Sabine Iatridou will give a lecture series on tense and aspect on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Also on Friday, Jan-Wouter Zwart will give a seminar entitled ‘Periphrastic morphology, verb clusters, and verb movement’.
> The Iatridou Lectures: Fancy Games with Tense and Aspect
> CRISSP Seminar with Jan-Wouter Zwart: Periphrastic morphology, verb clusters, and verb movement
CRISSP is proud to present the ninth instalment of the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL), devoted to Phase Theory.
BCGL 9: Phase Theory
Brussels, December 13-14, 2016.
Invited speakers
Workshop description
Throughout the history of generative grammar, there have been various ways of implementing locality effects, for example through Transformational Cycles (Chomsky 1965; Kayne 1969) or Barriers (Chomsky 1986). Phase Theory (Uriagereka 1999; Chomsky 2000, 2001) constitutes the most recent development in this line of thinking. It is often argued that there exist discrete structural domains in natural language that exhibit a degree of syntactic, semantic, and phonological independence from their surrounding linguistic environment. Phase Theory offers a tool for understanding such domains. However, since the inception of phases, there have been many different proposals about the specific formalization of this concept, along with much debate about the extent to which phases can be evidenced empirically (and indeed whether phases exist at all). The aim of this workshop is to discuss the empirical validity and theoretical specifics of Phase Theory.
The submission deadline for abstracts is September 1, 2016.
> Read the complete Call for Papers
CRISSP 10
BCGL 9 will be followed by CRISSP 10, a one-day workshop celebrating the 10th anniversary of the research institute CRISSP featuring invited presentations by Luigi Rizzi, Alec Marantz, and Angelika Kratzer, among others.
The title and the abstract for the Iatridou Lectures are now available:
Title: Fancy Games with Tense and Aspect
Abstract: Read the abstract (PDF)
The Lecture Series will take place on May 25, 26 and 27.
CRISSP (KU Leuven) is proud to present the workshop KrowFest, celebrating Koen Roelandt’s defense.
KrowFest
Friday April 1, 2016
KU Leuven Brussels Campus
Room 6306 (Building Hermes 3)
Invited speakers
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Chris Barker (New York University)
Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University)
CRISSP is very happy to present five new events in the following months.
CRISSP is happy to announce two installments in the CRISSP Seminar series in January:
CRISSP is happy to announce another installment in the CRISSP Seminar series:
Lecturer: Željko Bošković (University of Connecticut)
Title: On the locality of movement: Be careful when you label
Date & time: Friday 6 November 2015, 17h30
Location: CRISSP/KULeuven Brussels Campus, room 2212
Participation: free
Abstract:
The talk will provide a uniform account of a number of locality effects, in particular, the ban on movement out of moved elements, the CED effect (the Adjunct Condition and the Subject Condition), Richards’s (2001) tucking in effect, and the full Comp-trace paradigm, including (in addition to the basic cases) relative and extraposed clauses, the impossibility of short-subject topicalization, French que-qui alternation, and the effect of wh-movement on agreement in languages like Kinande.
CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Lecture Series with Chris Barker on October 14-16, 2015. The title of the Lecture Series is ‘Continuations and Natural Language’.
Abstract
Scope-taking is a hallmark of natural language: not only is it widespread in the world’s languages, it is pervasive within individual languages. It is so familiar to us linguists that it is sometimes hard to appreciate just how astonishing it is for an expression to take material that surrounds it as its semantic argument. For instance, in “Ann gave everyone cookies”, the semantic argument of the quantificational DP “everyone” is the property constructed by abstracting over the direct object position, i.e., “\x.Ann gave x cookies”. Clearly, a deep and complete understanding of scope-taking is of foundational importance. Building on joint work with Chung-chieh Shan, I will bring to bear insights and techniques from the theory of programming languages, in particular, the concept of a CONTINUATION. One potential advantage of continuations over other approaches is that continuations allow fine-grained control over the order of evaluation. This allows a new account of sensitivity to linear order in weak crossover, reconstruction, negative polarity licensing, and dynamic anaphora. I will go on to explain how continuations allow understanding the traditional method of Quantifier Raising not as an ad-hoc heuristic for constructing so-called “logical forms”, but as a bone fide logical inference rule in the context of a substructural logic. This will lead to an account of parasitic scope and recursive scope, as in adjectives such as “same” and “different”, as well as of sluicing as a kind of anaphora, including accounts of sprouting examples (“Ann left, but I don’t know when”) and Andrews Amalgams (“Ann ate I don’t know what yesterday”).
We are happy to announce new CRISSP Seminars and Lecture Series:
CRISSP is happy to announce a CRISSP Seminar with Daniel Harbour on Monday May 11, 2015.
Title: The logical resources of person features
Abstract
Traditionally, person features have been taken to denote predicates, with the minus value denoting logical negation. However, traditional features overgenerate person systems and must be constrained by ultimately nonexplanatory means (such as cooccurrence restrictions). This talk demonstrates that the need for ad hoc constraints vanishes if different logical resources are assumed. Specifically, person features denote power sets and feature values denote complementary operations by which sets act on one another. In tandem with this reconfiguration of the theory, I argue for a reenvisioning of the data pertinent to person theories, relegating syncretisms to secondary status and affording central position to partitions (superpositions of syncretisms) and treating person and spatial data on a par. Relative to these changes in data, the proposed theory generates all and only the required systems whilst deriving significant facts about their internal properties. These results suggest that the logical resources of feature theories in general are ripe for reconsideration.