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.