This coming week, we have our next installment in the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series for the 2024-2025 academic year! The talk will be given by Dr. Aron Hirsch (University of Maryland) on Friday, January 17 at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below.
Title: Only scope in English and German
Abstract: Only is traditionally defined as a propositional operator. Yet, syntactically, only can attach to a DP. One response is to modify the semantics, so that only can compose with a DP to form a quantifier (e.g. Rooth 1985). An alternative response is to modify the syntax. In one analysis, overt only is taken to be an inert focus marker at the DP-level, whose morphology reflects concord with a covert ONLY taking propositional scope (e.g. Quek & Hirsch 2017, Hirsch 2017, after Bayer 1999, Lee 2004, Hole 2015, 2017). In this talk, we provide novel evidence for the latter approach by comparing the scope behavior of only in English and German. Our aim is to show that differences between the two languages follow for free from independent constraints in the concord system. This talk reports on joint work with Michael Wagner.
Aron is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Aron before the talk next Friday, please email me with your availability by Wednesday so that we can schedule accordingly.