We’d like to announce two reading groups which will take place on alternating weeks on Fridays from 1–2:30 in room 117. All are encouraged to attend! We start this week with…
Agreement Reading Group
This reading group will examine morphological agreement from both theoretical and language-specific perspectives. An overarching question will be: which properties of agreement are universal and which are subject to cross-linguistic variation? More specifically, we will consider such issues as the status of object agreement, distinguishing agreement from pronominal clitics, the pronominal argument hypothesis, the role of animacy in agreement, and the nature of phi features.
When: Friday, 9/13 1–2:30
Where: Linguistics 117
What: Richard Compton will lead a presentation of Adger & Harbour’s chapter from Harbour, Adger, & Béjar’s (2008) Phi Theory book entitled Why Phi?, which gives an overview of work on phi features and agreement and highlights some of the issues involve.
The first meeting will also serve as an organizational meeting in which we can decide on future readings and work out a schedule. If there is an article you’d like to suggest (or better yet, present to the group) we’re eager to hear from you. You can also present original work or work in progress that relates to agreement.
Please email Richard to be added to the AGR group email list or if you don’t have access to the first reading.
Next week will be the first meeting of the second reading group, stay tuned for more information:
Constituency and Prosody: The Prosody of VSO and VOS
This reading group will explore how prosody and syntactic structure interact. We want to look at syntactic and prosody work on VSO and VOS word orders in various languages, and see what it tells us about how syntax and prosody relate to each other, and whether prosody can tell us something about syntax that we didn’t know already, and vice versa.
This reading group will explore how prosody and syntactic structure interact. We want to look at syntactic and prosody work on VSO and VOS word orders in various languages, and see what it tells us about how syntax and prosody relate to each other, and whether prosody can tell us something about syntax that we didn’t know already, and vice versa.