Review of “On Realizing External Arguments: A syntactic and implicature theory of the disjointness effect for passives in adult and child grammar” by Loes Koring, Eric Reuland, Nina Sangers and Ken Wexler. (to appear, Linguistic Inquiry)
(https://direct.mit.edu/ling/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/ling_a_00520/117701/On-Realizing-External-Arguments-A-Syntactic-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
Continuing with the tradition I started last summer, I post my summer reading for 2023. These books cover roughly the time period between June 1, 2023, and August 31, 2023. If anybody wants to discuss these books with me, let me know.
This is the first of a series of blog posts showing how I think about a syntax problem when I first notice it. I will occasionally choose phenomena that I notice, and talk about them in an informal fashion, breaking down the process of preliminary syntactic exploration. That is, I am just thinking off the top of my head (brainstorming), with few or no revisions. The focus of the discussion will be on process. I am not trying to come up with a polished analysis. Of course, if people suggest references for me to look at, I will look at them later, but that would be a second stage of thought, not the preliminary exploration.
During June and July of 2023, we (Olivia and I) did fieldwork on Cua, an endangered central Khoisan language spoken in southeastern Botswana. We did the fieldwork in Gaborone (one week) and Diphuduhudu (one month). The goals were to finish a rough draft of the grammatical sketch, bring the number of lexical entries up to at least 1,000, and to continue working on oral texts. We were successful in these goals.
Morphology as Syntax 3
Short Title: MaS3
Date: 15-Sep-2023 - 16-Sep-2023
Location: Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Contact: Tom Leu
Contact Email: leu.thomas@uqam.ca
Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories
Meeting Description:
The purpose of this workshop is to investigate the relationship between morphology and syntax, and in particular to investigate the extent to which morphological generalizations can be accounted for in terms of purely syntactic operations and conditions. Can morphology and syntax be unified under purely Merge based theories with the same principles? If so, what does this tell us about the type of syntactic theory we should pursue?
Invited speakers (in alphabetical order):
Léna Baunaz (University of Geneva)
Vicki Carstens (University of Connecticut)
James Crippen (McGill University)
Peter Kondwandi Msaka (University of Malawi)
Neil Myler (Boston University)
Sandhya Sundaresan (SUNY Stony Brook)
Peter Svenonius (University of Tromsø)
Here is a series of five papers I have written recently concerning negation, quantifiers and negating quantifiers. They are all syntax/semantics interface papers, with a substantial semantic component. The constant theme throughout is the application of the basic framework of Collins and Postal 2014 to various phenomena.
Losing sight of the forest through the trees:
Remarks on constituent structure and constituent structure tests
Pauline Jacobson
Program in Linguistics
Brown University
This is a guest blog which I was invited to write by Chris Collins. I am very grateful to Chris for the opportunity to write up and post these thoughts. Needless to say, he doesn't necessarily agree with or endorse anything in these remarks.
