Author Archives: Ray

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck at GLOW

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck will be present at the 36th GLOW colloquium on April 2-6, 2013 in Lund. He will give the following talk: 

  • Craenenbroeck, J. van & Koppen, M. van "Lexical items merged in functional heads: The grammaticalization path of ECM-verbs in Dutch dialects" GLOW workshop on Syntactic Variation and Change, April 2, 2013.

More information

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck at DGfS

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck will be present at the Theme Sessions of the 35th Annual Conference of the
German Linguistic Society in Potsdam. He will give the following talks:

  • Barros, Matt & Craenenbroeck, J. van "Tag questions and 'pseudo'-ellipsis", DGfS Theme Session on "Parenthesis and Ellipsis: Cross-Linguistic and Theoretical Perspectives", 13-15 March 2013.
  • Craenenbroeck, J. van & Koppen, M. van "Object movement feeds subject doubling: an anti-intervention effect in the Dutch dialects", DGfS Theme Session on "Interaction of Syntactic Primitives", 13-15 March 2013.

More information

CRISSP at TIN-dag

Several CRISSP members will be present at the TIN-dag and will give a talk there:

  • Marijke De Belder & Marjo van Koppen (Utrecht University)  (11:30-11:55, room 0.03)
    High fashion in the low countries: AN(N) compounds in Dutch.
  • Dany Jaspers  (11:30-11:55, room 1.01)
    More nonnatural concepts. 
  • Guido Vanden Wyngaerd (13:30-14:00, room 0.03)
    Do extension gaps exist? 
  • Marijke De Belder (14:00-14:30, room 1.02)
    Linking phonemes are class markers.
More information can be found at the TIN-dag website:

CRISSP Seminar: Sjef Barbiers

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

Lecturer: Sjef Barbiers (The Meertens Institute)

Title: Stranding and successive cyclic movement

Date & time: November 26 2012, 17.30-19.00

Location: CRISSP/Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Stormstraat 2 (Hermes building), room 4212

Participation: free

The Gajewski Lectures: Polarity and Truth Conditions

Jon Gajewski will give a CRISSP Lecture Series from December 19 to December 21. The title and the abstract for the lectures are now available: “Polarity and Truth Conditions.”

More information on the time, date, venue and registration can be found in the events section.

Abstract

These talks will concern how the distribution of negative polarity items is affected by truth-conditional and non-truth conditional meaning. Von Fintel has influentially argued that one kind of non-truth conditional meaning, presupposition, must be factored out of the licensing conditions on polarity items. Chierchia, on the other hand, has shown that another kind of non-truth-conditional meaning, implicatures, can interfere in NPI-licensing. I will argue that both are correct, but that there are important additional generalizations to be made about when and where non-truth-conditional meaning matters for determining the acceptability of a polarity item.

Evidence for this view will come primarily from examination of the distinction between weak and strong NPIs. Weak NPIs are those like English ever that have been argued to appear in downward entailing environments, cf. Ladusaw’s work. Strong NPIs appear in a proper subset of the environments that weak NPIs appear in. Zwarts influentially proposed that the distribution of strong NPIs can be captured with the formal property of anti-additivity. I have argued for a different view that takes the different roles of non-/truth-conditional meaning into account. In this talk, I will argue that strong NPIs show greater sensitivity to non-truth-conditional meaning than weak NPIs.

One issue that will have to be clarified is what aspects of the environment of a polarity item are relevant to determining the acceptability of a polarity item. For example, one must decide if there is an operator that can be identified as the constituent whose semantic properties license the occurrence of a polarity operator or if the presence of a polarity item is sanctioned by the total semantic properties of a constituent that contains it (roughly licenser- vs. environment-based approaches). I will argue for a hybrid of the two approaches whereby both properties of the licenser and material between the licenser and polarity items must be considered.  Having investigated the separate roles of truth-conditional meaning and non-truth-conditional meaning in licensing, I argue that the licenser must be treated differently from other material within the environment of licensing.

Pursuing this account will lead us into discussion of problematic cases. The first problem case is definite descriptions.  Negative polarity items can in limited cases occur in definite descriptions. The new approach to NPIs that I advocate requires re-examining the distribution of NPIs in definites. The second class of problem cases involves complex quantificational expressions I predict to license strong NPIs but do not. I will argue that these are not true counterexamples on the grounds that these operators do not create licensing environments when viewed from a suitably spare perspective on logical form. In this regard, I will discuss previous work on unacceptability that derives from trivial truth conditions.

 

BCGL7: Second call for papers

CRISSP is proud to present the seventh installment of the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL7). The theme of this year’s conference is “The Morphology-Syntax Interface”. BCGL7 will take place from December 17 to December 18, 2012.

Invited speakers

We are pleased to announce that the following invited speakers have agreed to give a talk at BCGL7:

  • Ad Neeleman (UCL)
  • Tarald Taraldsen (CASTL)
  • Matt Tucker (UCSC)

Important dates

Abstract submission deadline: November 1, 2012
Notification of acceptance: November 15, 2012
Conference: December 17-18, 2012

The call for papers and other information is available on https://www.crissp.be/bcgl7