The program for the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics is now available. BCGL7 will take place from December 17 to December 18 and will deal with The Morphology-Syntax Interface.
Category Archives: News
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
CRISSP Lecture Series: Jon Gajewski
CRISSP is happy to announce a three-day lecture series by Jon Gajewski.
Lecturer: Jon Gajewski (University of Connecticut)
Title: TBA
Date & time: 19, 20, 21 December 2012, 10.00-13.00
Location: CRISSP/Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Stormstraat 2, room TBA
Participation: free
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:
- What is the internal syntax of idioms, i.e. what characterizes their internal organization and makeup?
- 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: