malhotra (2011) to account for the multiple occurrence of wh-scope marking constituent kyaa and the observed island effects in Hindi. I am going to show that the analysis of the wh-scope marking constructions in terms of partial movement sufficiently handles the empirical observations in both Hindi and Polish.
Gísli Harðarson “The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion”
Renato Lacerda “Structure-dependent quantifier floating in Brazilian Portuguese”
In this work I show how the possibilities and restrictions of quantifier floating in Brazilian Portuguese are dependent on the internal structure of each quantified expression. In order to account for the contrasts between the quantifiers todos ‘all’ and cada um ‘each one’, I propose that a focus feature is encoded by an additional (FP) layer in the traditional noun phrase (that must be checked against a FocusP), predicting different extractability patterns once the PIC and Anti-locality are considered.
Troy Messick “Some notes on ellipsis & MaxElide”
Exactly what it says on the tin.
Irina Monich “Tonal Processes in the Setswana Verb”
The talk focuses on processes related to the formation of H-tone domains in Setswana. Tonal rules such as H-tone spreading and H-tone deletion (Meeussen’s Rule) are sensitive to MWd- and PhWd-boundaries and can therefore be used as a diagnostic for morphosyntactic constituency in the Setswana verb. Building upon Creissels (1996, 1998), I propose to refine Creissels’ analysis in a way that permits getting rid of several stipulations. The revised analysis also makes it possible to demonstrate that the Setswana verb (in simple tenses) consists of two PhWds. In addition to these advantages, the new analysis makes the similarities between the tonal processes of Setswana and other Bantu languages, such as Chishona, even more apparent.
Jelena Runić “The Person-Case Constraint: A Morphological Consensus”
The existence of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC) in Slavic has remained controversial (YES in Czech for Medová 2009; Sturgeon et. al. 2010, i.a.;NO in Czech and Serbian/Croatian for Haspelmath 2004, Migdalski 2006, Hana2007, i.a.). In this talk, I provide a unified analysis accounting forboth presence and absence of the PCC in Slavic. Based on idiolectalvariations in the data, I argue for a morphological filter-based approachthat can account for these variations. Further, I extend the analysis to Romance.
Zheng Shen “Superlative”
An attempt to account for a focus internal relative reading of superlatives in Slavic languages which is absent in DP languages like English and German.
Peter Smith “Rescue by pronunciation: Putting the ‘endo’ into Udi endoclitics”
I propose that person marker (PM) clitics in Udi are not endoclitics in any deep sense, but rather their root internal position arises from surface readjustment. In the relevant cases, the original placement of the PM clitic within the verbal complex gives rise to a morphotactic violation. An appropriate morphological repair however is not available, so the violation is flagged and phonology left to repair the violation via metathesis. The proposed analysis casts doubt on the status of endoclisis as a true operation of UG.
Aida Talić “TBA”
This talk is about the syntax and the “A” in “TBA”.
Neda Todorović “Different Aspect(s) of VP-ellipsis”
In this paper I show that VP-ellipsis in Serbian is sensitive to aspect, because only certain aspectual mismatches between the antecedent and the elided VP allow for it. I argue that seemingly unsystematic discrepancies in the availability of VP-ellipsis in Serbian with aspectual mismatches follow straightforwardly under the phase-constrained approach to VP-ellipsis.
“Emma” Jing Yang “Mandarin Classifiers and the Continuity Hypothesis”
According to the Continuity Hypothesis, children have all the syntactic structures of their native language from the onset of syntactic development. Studies on classifiers (Cls) in Mandarin Chinese have reached different conclusions: Chang-Smith (2005) argues that children do not have the Cl projection at first, while Lee, Wong, and Wong (1996) suggest that they do. The present study will employ experimental methods to test whether Mandarin-speaking children (aged 2;06-4;00) master the syntax of classifiers before the semantic properties of classifiers; if so, Cl projections are present in child grammar from the beginning rather than acquired through inductive learning.
UConn Linguistics Graduate Roundtable 