[PLing] Two guest lectures by Ian Roberts (Cambridge)

[Dalina Kallulli]

Dear colleagues,
Prof. Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge) will be giving two guest lectures in the Department of Linguistics, which you are cordially invited to, see details below.
Best wishes,
Dalina Kallulli

1. Title: Parameters of Verb Movement
Time and place: Friday, December 6th, at 10:30, Sensengasse 3a, first floor, Seminarraum 2.
Abstract: In this talk I will look at some parameters relating to Verb-movement. I begin by looking at fine-grained distinctions in Verb-movement in some of the Romance languages, presenting some of the data from Schifano (2018). Next, I look at the English auxiliary system, then at V-initial languages, distinguishing two principal types partly in terms of the nature of Verb movement. I then turn to Mandarin Chinese, looking at “deep analyticity” (in the sense of Huang 2015) in TP, vP and VP. After a brief consideration of Germanic V2, I look at the internal structure of complex verbal heads.

2. Title: 'Parameters: Redundancy and Deficiency' (joint work with myself)
Time and place: Wednesday, December 11th, at 16:45, Sensengasse 3a, 1st floor, Seminarraum 1.
Abstract: The Borer-Chomsky Conjecture (BCC) states that parametric variation reduces to (a subset of) formal features of (a subset of) functional heads. However, while we have a reasonable extensional idea of what such formal features are (e.g. Person, Number, Case, Tense, Aspect, Mood, wh, D, Q, …), though such lists are always incomplete, we have no adequate intensional definition to date. This arguably undermines the BCC, since without such a definition, strictly speaking no predictions can be made about the limits to typological variation. For example, the BCC would not prevent the postulation of a feature [±n]-ary Merge, whose positive value would allow multiple Merge to a single functional head creating a flat structure. Since it is currently assumed that binary Merge is invariant, we need to rule out such features. Adopting the definitions of Redundancy (ℜ) and Deficiency (𝔇) in Onea et al. (2023), we present an alternative to the BCC which addresses these issues. Our core proposal is given in (1):
(1) Parametric variation arises from the interaction of ℜ and 𝔇 of formal features of functional heads.

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