[PLing] TLC talk by Yiannis Katochoritis on November 6

[Iva Kovač]

Dear PLing-members,

We are happy to announce the first talk of this semester's Theoretical 
Linguistics Colloquium.

Speaker: Yiannis Katochoritis (MIT)

Date & time: Friday, 6 November, 10h
Location: Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, Seminarraum 7

The title and the abstract can be found below.

We are looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Valerie Wurm & Iva Kovač
The TLC organizers
https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming

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*It's just a phase, it'll pass: The key to unlocking and moving on*

Rackowski and Richards (2005) propose that phases can be 'unlocked' to 
become transparent for extraction if they first Agree with a higher 
probe, which may then attract a goal from within the phase's domain. 
Provided that phases count by default as potential movable interveners 
due to their featural make-up (Abels 2003), then prior Agree with the 
phase allows the probe to skip the phase boundary, as per Richards' 
(1998) Principle of Minimal Compliance in (1). Thus, in many languages, 
extraction out of CPs or DPs requires the matrix verb to (φ-)agree with 
the containing phase.

(1) Once a probe P Agrees with a goal G, P can ignore G for the rest of 
the derivation.

Although the research program of Phase Unlocking has been prolific (see 
a.o. van Urk & Richards 2015; Branan 2018; Halpert 2019; Hedding & Yuan 
2023; Ershova 2024; Lee & Yip 2024), it still raises important 
questions: (i) Are unlocking and successive cyclicity both required to 
escape a phase or not? (ii) How is unlocking compatible with the Phase 
Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2000) and spell-out? (iii) How does 
the Principle of Minimal Compliance allow to ignore an intervening 
locality domain? (iv) Is unlocking an exceptional primitive operation or 
part of a broader strategy to undo opaqueness?

To address these issues, I propose the condition in (2), for which I 
will provide novel empirical evidence from Austronesian Malagasy and 
Tagalog:

(2) Unlocking of phase XP requires remerge of XP to the edge of the 
probing head H, before an XP-embedded goal YP can subextract to a(n 
outer) SpecHP.

Thus, Agree is not sufficient for unlocking; it is only movement of the 
containing phase into the projection of the probing head that makes that 
phase transparent for extraction, yielding a multiple-specifier 
configuration. I suggest that (2) can ultimately provide an answer to 
all four open questions above.

In the end, (2) will also support the special status of phases as 
absolute cyclic locality domains, arguing against Halpert and Zeiljstra 
(2026), who subsume all phase-like locality effects to Relativized 
Minimality (Rizzi 1990).
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