CRISSP Seminar: David Adger

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

Lecturer: David Adger (QMUL)

Title: Extending extended projections: specifiers and generalised auxiliaries.

Date & time: Tuesday December 9, 2014, 17.30-19.00

Location: CRISSP/KULeuven Brussels Campus, room 4218

Participation: free

Abstract

This talk presents some work in progress, extending the system developed in Adger 2013. Specifically, it examines how this system can solve some long standing issues in the syntax of auxiliary constructions, as well as some new challenges raised by recent work (esp Bjorkman 2013). The idea is that non-finite VPs (and AuxPs) are in the specifiers of their apparent selectors, and their morphological form is a signal of their specifierhood, where specifiers are topped off by unvalued versions of the head they Merge to (which, in English, is the participial morphology). This proposal allows a unified view of auxiliaries, which in English all raise (cf Harwood 2014), and it opens up the way of explaining Bjorkman’s overflow pattern via conditions on how much morphological material a language allows a span of functional categories to spell out. I then tentatively extend this system to DP specifier licensing, taking K to be an underspecified category that is valued by the head it Merges to.