Author Archives: Ray

BCGL 9: First Call for Papers

CRISSP is proud to present the ninth instalment of the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL), devoted to Phase Theory.

BCGL 9: Phase Theory
Brussels, December 13-14, 2016.

Invited speakers

Workshop description

Throughout the history of generative grammar, there have been various ways of implementing locality effects, for example through Transformational Cycles (Chomsky 1965; Kayne 1969) or Barriers (Chomsky 1986). Phase Theory (Uriagereka 1999; Chomsky 2000, 2001) constitutes the most recent development in this line of thinking. It is often argued that there exist discrete structural domains in natural language that exhibit a degree of syntactic, semantic, and phonological independence from their surrounding linguistic environment. Phase Theory offers a tool for understanding such domains. However, since the inception of phases, there have been many different proposals about the specific formalization of this concept, along with much debate about the extent to which phases can be evidenced empirically (and indeed whether phases exist at all). The aim of this workshop is to discuss the empirical validity and theoretical specifics of Phase Theory.
The submission deadline for abstracts is September 1, 2016.

> Read the complete Call for Papers

CRISSP 10

BCGL 9 will be followed by CRISSP 10, a one-day workshop celebrating the 10th anniversary of the research institute CRISSP featuring invited presentations by Luigi Rizzi, Alec Marantz, and Angelika Kratzer, among others.

Guido Vanden Wyngaerd at WCCFL 34

Guido Vanden Wyngaerd and Karen De Clercq (UGent) will present a poster at The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 34, organised at the University of Utah from April 29-May 1, 2016. The title of their poster is “A Constraint on Double Negation”.

 

New talks for Jeroen van Craenenbroeck

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck will give three talks in Amsterdam, Göttingen and Cambridge:

  1. Handle your verb clusters with care. Dealing with bad data in linguistic theory. Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 17-19 March 2016. (invited)
  2. A microparameter in a nanoparametric world. With Marjo van Koppen. GLOW 39. Göttingen, Germany, 5-8 April 2016. (poster)
  3. A microparameter in a nanoparametric world. With Marjo van Koppen. CamCos 5. Cambridge, UK, 5-7 May, 2016.

KrowFest on 1 April

CRISSP (KU Leuven) is proud to present the workshop KrowFest, celebrating Koen Roelandt’s defense.

KrowFest
Friday April 1, 2016
KU Leuven Brussels Campus
Room 6306 (Building Hermes 3)

Invited speakers
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Chris Barker (New York University)
Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University)

> Read the complete program

CRISSP Seminar with Željko Bošković

CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:

Lecturer: Željko Bošković (University of Connecticut)

Title: On the locality of movement: Be careful when you label

Date & time: Friday 6 November 2015, 17h30

Location: CRISSP/KULeuven Brussels Campus, room 2212

Participation: free

Abstract:

The talk will provide a uniform account of a number of locality effects, in particular, the ban on movement out of moved elements, the CED effect (the Adjunct Condition and the Subject Condition), Richards’s (2001) tucking in effect, and the full Comp-trace paradigm, including (in addition to the basic cases) relative and extraposed clauses, the impossibility of short-subject topicalization, French que-qui alternation, and the effect of wh-movement on agreement in languages like Kinande.

The Barker Lectures: Continuations and Natural Language

CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Lecture Series with Chris Barker on October 14-16, 2015. The title of the Lecture Series is ‘Continuations and Natural Language’.

Abstract

Scope-taking is a hallmark of natural language: not only is it widespread in the world’s languages, it is pervasive within individual languages. It is so familiar to us linguists that it is sometimes hard to appreciate just how astonishing it is for an expression to take material that surrounds it as its semantic argument. For instance, in “Ann gave everyone cookies”, the semantic argument of the quantificational DP “everyone” is the property constructed by abstracting over the direct object position, i.e., “\x.Ann gave x cookies”. Clearly, a deep and complete understanding of scope-taking is of foundational importance. Building on joint work with Chung-chieh Shan, I will bring to bear insights and techniques from the theory of programming languages, in particular, the concept of a CONTINUATION. One potential advantage of continuations over other approaches is that continuations allow fine-grained control over the order of evaluation. This allows a new account of sensitivity to linear order in weak crossover, reconstruction, negative polarity licensing, and dynamic anaphora. I will go on to explain how continuations allow understanding the traditional method of Quantifier Raising not as an ad-hoc heuristic for constructing so-called “logical forms”, but as a bone fide logical inference rule in the context of a substructural logic. This will lead to an account of parasitic scope and recursive scope, as in adjectives such as “same” and “different”, as well as of sluicing as a kind of anaphora, including accounts of sprouting examples (“Ann left, but I don’t know when”) and Andrews Amalgams (“Ann ate I don’t know what yesterday”).

More information