Harvard Society of Fellows Application (September 2 1992)

Application (September 2 1992)

At the end of graduate school, I applied for Harvard’s Society of Fellows. It was basically a three-year period where one could do any research one wanted, and interact with all kinds of very smart people. I knew Chomsky had been a fellow nearly forty years earlier, and that this fellowship allowed him the intellectual room to write his master piece the Language Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT, of which his dissertation is a chapter). I would have loved following in his footsteps. My application was all about economy of derivation and trying to develop it in various ways. I applied for the position, and told Morris Halle, who said to me something like: “No, you will never get it.” I was hurt by that comment, but he was just being realistic. I did not get the fellowship. 

Several MIT linguistics students subsequently went on to get the fellowship.

Two Abstracts for ACAL55 on Kalahari Khoe

Here are two related abstracts that I submitted for ACAL55 with co-authors. ACAL stands for Annual Conference on African Linguistics.

They both concern the classification of Khoe-Kwadi languages (Central Khoisan). The first deals specifically with Tshila, which has not been very well classified before. The second deals with the structure of the Kalahari Khoe subgroup of Khoe-Kwadi, arguing that it should be divided into northern and southern Kalahari Khoe. The methodology of the second paper is based on the Bantu linguistics paper by Marten, Kula and Thwala 2007. 

As of the posting date (November 6, 2023), neither abstract has been either accepted or rejected.

Batchelder-Schwab, Andre and Chris Collins. 2023. Classification of Tshila. 

Abstract submitted to ACAL55. Abstract.

Collins, Chris and Anne-Maria Fehn. 2023. Parameters of Morphosyntactic Variation in Kalahari Khoe.

Abstract submitted to ACAL55. Abstract.

On implicit arguments and logophoricity (NELS abstract, Angelopoulos and Collins 2023)

This abstract was accepted as a poster at NELS 54 (2024). Empirically, it documents differences between exempt anaphora in Greek and English. It accounts for those differences by postulating a deep connection between logophoricity and implicit arguments in the sense of Collins 2023 (forthcoming, MIT Press). 

If you are unable to download the abstract, let me know.

Abstract: On implicit arguments and logophoricity

Possible Seminar Topics 2024-2025

The following is a list of possible seminar topics for 2024-2-25. That is, each item below represents a different seminar topic. I need to choose one of them.

1.

Quotative Inversion

We will begin the semester reviewing the literature on quotative inversion written in the wake of Collins and Branigan (1997). We will try to systematically enumerate all known syntactic properties of quotative inversion in English. We will then develop a more modern account based on remnant movement and smuggling. Connections to related phenomena, such as locative inversion and subject-object inversion in Bantu, will be explored. Students will be encouraged to look at quotative inversion cross-linguistically for course papers and presentations.

2.

Merge, MERGE and Workspaces.

Recent work on the foundations of minimalism, by Chomsky and others, has focused on the role of the workspace in syntactic derivations. In this seminar, we will review work on workspaces, starting with Collins and Stabler 2016. We will evaluate Chomsky’s arguments for MERGE over Merge. Emphasis will be on developing empirical predictions of the various theoretical formulations. Depending on the interest of the students, other possible topics may include labelling and copies versus repetitions.

3.

Morphology as Syntax: Spelling out Syntactic Structure

In this seminar, we will review various proposals in the morphology literature for spelling out syntactic structure, including proposals based on spans, DM (Vocabulary Insertion), Nanosyntax and MaS (Collins and Kayne 2023). We will discuss the theoretical foundations of each of these approaches. Then we will present various case studies from the literature, and compare them.

4.

Topics in Argument Structure

The purpose of this seminar will be to investigate a small range of topics (e.g., adjectival passives, unaccusatives) from the perspective the Merge-based approach to argument structure developed in Collins 2023 (see also Collins 2005). In the first two weeks, we will review the main results of Collins 2023, and then quickly branch off into unknown territory. The topics investigated will be decided jointly by the participants in the seminar.

Reply by Kenneth Wexler ("On Realizing External Arguments")

The following post is a reply by Prof. Kenneth Wexler to Chris Collins' blog post reviewing Koring et. al. ("On Realizing External Arguments", Linguistic Inquiry, forthcoming).

The article is found here:

Koring et. al. ("On Realizing External Arguments")

The review is found here:

Review of Koring et. al. (forthcoming)

Review of "On Realizing External Arguments" by Koring et. al. (to appear, Linguistic Inquiry)

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)

Summer Reading 2023

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.