Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Issue of Monday, September 28th, 2026

LFRG - Prarthanaa Bharadwaj (Goethe University, Frankfurt)

Speaker: Prarthanaa Bharadwaj (Goethe University, Frankfurt) 
Title: Polyfunctionality of the Particles -oo and -uu: The Indeterminate sytem in Kannada 
Time: Wednesday, September 30, 1-2pm 
Location: 32-D461
Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92053685079
 
Abstract: 
In his seminal typology, Haspelmath (1997) observed that indefinite pronouns in many languages are built from interrogatives combined with focus-sensitive particles, and that the same building blocks yield negative polarity items (NPIs) and free choice items (FCIs). Work on such indeterminate systems has shown that they also extend to question formation (Kuroda, 1965; Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002; Cable, 2010) and relative clauses (Slade, 2011; Dayal, 1997; Caponigro, 2003; Balusu, 2021). In this talk, I examine indeterminates in Kannada (Dravidian) from the perspective of the particles that license them. I present the paradigm of the disjunctive particle -oo and the inclusive particle -uu across coordination, indefinites, questions, inclusive focus, and relative clauses, and show that both the presence of a wh-word and the particle’s height of attachment determine its interpretation: -oo can occupy the clause-typing position, where it forms questions, whereas -uu never can. I then assess how far two existing accounts—Uegaki’s (2018) unified semantics of the Japanese Q-particle ka and Balusu’s (2022) analysis of Dravidian NPIs/FCIs as unconditionals can jointly account for the Kannada paradigm. 

Colloquium - Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS)

Speaker: Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS)
Title: “The Iconic Frontier of Formal Grammar“ 
When: Friday, October 2nd, 3:30-5pm 
Where: 32-141
 
Abstract:

Iconicity has long been known to be pervasive in sign language. But how does it interact with grammar?  On the basis of ASL data, we propose a modular framework with three key features.

  1. Semantics: Logical semantics must be extended with an iconic component. The result, which we call “Iconological Semantics”, has Logical Forms that combine standard logical operators with an iconic component (inspired by formal pictorial semantics). The “glue” between them is viewpoint manipulation. 
  2. Syntax: Certain expressions with a designated iconic behavior, called  ‘classifiers’, have not just an iconic semantics but also an iconic syntax: they take their arguments in the order in which they would appear in a simplified comic. To say that “a crocodile ate up a ball”, the normal word order in ASL is SVO if the verb (EAT) is not a classifier. But if one uses a classifier instead,  the order becomes SOV or OSV. This is because one typically sees the eating after one has seen the event participants.
  3. Pragmatics: The iconic content of classifiers is not an unstructured whole. It is divided among traditional slots of the inferential typology, such as assertions, presuppositions, implicatures, and more. Since this  iconic content is determined by classifier movement and could not be listed in the lexicon, there must be an algorithm that productively divides this iconic content among these slots.

(These claims extend from sign with iconicity to speech with gestures, but for reasons of time we will focus on sign.)

Brief survey: “Meaning after the Multimodal Revolution: Seven Things Signs and Gestures Teach Us about Meaning”, to appear in WIREs Cognitive Science.

Technical: “Iconological Semantics” “Iconic Syntax” “The Inferential Typology of Language: Insights from Sign Langage (ASL)”

Syntax Square 10/29 - Magdalena Lohninger (Salzburg)

Speaker: Magdalena Lohninger (University of Salzburg)
Title: Form of a CP, meaning of a vP: Event complements in Austrian German
Time: Tuesday, September 29, 1:00pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461

The talk investigates clausal complementation in Austrian German, focusing specifically on complement clauses under verbs like “try, begin, finish”. While such verbs select only infinitival complements in Standard German, they can take full CPs in Austrian German, giving rise to sentences such as (1):

1)   (1) Er hat versucht/angfangen/aufghört [ dass er des Auto repariert ]
    He has tried/started/finished [ that he the car repair.3sg ]
    He tried/started/finished to repair the car

Even though such complement clauses surface as full CPs, they are highly restricted in their interpretation: they exhibit obligatory control, their time-reference must be identical to the matrix time, they cannot express any other morphological tense value than present tense, they can receive an implicative reading under verbs like “forget”, and do not permit embedded V2 or interrogatives. Hence, their interpretation resembles an infinitive (or what Wurmbrand and Lohninger 2019 term an “Event” clause), rather than what we expect from a CP. Interestingly, these “fake” CPs freely alternate with genuine infinitival complements, raising a puzzle concerning the relationship between semantic selection and syntactic size.

Given that this is very recent work, I will focus primarily on the empirical findings, and hope to get some feedback on how to develop the more theoretical aspects.