Whamit!

Speaker: Yold Winter (Utrecht University)

Time: Tuesday Oct 14, 5-6:30pm

Location: 32D-461

Abstract: The art of Senegalese *griots* - poets, musicians, and oral historians - offers a unique example of the interplay between language and music. While many traditional Senegalese griots describe their *sabar* drums as having a “talking mode”, sabar does not exhibit the tonal correspondences typically associated with African speech surrogate systems like those of Yoruba or Akan drumming traditions. Major Senegalese languages such as Wolof and Serer are non-tonal, and sabar drumming lacks the pitch-based distinctions of drums like Dundun (Yoruba) or Atumpan (Akan).

In this talk, I present findings from ongoing research into the status of sabar drumming as a potential speech surrogate. We show that, as in other West African traditions, sabar drumming exhibits a remarkable proximity to speech - far more than most Western musical traditions. We investigate whether this speech-drum relationship operates at the phonological level - mapping phonemes onto the 10–14 distinct sabar strokes - or at the syntactic level, encoding larger linguistic constructions. While our current findings are inconclusive, they strongly support the idea that sabar drumming merits deeper theoretical investigation from a linguistic perspective.

The talk concludes with a screening (35 minutes) of the recent documentary “Doudou - the Magic of the Rhythm” was directed by Sjors Swierstra and produced by the Utrecht drum language project. The film is a tribute to Doudou Ndiaye Rose, the legendary Senegalese composer and master drummer. Through sabar performances, intimate reflections from family members, and interviews with music icons Peter Gabriel and Youssou Ndour, the film honors Doudou’s profound cultural and artistic legacy.

**Film synopsis**:
Nine years after his passing, Doudou’s family embarks on a spiritual pilgrimage from the busy streets of Dakar to the provincial town of Tivaouane. There, they lead a powerful ceremony that unites Senegal’s foremost percussionist families in a traditional sabar ritual of rhythm and dance. The film was premiered at the Fine Arts Film Festival in Venice, California, and broadcast on NTR, the Dutch public broadcaster.

Speaker: Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (MIT) & Omri Doron (UMass Amherst)

Title: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion

Time: Tuesday, October 14th, 1pm - 2pm

Location: 32-D461



Abstract: Jacobson (2016) observes that fragment answers to which-questions seem to have different felicity conditions than fully spelled out answers and even ones with VP ellipsis, as demonstrated in (1). Jacobson takes this fact as evidence against an analysis of Fragment Answers as the result of Clausal Ellipsis (FACE, in short; Merchant, 2005), and proposes an analysis that treats them as connected to their preceding questions via a special syntactic relation. But FACE has its merits: (i) It explains why fragments seem sensitive to constraints on movement and morphosyntactically connected to their hypothesized “original position”; and (ii) it unifies fragment answers, VP ellipsis and sluicing under the same recoverability conditions. In this talk, we propose a novel account of Jacobson’s puzzle which does not give up FACE, and instead points at the parallelism constraint on ellipsis as the source of infelicity in (1a). Specifically, assuming trace conversion (Fox, 1999), we propose that the mismatch between the trace left by which Math professor and the one left by Mary prevents them from satisfying parallelism. In doing so, we argue for a modification to the process of trace conversion.

(1) Q: Which Math professor left the party early?
a. #Mary, but she’s not a Math professor.
b. Mary left the party early, but she’s not a Math professor.
c. Mary did, but she’s not a Math professor.

Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)
Title: VP-ellipsis and parasitic gaps: observations on temporal modifiers and parallelism
Time: Wednesday, October 15th, 1pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

Abstract: As the title suggests, in this LFRG I present ongoing work on PV-ellipsis and Parasitic Gaps. I discuss novel data involving parasitic gaps (henceforth PGs) in VP-ellipsis constructions. In particular, I present a series of minimal pairs and claim that the grammatical contrasts are mainly accounted for by the combination of a local parallelism condition on ellipsis in the style Takahashi and Fox (2005)/Fox and Katzir (2011), and Nissenbaum’s (1998; 2000) theory of PGs. First, the contrast between (1a) and (1b) is introduced to show that adjuncts with a PG cannot appear in the clause containing ellipsis, in contrast with adjuncts with no gap:

(1) a. *This is the song that John listened to,
and this is the song that Mary did [listen to] after reading about.
b. This is the song that John listened to,
and this is the song that Mary did [listen to] after having a coffee .

More data in (2) show that there are actually instances in which a PG-adjunct can appear in the elided clause, but only if another PG-adjunct is present in the antecedent:

(2) a. This is the song that Rosa listened to after reading about,
and this is the song that Karl did [listen to] before hearing about.
b. *This is the song that Rosa listened to after turning on the radio,
and this is the song that Karl did [listen to] before hearing about .

A third - semantic - constrast will also be introduced tin the talk. After considering observations from Hartman (2011) on the size of elided phrases, I will show the need for a silent element that merges in the same position as adjuncts that do not contain a PG. This need can be implemented either with a tense restrictor analysis of temporal modifiers (as for example presented in von Fintel and Heim (2011)) or with a silent pronominal version of temporal adjuncts, as long as this is restricted to non-PG adjuncts.