Cours d'été LIA "Grammar of the verbal domain in Romanian and beyond"

Amy Rose Deal 

Agree, agreement and the Person Case Constraint (PCC)

Description: In this course I will introduce a theory of Agree that dispenses with the notion of uninterpretable/unvalued features as an impetus for feature transfer. I present an alternative model wherein probes are specified in two ways: in terms of their interaction features (features which they copy back to themselves from goals) and their satisfaction features (features which cause probing to stop). We will explore the ways in which this model can capture agreement patterns that prove challenging from a uF perspective, including various types of PCC patterns (e.g. weak, strong, me-first). 

• le lundi 8 juillet 2019, 14h-17h30

• le mardi 9 juillet 2019, 9h30-13h

Lieu: salle 533 (salle des conseils), 5ème ét
  [*demander un badge à l'accueil*]
  bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 8, pl. Paul Ricoeur
  75013 Paris

*+*

Hedde Zeijlstra

The syntax of negative concord and its consequences for theories of agree(ment)

This mini-course consists of two parts. In the first part, I argue that Negative Concord is best analysed as an instance syntactic agreement, where one or more morphosyntactically negative elements agree with a higher, possibly covert, negative operator. I argue how this approach can account for the syntactic and semantic properties of Negative Concord, as well as the cross-linguistic variation that can be attested with respect to that. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the more general consequences of this agreement mechanism. In short, I will argue that the features involved in this type of agreement relation should not be thought of as ‘interpretable’ and ‘uninterpretable’ features but rather as independent or dependent categorial features. I will furthermore explore what the consequences are of such a feature architecture to better understand general syntactic operations, such as agree, merge, selection and labeling.

• le mercredi 10 juillet 2019, 9h30-12h30

Lieu: salle 533 (salle des conseils), 5ème ét
  [*demander un badge à l'accueil*]
  bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 8, pl. Paul Ricoeur
  75013 Paris

*+*

Peter Hallman

Degree Quantification and Scope Splitting in Arabic

In this course, I will firstly provide an overview of how degree modification works in Syrian Arabic, focusing on superlatives but also touching on comparatives and degree questions. What is linguistically revealing about superlatives in this language is that the superlative morpheme (counterpart to “most”) can be separated from its scalar associate over some syntactic distance, and its surface position determines its scope. I will then capitalize on this fact to explore ‘split scope’ phenomena in which the negative component of “least” appears to have a different scope than the superlative component. The facts reported here support a model of degree modification in which interpretational ambiguities reflect structural ambiguities at LF.

• le jeudi 11 juillet 2019, 9h30-12h30

Lieu: salle 533 (salle des conseils), 5ème ét
  [*demander un badge à l'accueil*]
  bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 8, pl. Paul Ricoeur
  75013 Paris