The 2022-2023 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 13, with a talk by Ivano Caponigro (UC San Diego), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom from 3:10-5pm. His talk is entitled "Investigating Headless Relative Clauses Across Languages: Why and How," and the abstract is as follows:
Headless Relative Clauses have been sadly neglected in linguistics — fortunately, not so by languages across the world and their speakers. Rarely mentioned in descriptive grammars and largely ignored by typological investigations, Headless Relative Clauses have received only limited attention in theoretical syntax or formal semantics, mainly based on the usual "language" suspects (i.e., some Germanic and some Romance). In this talk, I aim to vindicate them. I introduce and define varieties of Headless Relative Clauses, present a methodology to study them across languages, and highlight the insights they bring to the investigation of the crosslinguistic syntax/semantics interface, and also to the study of logical words, and fieldwork, typology. I hope to provide what is needed for those who want to study Headless Relative Clauses in whatever language they choose from whichever linguistic corner they prefer, starting from this last sentence, which contains 4 examples of a total of 3 different kinds of Headless Relative Clauses.