The Syntax-Semantics Group will be meeting on Monday, January 20 at 3 pm in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics department. For those joining remotely, the Zoom link is included at the bottom of this message.
Aron Hirsch (UMD) will be presenting a talk, “Multiple Projection.” Following Aron’s talk, we will head over to Thomson House at 4 pm for our rescheduled reception. There is funding to cover snacks and the first round of drinks. We hope to see you there!
Here is Aron’s abstract:
It is generally thought that complex structure is formed by Merging two elements, and projecting the features of one. For instance, in “Amy read Macbeth”, read and Macbeth Merge, and read projects its V feature to form a VP. In this talk, we will explore the idea that the grammar also incorporates a “Multiple Projection” mechanism, where the features of both daughters project. To motivate Multiple Projection, we will consider the syntax of questions. Cable (2007, 2010) proposed that questions contain a functional head Q, which is covert in English. In “What did Amy eat?”, Q Merges with the DP what, and projects to form a QP. The QP fronts in A’-movement. We will show that a number of puzzles raised by the Q particle (see e.g. Cable 2010, Safir 2019, Hewett 2024) can be resolved in a uniform way if the features of the wh-phrase project along with Q, a possibility predicted by Multiple Projection. This talk reports on joint work with Sadira Lewis (UMD).
Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/16ZiB1ATRMGSUxbkGOJGvw.