Whamit!

In a high-octane, back-and-forth showdown that could only be described as syntactically chaotic, Noam’s Gnomes edged out the athletic but less semantically structured ZBT fraternity team in a thrilling 6-5 victory.

The Gnomes opened the scoring early, with a well-parsed through ball resulting in a tidy finish that had fans chanting “Tree that sentence!” But ZBT quickly responded with a goal of their own, leveling the playing field and reminding everyone that brute athleticism can sometimes trump careful analysis.

From there, the first half turned into a lexical breakdown for the Gnomes. Though they briefly retook the lead at 2-1, their syntax soon unraveled. ZBT rallied with three unanswered goals, including a particularly devastating counterattack off a misplaced modifier from midfield. By halftime, the frat boys were up 4-2 and looking confident, flexing both muscles and minimal tactical nuance.

But the second half belonged to the Gnomes.

Adjusting their structure and clearly undergoing a pragmatic shift in formation, the linguists came out with renewed cohesion. They scored four consecutive goals, each more elegantly diagrammed than the last — including a cheeky backheel dubbed “The Recursion” that put them up 6-4. Fans of transformational grammar were in ecstasy.

ZBT did manage to claw one back late in the game, narrowing the score to 6-5, but the Gnomes held strong through stoppage time, parsing out the clock with expert possession and clever subclauses down the flanks.

Final Score: Noam’s Gnomes 6 — ZBT 5
A wild, referentially rich affair where form met function — and function triumphed, just barely.

Speaker: Janos Egressy (UCLA)
Title: Size-sensitive Sequence of Tense in Hungarian
Time: Tuesday, October 7th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: In Sequence of Tense (SOT) Analyses (e.g. Ogihara 1995), it has been argued that past-under-past configurations (e.g. John said that Mary was pregnant) have a simultaneous reading if the embedded past head undergoes “deletion” under agreement with the matrix past head: While the deletion does not affect the verb form, the reading becomes John said: ‘Mary is pregnant’. If no such deletion happens, the embedded past tense remains backshifted compared to the matrix past tense, so the reading remains John said: ‘Mary was pregnant’. Previous SOT research has claimed that the availability of this deletion rule is a parameter for entire languages, e.g. English has such a rule but Japanese does not, so the simultaneous reading is never available for Japanese clauses. This paper shows that Hungarian exhibits language-internal SOT-variation in past-under-past configurations: While speech-reporting clauses are Japanese-like, i.e. obligatorily backshifted, non-speech-reporting clauses are English-like, i.e. they have a simultaneous reading. My syntactic analysis proposes a size-difference between the clause types: speech-reporting clauses are structurally larger. Hence, the availability of deletion-under-Agree can be described as a case of Williams Cycle (Williams 2003) or size-dependent opacity in Agree (Keine 2020).

(This talk is a practice talk for NELS.)

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)

Title: Long-distance agreement on Procrustes’ bed: a revival of spec-head

Time: October 9, 12:30pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Long-distance agreement (LDA) refers to the phenomenon where a matrix verb may (optionally) agree in ?-features with an embedded argument of its complement clause, otherwise showing default agreement with the entire complement clause. Spanning a clausal boundary and appearing to involve no displacement of the embedded goal, LDA has been one of the core empirical arguments in favor of the operation Agree, which dissociates agreement from movement.

This talk has a double aim: first, to present a previosuly unnoticed observation; that is, (almost) all geographically diverse LDA languages share fundamental typological properties: they are verb-final, with a (full or split) ergative alignment, and with default SOV order; moreover, LDA-transparent embedded clauses are always either restructuring VPs or nominalized/participial TP/CPs; and once a potential LDA goal somehow overtly fronts to the left of the matrix verb, LDA (usually) becomes obligatory.

Second, I attempt to account for this empirical picture through little bits of Kayne’s (1994) Antisymmetry, Bobaljik’s (2008) m-case hierarchy, and the magic power of pied-piping. Specifically, I will suggest a unified analysis of LDA as local feature-checking in a (covert) spec-head configuration, which may allow for iterative feature-copying under recursive merge. Depending on two parameters, the specifier of the agreeing verbal head is filled either directly by the moving DP goal or by the complement clause that pied-pipes the goal at its edge. Hence, LDA is derived via Merge, not Agree. This will eventually yield a typology of (at least) four types of LDA systems, among which I will (struggle to) intergrate the outlier named Algonquian.

The analysis hinges on two crucial premises: one, LDA often features movement properties/constraints; two, the optionality of LDA is only apparent, as it obligatorily interacts with scope and/or information-structure, reducing to the reflex of independently motivated syntactic processes. Thus, I will distinguish between two types of agreement: narrow-syntactic agreement feeds LF or further syntactic operations, and involves downwards valuation by some interpretable feature, (plausibly) under spec-head. This contrasts with uninterpretable agreement, which is pushed post-syntactically, at early PF, and may operate from a distance, via upwards valuation (though still c-command-based).