Author Archives: Ray

CRISSP Seminar: Bart Geurts

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

Lecturer: Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen)

Title: “Embedded implicatures”: the state of the art

Date & time: November 7 2012, 17.00-18.30

Location: CRISSP/Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Stormstraat 2 (Hermes building), room 3207

Participation: free

“Embedded implicatures”: the state of the art

For about a decade, the interpretation of scalar expressions under embedding has been a much debated issue, with proposed accounts ranging from strictly pragmatic, on one end of the spectrum, to lexico-syntactic, on the other. Since researchers’ introspective judgments tend to agree with the theories they advocate, a number of experimental studies have recently tried to shed light on the issue. In my talk, I will review these experiments, and argue that the extant data favour a pragmatic account.

BCGL7: The Morphology-Syntax Interface

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

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck at CASTL conference

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck is an invited guest at Decennium: The First Ten Years of CASTL. The conference will be held on September 12-14 in Tromsø, Norway.

Conference description

CASTL, The Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics is celebrating its tenth year, and preparing for its future as an integral part of an expanded Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Tromsø. At this juncture, CASTL will host a major international conference highlighting its contributions at the forefront of linguistic research, to be held on September 12-14, 2012. Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT has agreed to hold a plenary lecture.

New postdoc: Tanja Temmerman

Tanja Temmerman has joined CRISSP as a post-doctoral researcher. She will be working on ‘The Syntax of Idioms’, a collaborative NWO-FWO project with Utrecht University (Prof. dr. Norbert Corver).

The Syntax of Idioms

Every language contains idiomatic expressions. In spite of their widespread occurrence, their linguistic properties have so far not been deeply and systematically investigated. The aim of this project is to increase our understanding of “the language of idioms” by focusing on their behavior in syntax. Therefore, the main research question is: What is the syntax of idioms?

This question can be naturally divided into two sub-questions, which correspond to two sub-projects:

  1. What is the internal syntax of idioms, i.e. what characterizes their internal organization and makeup?
  2. what is the external syntax of idioms, i.e. how does material contained within the idiom interact with material that is not part of the idiom?

Subproject 1 aims to show that idioms, in spite of their superficially “special” appearance, are built up by the very same syntactic and morphological structure building mechanisms that are responsible for non-idiomatic expressions. Subproject 2 aims to show that idiomatic expressions are essentially opaque domains, but that dependencies with idiom-external material is possible under certain narrowly defined circumstances.

The empirical basis for our investigation into the syntax of idioms will consist of idioms from non-standard varieties of Dutch. On the basis of dialect grammars and dictionaries, and also on the basis of additional field work, an electronic database will be developed which will serve as a tool for our systematic investigation into the syntax of idioms.

Guido Vanden Wyngaerd at SLE

Guido Vanden Wyngaerd was at the 45th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in Stockholm. He gave at talk entitled ‘The Boundedness Distinction in Adjectives’.

Johan Rooryck (LUCL) also presented his joint work with Guido at the workshop Reference and Antecedence: How far does the grammar reach? The title of this talk was ‘Binding theory from first principles’.

The handouts for both presentations are available for download:

 

Marijke De Belder at the Morphology Meeting 2012

Marijke De Belder will give a talk at the Morphology Meeting 2012, organized by LUCL and Meertens Institute (Amsterdam):

  • Marijke de Belder, Bettina van den Broek, Marjo van Koppen, Nina Wiedenhoff (UUtrecht)
  • Title: [[A N] N] compounds and [[Num N]N] Compounds
  • Date: Saturday, September 8, 9.00-17.00 hours
  • Location: Lipsiusgebouw, Cleveringaplaats 1, 2311 BD Leiden; Rooms 147 and 148
  • Full programme.

New postdoc: Marijke De Belder

CRISSP is happy to welcome back Marijke De Belder. She will work as a post-doctoral researcher on a project titled “Ambiguous words. Mismatches between syntax and the lexicon.”

Tanja Temmerman’s PhD defence

On 28 June 2012, Tanja Temmerman will defend her PhD.

Title: Multidominance, ellipsis, and quantifier scope
Date: Thursday 28 June 2012 at 11:15
Place: Academiegebouw, Rapenburg 73, Leiden
Promotores: Prof. dr. Johan Rooryck (LUCL Leiden) and Prof. dr. Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (CRISSP HUB)

 


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