Category Archives: CRISSP Seminars

CRISSP Seminar with Daniel Harbour

CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Seminar with Daniel Harbour on Monday May 11, 2015.

Title: The logical resources of person features

Abstract

Traditionally, person features have been taken to denote predicates, with the minus value denoting logical negation. However, traditional features overgenerate person systems and must be constrained by ultimately nonexplanatory means (such as cooccurrence restrictions). This talk demonstrates that the need for ad hoc constraints vanishes if different logical resources are assumed. Specifically, person features denote power sets and feature values denote complementary operations by which sets act on one another. In tandem with this reconfiguration of the theory, I argue for a reenvisioning of the data pertinent to person theories, relegating syncretisms to secondary status and affording central position to partitions (superpositions of syncretisms) and treating person and spatial data on a par. Relative to these changes in data, the proposed theory generates all and only the required systems whilst deriving significant facts about their internal properties. These results suggest that the logical resources of feature theories in general are ripe for reconsideration.

Click here for more information about the seminar

Two new CRISSP Seminars

We are happy two new installments in the CRISSP Seminar series:

Theo Janssen (UvA): December 2, 2014 – The principle of compositionality of meaning
David Adger (QMUL): December 9, 2014 – Extending extended projections: specifiers and generalised auxiliaries.

CRISSP Seminar: Jóhanna Barðdal on October 13

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

Lecturer: Jóhanna Barðdal (Ghent University)

Title: How to Identify Cognates in Syntax: Taking Watkins’ Legacy One Step Further

Date & time: Monday October 13, 2014, 17.00-18.30

Location: CRISSP/KULeuven HUBrussel, Stormstraat 2 (Hermes building), room 3101

Participation: free

Abstract:

As a reaction to three different proposals on how to reconstruct basic word order for Proto-Indo-European, Watkins and his contemporaries in the Seventies succeeded in aborting any attempt at reconstructing syntax for a long time to come. As a consequence, syntactic reconstruction has generally been regarded as a stranded enterprise by historical linguists for several different reasons, one of which is the alleged difficulty in identifying cognates in syntax. Later, Watkins (1995) proposed a research program aiming at reconstructing larger units of grammar, including syntactic structures, by means of identifying morphological flags that are parts of larger syntactic entities. As a response to this, we show how cognate argument structure constructions may be identified, through a) cognate lexical verbs, b) cognate case frames, c) cognate predicate structure and d) cognate case morphology. We then propose to advance Watkins’ program, by identifying cognate argument structure constructions with the aid of noncognate, but synonymous, lexical predicates. As a consequence, it will not only be possible to identify cognate argument structure constructions across a deeper time span, but also to carry out semantic reconstruction on the basis of lexical-semantic verb classes.