In our department a "proseminar" is a special topics course, taught at the advanced graduate level, and usually offered just once. Proseminars often emphasize an area of the instructor's research.

This page reports the areas in which proseminars are taught. We also include other graduate courses when their content has changed for the current offering.

For an archive of old proseminar topics, please visit the archive page.

Spring 2012

Tim Stowell             Spring 2012              Thursday 4-7

Proseminar on Ellipsis, Tense, and Abbreviated English (AE)

I am scheduled to teach a proseminar this quarter; the meeting time is Thursday afternoon from 4:00 to 7:00 PM, in Haines A24.

I had originally planned to devote the course to the topic of ellipsis, but I learned relatively recently that Maziar Toosarvandani taught a proseminar on ellipsis last year (deans are typically too distracted to keep track of such things) and after consulting his syllabus I decided that the overlap might be problematic.  I have therefore decided to teach my proseminar this quarter on three somewhat unrelated topics, comprising, in effect, three mini-courses strung together to form a quarter-long course.

Because I understand that most grad students were blissfully unaware of this proseminar, and because there is a GLC meeting scheduled for this afternoon during the same time slot, the class will not meet this week.  The first class will meet next Thursday afternoon; I'll figure out a time for a make-up class for this week's meeting, probably at the beginning of exam week.

The first topic of the course will involve ellipsis, a topic that I have been interested

in for some time (I taught a proseminar on this in 2004.) More recently I have been working on a class of parenthetical constructions involving parenthetical modified adverbs, which I have come to conclude involves TP ellipsis with a derivation substantially similar to Sluicing.  I would like to look at this construction as well as some related literature on issues relating to topics that have become familiar in the literature on ellipsis, including antecedent contained deletion, 'vehicle change,' the nature of the identity condition on the antecedent, and certain issues specific to the theory of parenthetical constructions.

The second topic of the course will involve another topic that I have worked on over the past 20 years or so, namely the syntax and semantics of tense. (This is also a topic that Yael has done very interesting work on.) My specific interest here will be with certain issues relating to "sequence of tense," intervention effects associated with the interweaving present and past tense, and interactions between tenses and modals.

Finally,  I would also like to cover a third topic, namely the syntax of special registers of written English, associated with newspaper headlines, diaries, recipes and instruction manuals, titles and captions, and note-taking; I refer to these collectively as genres of Abbreviated English (AE).  These genres of writing share several properties, including (a) null subjects and/or objects, (b) null definite and indefinite articles and/or possessive pronouns, (c) null copulas, (d) null conjunctions, (e) the use of the present tense to report an event located in the past or in a temporally unanchored location.  We will also look at parallels between these registers of AE and other languages with respect to these phenomena.

Linguistics 254:  Lessons from Universal 20

Hilda Koopman

The starting point for my seminar will be Greenberg’s Universal 20 (U20) and its syntactic modeling. It will apply the lessons from U20 to the clausal domain: this will lead to a fresh look at the postverbal domain in English and other languages, and a potential re-evaluation of some widely held theoretical results which are based on the syntax of the postverbal domain.

Greenberg’s U20 states that in :

(1) a. prenominal position the order of demonstrative, numeral, and adjective (or any subset thereof) conforms to the order Dem Num A, and
in b. postnominal position the order of the same elements (or any subset thereof) conforms either to the order Dem Num A or to the order A Num Dem.

(1) a. has remained (virtually) unchallenged in the extensive literature on U20, but (1) b has been shown to be too weak: many more orders (but not all) are attested postnominally.

Cinque, 2005 derives these patterns from a universal hierarchy (Dem(Num(A(N)))), with the prenominal order a direct reflection of the universal hierarchy Postnominal orders result from various leftwards movements of a phrasal constituent containing N which can pied-pipe various elements (the post N domain thus hides much structural ambiguity). Patterns that are crosslinguistically unattested cannot be derived by the syntax.

These results for U20 lead to the following general expectation:

(2) a.    the order (of phrases) in prehead position is a reliable indicator of the underlying order of merge
b.    the posthead order shows much more structural variability:its structural analysis is therefore much more difficult and should be approached with great caution.

Applied to the sentential domain, (2) means that the preverbal domain in OV languages would hold priviliged information about the underlying merge order, but the postverbal order does not, as it can hide considerable structural ambiguity. This is not in line with the standard wisdom, which holds that OV languages scramble happily, leading to a much greater free word order, whereas VO languages are thought to have much more restricted orders and are widely thought to lack scrambling.

The seminar will:
(i) examine U20 and its derivations in the nominal domain, refine Cinque’s proposals in some ways (based on Koopman and Szabolcsi 2000), and account for variable orderings within the same language;
(ii) look at the typology of words, where we seem to find the same patterns and asymmetries as U20 and verbal complexes (Koopman and Szabolcsi 2000, Koopman 2005, in progress );
(iii) compare the structures of pre and postV domains in a number of languages (including Samoan and Malagasy), supporting (2);
(iv) model the difference between Dutch (OV) and English (VO) in this way (Koopman 2010), leading to the (to me ) quite surprising conclusion that the syntactic derivations of the postverbal domain in English and the preverbal domain Dutch are remarkably similar (perhaps identical), reducing to pied-piping in English, but not in Dutch.
(v) explore the consequences of (2) for the understanding of the syntax of the postverbal domain in English in some detail.

Can be taken for 2 or 4 units. scheduled to meet We 11-2.

Linguistics 254, The acquisition of semantics

Winter 2012 

213B will focus on topics related to the biological and neurological basis of language. We will try to examine what it means to assert that language is part of our genome and that UG is the biological endowment of every normal human. What do these assertions predict regarding normal and disordered language acquisition? To do this we will concentrate on three topics: 1) the genetics of language, 2) linguistic theoretic accounts of SLI and 3) linguistic-theoretic accounts of acquired aphasia.  If there is time, we will also examine the issue of neural plasticity and its relation to where language resides in the brain. including the effects of pediatric focal lesions and pediatric hemispherectomy on language development.

This quarter I will be offering a proseminar on "Auxiliaries and their kin", the blurb for which is below. Our currently scheduled meeting time is

Mondays 1-4 in Rolfe 3114

If you cannot make the first meeting but would like to attend, please email me with your scheduling constraints. (It is quite possible we can push the time later.)


Syntax-Semantics Proseminar:  Auxiliaries and their kin

Carson Schutze

This quarter I will be offering a proseminar on "Auxiliaries and their kin", the blurb for which is below. Our currently scheduled meeting time is

Mondays 1-4 in Rolfe 3114

If you cannot make the first meeting but would like to attend, please email me with your scheduling constraints. (It is quite possible we can push the time later.)

Given the prominent place of the analysis of the English auxiliary system in Chomsky’s earliest work, there are surprisingly few attempts to treat the same set of facts in a Minimalist framework (and none of them have appeared in journals, to my knowledge). This is probably because the insights captured in the original Affix Hopping approach are tricky to implement using Minimalist machinery. In this proseminar I would like to revisit these and other facts about auxiliaries (in a range of languages) and see whether we can develop insightful analyses in a modern syntactic framework. Among the issues we could explore are the following:

• How should we encode the relationships between auxiliaries and their participles, and the relative ordering restrictions among auxiliaries? (Selection, Agree, PF movement?)

• How should we capture the fact that English finite auxiliaries appear to act positionally like all finite verbs in French? (Should raising across negation be allowed? Is there a base generation alternative?)

• How should we capture the “last resort” nature of dummy do, particularly given that it was used more freely in earlier varieties of English? (Is it a coincidence that do almost exactly mirrors the distribution of modals in English?)

• What is the actual content of be, have and do, and can the same answer be given for all auxiliary and main verb uses? (If be and do are both semantically empty, what makes them different? Can all uses of have be analyzed as be+X, and what exactly is X? Do auxiliary selection phenomena shed any light on these issues? How do we differentiate Sp ser and estar?) Should BrEn do be assimilated to auxiliary do, main verb do, or something else?
?Gillian has made pasta and David is doing. ?I am eating a mango and Gillian has done.

• How can we explain the way auxiliaries interact with VP ellipsis and VP fronting? (Danish has an auxiliary that seems to be limited to these contexts.)
John might have been being criticized, and Fred might (have (been (*being))) as well.
I suspected that John might be being criticized, and by gosh, being criticized he was.
*criticized he was being.
I thought John might eat an apple, and by gosh, eat(??en) an apple he has.
eating/*eat an apple he is.

• Why can auxiliaries be dropped in various circumstances (e.g. colloquial yes/no questions in English, e.g. You going to the party?; ‘have’ following modals in Scandinavian)? Can children’s omission of auxiliaries tell us something interesting?

• In English many auxiliaries can contract. Is this purely a phonological process or does the syntax have to be sensitive to it?
Might’ve/??Might have the President done more about the crisis?
Mike should’ve not been eating cake.

Syntax-Semantics Proseminar:  Raising Effects

Keir Moulton
UCLA
Winter 2012

The seminar will investigate some ‘peripheral’ raising phenomena, with a particular
eye to the interaction of the semantics of raising predicates and the interpretation of
the raised element. Here’s a taste of some particulars we’ll look at: It’s often reported
that universal quantifiers display an ambiguity with epistemic raising verbs, as in ‘Every
student seems to be sick’. But since the raising verb and the QP are both universal
quantifiers, it’s surprising that such a strong intuition is felt (Fintel and Iatridou 2003).
Instead, we’ll ask whether this ambiguity follows from a subtle interaction between domain
restriction and the evidential component of these raising verbs (one more obvious
in small clauses and copy raising constructions). Similar issues of raising/control in the
modality literature will be relevant. Depending on how things go, we’ll turn our attention
to another funny raising configuration—-covert tough constructions.
We’ll begin by assembling diagnostics, our central ones being scope and connectivity
(reconstruction) effects. The pedagogical component of the course will prepare students
new to the literature on scope and modality at the syntax-semantics interface.

Part A: Background
1. Basics: raising and scope/connectivity
Readings: Sportiche (2005), Iatridou and Sichel (2010), Lasnik (1999)
2. Control/raising questions: Modals
Wurmbrand (1999), TBA (course notes)

Part B: New stuff
1. Raising and evidential effects—small clauses, copy raising
Asudeh and Toivonen (2010), Landau (2009), Potsdam and Runner (2001), Moulton
(2011)
2. Background: Domain restriction
Kratzer (2009), Schwarz (2011)
3. reconstruction in situation semantics (course notes)
4. Covert raising complements/covert tough constructions
Larson, Den Dikken, and Ludlow (1997), Moulton (2012)

References

• Asudeh, Ash, and Ida Toivonen. 2010. Copy raising and perception. Manuscript, Univeristy of Ottawa.
• Fintel, Kai von, and Sabine Iatridou. 2003. Epistemic containment. Linguistic Inquiry 34:173–198.
• Iatridou, Sabine, and Ivy Sichel. 2010. Negative DPs, A-Movement, and Scope Diminishment. Ms. MIT.
• Kratzer, Angelika. 2009.Context and content.Lecture slides, Institut Nicod, Paris.
• Landau, Idan. 2009.Predication vs. aboutness in copy raising.Downloaded from lingBuzz (lingBuzz/000835).
• Larson, Richard, Marcel Den Dikken, and Peter Ludlow. 1997.Intensional Transitive Verbs and Abstract Clausal Complementation.Ms. SUNY, and Vrije Universiteit.
• Lasnik, Howard. 1999.Minimalist analysis.Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
• Moulton, Keir. 2011.Scope and Evidentiality.Talk given at GLOW 34.
• Moulton, Keir. 2012.For Small Clauses.In prep.
• Potsdam, Eric, and Jeffrey T. Runner. 2001. Richard returns: Copy Raising and its implications. In Proceedings of CLS.
• Schwarz, Florian. 2011.Situation pronouns and nominal domain restriction.Ms, UPenn.
• Sportiche, Dominique. 2005. Division of labor between merge and move: Stricty locality
• of selection and apparent reconstruction paradoxes.LingBuzz/000163.
• Wurmbrand, Susanne. 1999.Modal verbs are raising verbs.In Proceedings of WCCFL XVIII.

Experimental Phonology

Robert Daland

The Experimental Phonology course this winter will be focused on word segmentation. Word segmentation is the perceptual ability of fluent listeners to perceive speech in word-sized units, even when that speech contains unknown words. In recent years, an enormous amount of progress has been made on the segmentation problem as a result of a high degree of multidisciplinary attention to and cooperation on this problem; it is very likely that we will crack this problem within the next decade.
The course will consist of readings and discussion. Readings will focus on computational and experimental approaches to word segmentation. Class time will consist of critical discussion of the readings. The final project will be to design a study using any of the methods we discuss in class.

Please email me if you are interested in taking the course but have not yet signed up for it. The officially scheduled time is MW 2-4, but that can be adjusted based on the needs of attendees.

Formal Pragmatics: MultidimensionalMeaning

Daniel Buring (UCLA)
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UCLA, Winter 2012

This class is about so-called non-at-issue meaning. Non-at-issue meaning is part of conventional meaning, usually triggered by particular lexical items (unlike conversational implicatures), but in a sense to be made precise, not the main meaning contribution of a sentence (not its assertion). The most prominent example of non-at-issue meaning are conventional implicatures.

In this class we want to do three things:

 study particular analyses of items that have been argued to contribute non-at-issue meaning, and maybe come up with some of our own
 familiarize ourselves with the technical apparatus required to model non-at-issue meaning, in particular Potts' multi-dimensional semantics
(e.g. Potts, 2003)
 take a step back and see if we can nd more general properties of nonat-issue meanings; for example: is discourse-related meaning generally
non-at-issue? Are non-at-issue meanings use-conditional, rather than truth-conditional? Are non-at-issue meanings shiftable, or projective?
Etc.

Apart from Pott's and others' work on classical conventional implicatures (parentheticals and expressives, among others), I'd like to look at work on ethical datives, sentence mood, and in particular so-called discourse particles, as well as some work in progress of mine on light or `high' negation (based on Buring and Gunlogson, 2000). Some initial references are given below, details will be announced later.

References

Bach, Kent (1999). \The Myth of Conventional Implicature." Linguisticsand Philosophy 22(4):327{366.
Buring, Daniel and Christine Gunlogson (2000). \Aren't Positive and Negative Polar Questions the Same?" UCSC/UCLA.
Geurts, Bart (2007). \Really Fucking Brilliant." Theoretical Linguistics 33:209214.
Gutzmann, Daniel (2007). \Eine Implikatur konventioneller Art: Der Dativus Ethicus." Linguistische Berichte (211):277{308.
Gutzmann, Daniel (2008). On the interaction between modal particles and sentence mood in German. Master's thesis, Universitat Mainz.
Gutzmann, Daniel (2011). \Expressive Modiers and Mixed Expressives." In Oliver Bonami and Patrizia Cabredo Hofherr, eds., Empirical Issues in
Syntax and Semantics 8 , 123{141.
Horn, Laurence (2007). \Toward a Fregean pragmatics: Voraussetzung, Nebengedanke, Andeutung." In Istvan Kecskes and Laurence Horn, eds.,
Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Intercultural Aspects, 39{69. Berlin, New York: Mouton.
Horn, Laurence (2011). \The Landscape of Non-At-Issue Meaning." Talk presented at CRISSP Brussels, December 7, 2011; ms. available at
www.crissp.be/pdf/events/201112 horn3Landscap.pdf.
Kratzer, Angelika (1999). \Beyond Ouch and Oops. How Descriptive and Expressive Meaning Interact." unpubl. ms. UMass Amherst.
Kubota, Yusuke and Wataru Uegaki (2011). \Continuation-based semantics for Conventional Implicatures: The case of Japanese benefactives." In Ed Cormany, Satoshi Ito, and David Lutz, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 19 , 306{323. eLanguage.
McCready, Eric (2008). \What Man Does." Linguistics and Philosophy 31(6).
McCready, Eric (2010). \Varieties of Conventional Implicature." Semantics & Pragmatics 3:1{57. 2
Potts, Christopher (2003). The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Ph.D. thesis, UC Santa Cruz.
Potts, Christopher (2007). \The expressive dimension." Theoretical Linguistics .
Potts, Christopher (to appear). \Conventional Implicature and Expressive Content." In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus Von Heusinger, and Paul Portner,
eds., Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Potts, Christopher, Luis Alonso-Ovalle, Ash Asudeh, Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Christopher Davis, Yurie Hara, Angelika Kratzer, Eric McCready,
Tom Roeper, and Martin Walkow (2009). \Expressives and Identity Conditions." Linguistic Inquiry 40(2):356{366.
Wang, Linton, Brian Reese, and Eric McCready (2005). \The Projection Problem of Nominal Appositives." Snippets 10:13{14.
Zimmermann, Malte (to appear). \Discourse Particles." In Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, and Klaus Von Heusinger, eds., Handbook of Seman-
tics, Handbucher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Linguistics 251

Bruce Hayes

Fall 2011

 English phonology, oddly, is underresearched. The language was at the center of the research agenda during the period of The Sound Pattern of English, as well as in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the advent of metrical and lexical phonology. Since then, English seems to have receded in importance and is understudied from the viewpoint of modern phonological research methods. The classical analysis were done on paper, without any kind of quantitative checking against corpus data. Moreover, with isolated exceptions the generalizations were not tested for their productivity using native speakers. So it makes sense to return to the study of this language:  we can both reassess what was true in the classical work and perhaps also discover new phenomena.  In addition, I hope that the skills practiced in the course will be useful to phonologists working on any language.  Below are empirical areas and methods to be covered (tentative).

Empirical topics

The system of phonemes and allophones. Dialectal variation and emergent “semiphonemes” (Paul Kiparsky, Timothy Vance); consonant allophones marching in lockstep according to foot structure (Dan Kahn, Lisa Selkirk).

Segmental phonotactics.  Classical work (Bloomfield, Selkirk); searching for new generalizations (Michael Hammond, Hayes/Colin Wilson/James White).

The stress system.  Checking the classical generalizations from SPE and Liberman/Prince, gradient paradigm uniformity (Joe Pater), effects of nonstandard syllable weight (Deborah Nanni, Michael Kelly, Kevin Ryan)

Morphology and the “Level I/Level II” contrast.  Classical work of SPE and Kiparsky, Donca Steriade’s discovery of lexical conservatism in -able adjectives, the relationship of levels to productivity.

Segmental alternations:  Vowel Shift, Trisyllabic Shortening, Velar Softening and their productivity (John Ohala, R. Cena, Janet Pierrehumbert).  The minor alternations in strong verbs (Steven Pinker, Albright/Hayes).

Methods: corpus grooming; checking generalizations with the corpus; experiments to test productivity, particularly using the Mechanical Turk

Students enrolled for 4 units will do readings, a couple exercises, and a paper; students enrolled for 2 units need to do the readings.  Current planned time is TR 9-11.  Feel free to contact me with questions.

Proseminar description:  Auxiliaries and their kin

Linguistics 252

Carson Schutze

Fall 2011

I will be offering Ling 252 this fall, as described below. The class  will meet Thursdays 4-7 in Rolfe 3115.


Auxiliaries and their kin

Given the prominent place of the analysis of the English auxiliary system in Chomsky’s earliest work, there are surprisingly few attempts to treat the same set of facts in a Minimalist framework (and none of them have appeared in journals, to my knowledge). This is probably because the insights captured in the original Affix Hopping approach are tricky to implement under current theoretical assumptions. In this proseminar I would like to revisit these and other facts about auxiliaries (in a range of languages) and see whether we can develop insightful analyses in a modern syntactic framework. Among the issues we could explore are the following:

• How should we encode the relationships between auxiliaries and their participles, and the relative ordering restrictions among auxiliaries? (Selection, Agree, PF movement?)

• How should we capture the fact that English finite auxiliaries appear to act positionally like all finite verbs in French? (Should raising across negation be allowed? Is there a base generation alternative?)

• How should we capture the “last resort” nature of dummy do, particularly given that it was used more freely in earlier varieties of English? (Is it a coincidence that do almost exactly mirrors the distribution of modals in English?)

• What is the actual content of be, have and do, and can the same answer be given for auxiliary and main verb uses? (If be and do are both semantically empty, what makes them different? Can all uses of have be analyzed as be+X, and what exactly is X? Do auxiliary selection phenomena shed any light on these issues?)

• How can we explain the way auxiliaries interact with VP ellipsis and VP fronting? (E.g., why can being not be stranded?)

• Why can auxiliaries be dropped in various circumstances (e.g. colloquial yes/no questions in English, ‘have’ following modals in Scandinavian)? Can children’s omission of auxiliaries tell us something interesting?