Syntax and Semantics

Jenks presents at Definiteness across Domains

September 6, 2023

Peter Jenks is giving a talk (via Zoom) at the 4th meeting of the Definiteness across Domains DFG network this Sunday at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The talk is entitled "Anaphoric bare nouns without indices". The program is available here: https://www.definiteness-across-domains.org/4th-meeting/.

Bossi files dissertation

August 16, 2023
Congrats to Madeline Bossi, who has just filed her dissertation Epistemic modality across syntactic catergories in Kipsigis! Starting in mid August, Maddy will be working as the Programs Data Manager for DREAM Charter School in New York City. She'll be running data collection and analysis for all of the school’s extracurricular programs, as well as leading UX research on the products that the data team uses and creates to make sure they’re working as user-friendly as possible.

Scott files dissertation

August 16, 2023

Congrats to Tessa Scott on her dissertation Pronouns and agreement in San Juan Atitán Mam, filed in May! Tessa has accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow with the UC Berkeley Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellowship Program starting in September. She will be working in the office of the Dean of the College of Letters and Science on undergraduate education policy and advising. In this position she will also continue her research and work on Mam. We look...

Eve Sweetser

Professor Emerita of Linguistics

Semantics, syntax, historical linguistics, Celtic languages, speech act theory, metaphor theory, semantic change, grammaticalization, grammatical meaning, gesture

Jarvis presents at SALT 33

February 22, 2023

Congrats to Becky Jarvis, who will be giving a presentation titled "Movement & interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses" at the 33rd meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 33) hosted at Yale from May 12 to 14, 2023.

Deal colloquium

September 15, 2022

The 2022-2023 colloquium series begins on Monday, September 19, with a talk by our very own Amy Rose Deal, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom (passcode: lxcolloq) from 3:10-5pm. Her talk is entitled "On ditransitive person restrictions in primary object languages," and the abstract is as follows:

When a ditransitive is expressed with clitic pronouns or agreement for both objects, oftentimes restrictions are in place on the relative person of the two objects. A typical pattern is that the theme object must be 3rd person. This pattern has been the subject of intensive study by syntacticians over the last two decades. In this talk I investigate the implications of this work for primary object languages, where the "object markers" controlled by the patient in a monotransitive are controlled by the goal/recipient in a ditransitive. Various prominent syntactic analyses of person restrictions, when put together with commonly assumed ideas about the syntax of primary object languages, lead to the prediction that person restrictions should be absent in ditransitives in languages of this type. This prediction is wrong: in fact, it has proven hard to find a primary object language that LACKS a person restriction in ditransitives. I critically review two lines of analysis that have been pursued regarding these person restrictions, and propose a new approach grounded in my recent work on the person-case constraint (Interaction, Satisfaction, and the PCC).