Syntax and Semantics Research Group

Meeting Schedule

The Syntax and Semantics group typically meets on alternate Wednesdays at 3pm, to discuss theoretical issues of common interest, work in progress or published papers. There are also occasional informal presentations by invited speakers. Volunteers to present work or lead discussions are invited to contact Rob Truswell.

Semester 2, 2010–11

  • 20 Jan (week 2): Robert Truswell, ‘Scope, binding, and what's beyond surface structure’.
  • 9 Feb (week 5): Carlos Prado-Alonso (University of Santiago de Compostela), ‘A cognitive approach to obligatory subject-dependent XVS word order’.
  • 23 Feb (week 7): Martha Robinson, ‘The interpretation of adjectival and verbal absolute predicates in Spanish: A Dynamic Syntax perspective’.
  • 9 Mar (week 9): Abigael Candelas de la Ossa, ‘What is the status of stance-commitments?’
  • 23 Mar (week 11) postponed: Ronnie Cann, ‘Cognate objects: Events, modifiers, or (pseudo-)arguments?’.
  • 30 March (week 12): Antonella Sorace, ‘Gradient auxiliary selection in German: Neurophysiological correlates of acceptability judgments’
  • 6 May (FRIDAY): Philip Miler (Université Paris Diderot): ‘The choice between verbal anaphors in discourse’
In addition to meetings of the full Syntax–Semantics Research Group, there are a number of more specialised reading groups which meet informally throughout the semester. These include:
  • Dynamic Syntax reading group (contact Martha Robinson for details)
  • Minimalist reading group (contact Caroline Heycock for details)
  • Construction Grammar reading group


Past events

Semester 1, 2010–11
  • 13 Oct (week 4): Discussion of Markus Bader & Jana Häussler (2010) Toward a model of grammaticality judgments, Journal of Linguistics 46:273–330.
  • 20 Oct (week 5): Caroline Heycock, ‘Riding the tail of the S-shaped curve’
  • 3 Nov (week 7): Robert Freidin (Princeton University), talking about the cycle
  • 17 Nov (week 9): Discussion of James Myers (2008) Syntactic judgment experiments, Language and Linguistics Compass 3:406–423; and Carson Schütze (2010) Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory, WIREs Cognitive Science
  • 1 Dec (week 11): Elaine Francis (Purdue University), Merits and challenges of using intuitive judgment experiments in syntactic research
Semester 2, 2009-10
  • 27 Jan (week 3): ‘Nonreasons to believe in LF’: presentation by Rob Truswell, plus general discussion
  • 10 Feb (week 5), 2pm: ‘Nonreasons to believe in LF’, Part II
  • Tuesday 2 March (week 8), 11am: Dan Wedgwood ‘Relevant kinds of science: pragmatics and natural selection’ (joint meeting with LEC)
  • Monday 15 Mar (week 10), 2pm: Stavros Assimakopoulos (University of Granada), ‘Semantic underspecification and pragmatic enrichment: how far can we go?’
Semester 1, 2009-10
  • 7 Oct (week 2): ‘(Why) do people believe in the DP hypothesis?’: presentations by Geoff Pullum and Rob Truswell, plus general discussion
  • 14 Oct (week 4): Continuing discussion of ‘(Why) do people believe in the DP hypothesis?’
  • 25 Nov (week 10): Antonella Sorace, ‘Psycholinguistic signatures of gradient auxiliary selection: implications for models of the lexicon-syntax interface’
  • 9 Dec (week 12): Kaori Miura, ‘A movement analysis for dative case assignment’
Semester 2, 2008-9
[Things happened, but didn't make it onto this website.]
Semester 1, 2008-9
  • 8 Oct (week 3): Martha Robinson, ‘The interpretation of SER/ESTAR, temporal reference and scopal relations ’
  • FRIDAY 24 Oct (week 5), joint meeting with LEC: Rob Truswell, ‘Constituency Deficits in Bonobo Comprehension of Spoken English’
  • 3 Dec (week 11): Peter Ackema, ‘The Japanese causative’
Semester 2, 2007-8
  • 6 Feb (week 5): Jule Landgraf, ‘Tense in the Scottish Gaelic verbal system’
  • 23 Jan (week 3): Rhona Alcorn, ‘to him vs. him to: The variable syntax of pronominal prepositional objects in Old English ’
  • 9 Jan (week 1): Martha Robinson, ‘The interpretation of Modern Spanish SER/ESTAR, a Dynamic approach’
Semester 1, 2007-8
  • 14 Nov (week 9): Susanna Padrosa Trias (Barcelona/Edinburgh), ‘Syntax-Morphology Competition’
  • 31 Oct (Week 7): Caroline Heycock, ‘Current work on variable verb movement in Faroese: a report on our ongoing work on syntactic change’ (research conducted with Antonella Sorace and Zakaris Hansen)
  • 17 Oct (Week 5): Dan Wedgwood, ‘Degrees of abstraction in grammatical theory: methodological and theoretical considerations’
  • 3 Oct (Week 3): Ronnie Cann, ‘The bei construction in Chinese’
Semester 2, 2006-7
  • 14 March (Week 10): Peter Ackema, ‘Restrictions on subject extraction: pure syntax or an interface phenomenon?’
  • 14 Feb (Week 6): Kaori A. Miura, ‘Does the DO always measure out the event? - A Preliminary data examination of the locative alternation in English and Japanese’
  • 31 Jan (Week 4): Discussion of Hamm, Kamp, and van Lambalgen (2006), ‘There is no opposition between Formal and Cognitive Semantics’. Theoretical Linguistics 32(1).
  • 17 Jan (Week 2): Discussion of ‘‘Virtual conceptual necessity’, feature-dissociation and the Saussurian legacy in generative grammar’, by N Burton-Roberts and G Poole, Journal of Linguistics 42/3, 2006, pp 575-628.

Semester 1, 2006-7

NORTH EAST SYNTAX SEMINAR

Friday 17 November, 2:00-4:25pm, Faculty Room South, David Hume Tower

2-3:05pm, Luigi Rizzi (Siena), Criterial Freezing, EPP and subject-object asymmetries

3:25-4:25pm, William Haddican, Hidekazu Tanaka & George Tsoulas (York), 'Notes on Clausal Pied Piping'

Immediately followed by ...

MEETING OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Raeburn room, Old College

4:30pm, Andreas Willi (Oxford), 'Useless augments and improper perfects: Greek and the Indo-European verb'

Semester 2, 2005-6

  • 18 Jan (Week 2): Presentations of research interests (I): Keith Mitchell, Gergely Pethö, Caroline Heycock, Ian Underwood
  • 1 Feb (Week 4): Presentations of research interests (II): Peter Ackema, Kaori Miura, Dan Wedgwood
  • 15 Feb (Week 6): Presentations of research interests (III): Stavros Assimakopoulos, Ronnie Cann, Nik Gisborne
  • 1 March (Week 8): [Note change to schedule]
    • Presentations of research interests (IV): Merilin Miljan, Anna Parker
  • 15 March (Week 10): Antonella Sorace, Representation and processing of pronominal subjects: the contribution of developmental data

Semester 1, 2005-6

  • 19 Oct (Week 5): Gergely Pethö and Dan Wedgwood, Outline of project on corpus evidence for the semantics of the Hungarian ‘focus position’
  • 2 Nov (Week 7): Cancelled
  • 16 Nov (Week 9): Peter Ackema, Restricted pro drop in Early Modern Dutch.
  • 30 Nov (Week 11): Caroline Heycock, On the evidence concerning ‘topic’ that can be derived from Japanese.
  • 14 Dec (Week 13): NESS (North East Syntax Seminar) meeting
    Room 1.01, 14 Buccleuch Place:
    • 2.00 - 3.00: Gillian Ramchand (Tromsø), Predication and the syntax and semantics of events.
    • 3.30 - 4.30: Nikolas Gisborne (Edinburgh), Default inheritance and light verbs

2004-5

TALKS
  • Ronnie Cann, Dynamic Syntax: Introduction to the framework.
  • Dan Wedgwood, Roothlessly reductionist: 'focus semantics' and (its) pragmatic alternatives
  • Nik Gisborne, Against Copy Raising.
  • Etsuko Oishi, Austin's Speech Act Theory and the Speech Situation. Abstract
  • Miriam Meyerhoff, Some comments on fieldwork, Bequian creole, and what little we know about copula variability [joint meeting with Language in Context group]
  • Caroline Heycock, V2 in Faroese. Abstract
NESS (North East Syntax Seminar) meeting
  • Peter Ackema (Edinburgh), LF complex predicate formation: the case of participle fronting in Serbo-Croatian Abstract (PDF)
  • Anders Holmberg (Newcastle), The null generic subject pronoun in Finnish Abstract

Spring 2004

TALKS
  • Virve Vihman "Placing the Blame: Recovering the referent of the demoted argument"
  • NESS meeting in Durham, Speakers Hidekazu Tanaka and Joe Emonds
  • James Walker (York) "How to take a complement in Canadian English", co-hosted by the Language in Context Research Group
READINGS
  • Jackendoff & Culicover (2003) "The semantic basis of control in English"
  • Schlenker (2003) "Towards a semantic reinterpretation of binding theory"

2003

TALKS
  • Stefan Mueller (Institute for Germanic Linguistics, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena), "Morphology and Syntax of German Particle Verbs - Solving the Bracketing Paradox"
  • Theodora Alexopoulou, "Quantifying linguistic intuitions and crosslinguistic research"
  • Yicheng Wu "The Dynamic Syntax of BEI Constructions"
  • NESS meeting in Edinburgh,  Speakers Joe Emonds and Dan Wedgwood
READINGS
  • J. Bobaljik (to appear) "Realizing Germanic inflection: Why morphology does not drive syntax"
  • M. Rappaport Hovav & B. Levin (2001) "An event structure account of English resultatives"

2002

TALKS
  • Caroline Heycock, "Neg-Raising vs. reconstruction in relative clauses". Presentation of work in progress
  • Keith Mitchell, "The English manifestation of evidentiality: An overview"  
  • Dan Wedgwood, "A processing account of some constraints on quantifier and adverb distribution in Hungarian"
  • Jim Miller, "On Perfect, Grammaticalisation and Typology".
  • Relative Clause Construal: the dynamics of terms under construction. 
  • Caroline Heycock, "Information Structure and unexpected syntactic relations" 
READINGS
  • E. Haeberli (2002) "Inflectional morphology and the loss of verb-second in English"
  • A. Holmberg & U. Nikanne "Expletives and subject positions in Finnish"
  • J.McCloskey's "Resumption, Successive Cyclicity and the Locality of Operations" 
  • Whitman's "Relabelling"
Last updated: 23 September 2010