[PLing] Talk by Hilda Koopman, 21.6

[Enrico Flor]

Dear everyone,

we'd like to invite you to a talk by Hilda Koopman (UCLA) that will be
given on Wednesday 21.6 at 17h in the Seminarraum 7 in the Linguistics
Department (Sensengasse 3a, second floor).

The title of the talk is: "On (some) Interface mismatches: when the
syntax is not what it seems". See below for the abstract.

Enrico Flor [and Nina Haslinger, Eva Rosina, Magdalena Roszkowski, Viola
Schmitt]

ABSTRACT: "The problem: In (i) Bill cannot seem to fix this, seem scopes
above  cannot, as shown in the paraphrase in (ii) it seems that Bill
cannot fix this). In the syntactic structure seem appears to be embedded
under cannot, yielding what looks like a clear syntax-LF mismatch. I
will show that the syntax of this construction must be more complex than
it seems to be at first sight, and that there is in fact no syntax
semantics mismatch. Arguments will be presented that (i) must be derived
from the merge structure in (ii) seem>  not>  can.  Insights into the
syntactic derivation of (i) in English comes from the syntax of related
Germanic OV languages. The analysis extends to other elements that raise
in this construction (Tense and Adverbs, yielding an account for
apparent adverb scrambling). From English to German. I will show suggest
how the proposed analysis for English may in turn pave the way for a
purely syntactic treatment of a well-known and curious syntax-PF
mismatch with regards to zu-placement in German, which has called for a
postsyntactic treatment, based on the DM mechanism known as "local
dislocation" (Saltzman 2012). In sum, as the argument goes, once we
understand the (independently motivated) syntactic derivations, these
are instances of syntax phonology and LF interface matching, not
instances of interface mismatches, neither of the syntax LF interface,
nor of the syntax PF interface.   This in turn can be taken as an
argument in favor of the type of syntax that we should pursue."