AY 2024-2025: Organizers: Kutay Serova & Akshay Aitha
Spring 2025: Fridays 12:30-2:30 PM Central Time, Wieboldt 103 or online (link)
Week 3 – April 11 Irene Macazaga (UPV/EHU & uOttawa), Exploring remnants of clausal ellipsis in Basque
Week 6 – May 2 Cecilia Fernández-Altonaga (UPV/EHU & UPPA), A new look into predication and modification from Basque
Week 8 – May 16 Jaehong Shim (Chicago), Is There String-Vacuous Verb Raising in Khalkha Mongolian? An Experimental Investigation
Week 9 – May 23 Akshay Aitha & Kutay Serova (Chicago), Paper Discussion: Fenger & Weisser (to appear): Matching domains: the syntax, morphology, and phonology of the verb in Sinhala
Week 10 – May 30 Jessica Coon (McGill), Invisible Inanimates in Kanien’kéha: Consequences for Polysynthesis
Archived Schedule
AY 2024-2025: Organizers: Kutay Serova & Akshay Aitha
Fall 2024: Fridays 12:30-2:30 PM Central Time, Classics 405 or online (link)
Week 1 – Oct 4 Parker Robbins (Chicago), Against an extraction analysis of discontinuous nominals in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy
Week 2 – Oct 11 Luigi Rizzi (Siena/Collège de France), Structure and acquisition of the left periphery: the growing trees approach
Week 5 – Nov 1 Sid Bhushan (Michigan), Number-driven gender syncretism and Impoverishment: some insights from Kannada (MWSSE Presentation)
Week 6 – Nov 8 Mattie Wechsler (Chicago), Flip it & reverse it: A Mirror Principle-compliant analysis of rigid argument & affix order in Shona
Week 9 – Dec 6 Shanti Ulfsbjorninn (Mem. Univ. of Newfoundland), Resolving the Allomorphic Mess of the Italian Irregular Infinitives: a classless, non-morphomic, item-and-arrangement analysis
Winter 2025: Fridays 12:30-2:30 PM Central Time, Cobb 115 (link)
Week 3 – Jan 24 Akshay Aitha (Chicago), Mouths, Oceans, and All: What Telugu Case Paradigms Can Teach Us About Distinctions in Morphology and Phonology
Week 5 – Feb 7 Dan Milway (University of Toronto, Mississauga), Coordination – Problems and Prospects
Week 7 – Feb 21 Chris Kennedy (Chicago), Notes on comparatives and superlatives and related matters
Week 8 – Feb 28 Gabriel Gilbert & Mattie Wechsler (Chicago), Voice head or pronominal clitic?: The distribution of di- in Eastern Javanese
Week 10 – Mar 14 Chae Eun Lee (Illinois), Definiteness and Animacy in the Realization of Korean Plural Marker -tul: An Experimental Study (MWSSE)
AY 2023-2024: Organizer: Kutay Serova
Spring 2024
Week 1 – Mar 22 Walther Glodstaf (UIUC), Support from Priming for Case Morphology not being part of the Lexicon
Week 2 – Mar 29 Asia Pietraszko (Univ. of Rochester), Clause internal phase and successive cyclic A-movement
Week 4 – Apr 12 Norvin Richards (MIT), Two ways to ban ergative extraction
Week 5 – Apr 19 Paper discussion, Bye & Svenonius (2012): Non-concatenative morphology as epiphenomenon; Bermúdez-Otero (2012): The architecture of grammar and the division of labor in exponence. Led by Akshay Aitha (UChicago).
Week 8 – May 10 Roumyana Pancheva (UCSC), Numeral syntax and nominal number
Week 9 – May 17 Zach Lebowski (UChicago), When remnants leave a phase
Winter 2024
Week 3 – Jan 19 Ksenia Ershova (MIT), What’s in a (polysynthetic) phase: Dynamic domains, spellout and locality
Week 6 – Feb 9 Paper discussion, Halpert (2016): Prosody/syntax mismatches in the Zulu conjoint/disjoint alternation. Led by Zach Lebowski (UChicago).
Week 9 – Mar 1 Paper discussion, Klaus Abels & Ad Neeleman (2023): e. Led by Kutay Serova (UChicago).
Fall 2023
Week 2 – Oct 6 Andreas Trotzke (Universität Kontanz), The syntax of discourse particles in questions
Week 3 – Oct 13 Bob Offer-Westort (UChicago) & Andrew Murphy (Potsdam), Allomorphy in Bidhaawyeet
Week 6 – Nov 3 Zeineb Sellami (UChicago), First conjunct agreement in Tunisian Arabic is an illusion
Week 7 – Nov 10 Mattie Wechsler (UChicago), Only Two per Customer: Case-Licensing Scarcity for Postverbal Objects in Shona
Week 8 – Nov 17 Joshua Dees (UIUC), Evidence of concord between (T)ense and temporal adverbs: A diachronic analysis of Dholuo
AY 2022-2023: Organizers: Zeineb Sellami & Zach Lebowski
Spring 2023:
Week 2 – Mar 31 Zach Lebowski (UChicago), We owe this talk to the a**hole
Week 5 – Apr 21 Jaehong Shim (UChicago), A Distributed Morphology approach to historical difference in the sequence of Korean subjective honorific suffix –si
Week 8 – May 12 Laura Stigliano (UChicago), Verb-echo answers in Galician
Week 9 – May 19 Claire Halpert (UMN), Escape Clause
Winter 2023: All meetings from 12:30 to 2:20pm in Rosenwald 301 unless otherwise specified.
week 4 – Feb 3 Akshay Aitha (UChicago), Three Puzzles in Telugu Nominal Syntax
week 7 – Feb 17 Mattie Wechsler (UChicago), Noun Class Agreement (Mis?)matches in Swahili
week 8 – Feb 24 Naomi Kurtz (UChicago), Galician Article Contraction as a Reflex of Case Assignment
week 9 – Mar 3 Karlos Arregi (UChicago), The relation between head movement and periphrasis
Fall 2022: All meetings from 12:30 to 2:20pm in Rosenwald 301 unless otherwise specified.
week 4 – October 21 Zeineb Sellami (UChicago), Phi-Agreement vs. Clitic Doubling in Tunisian Arabic.
week 6 – November 4 Kutay Serova (UChicago), Accusatives with Passives in 16th century Chaghatay.
week 7 – November 11 Ruth Kramer (Georgetown University), The Morphosyntax of Agreement on Imperatives in Amharic .
week 8 – November 18 Matt Hewett (UChicago), Cross(over) my Heart and Hope to Bind.
AY 2021-2022: Organizer: Matt Hewett
Spring 2022
week 2 – April 8 Andrew Murphy (UChicago), Multiple Left Branch Extraction Revisited
week 3 – April 15: Madeline Snigaroff (UChicago), Head-Movement Out of Adjuncts: The Case of Aleut Suffixal Adjectives
week 6 – May 6: Ivy Sichel (UC Santa Cruz), How resumptive pronouns ameliorate island violations
week 8 – May 20: Zach Lebowski (UChicago), Are prosodic boundaries directional?
week 9 – May 27: Stefan Keine (UCLA), Silencing the PCC
Winter 2022
week 3 – January 21: Paper discussion, Royer (2022) “Prosody as syntactic evidence: The view from Mayan”
week 4 – January 28: Darragh Winkelman, Perso-Arabic borrowings in Ottoman Turkish
week 6 – February 11: Brianna Wilson & Andrew Murphy (UChicago), Discontinuous Noun Phrases and Irrealis Movement in Iquito
week 9 – March 4: Laura Stigliano (UChicago), Wh-TREQs and CP-Ellipsis in Spanish
Fall 2021
week 3 – October 15: Matthew Hewett (UChicago), Towards a base-generation theory of Arabic resumption
week 4 – October 22: Heidi Harley (University of Arizona), Relative nominals and event nominals in Hiaki
week 7 – November 12: Kutay Serova (UChicago), Dative Stem Allomorphy in Turkic Pronouns: Suppletion or not?
week 8 – November 19: Naomi Kurtz & Akshay Aitha (UChicago), Phorhépecha: Clitics and Omnivory
AY 2020-2021: Organizer: Matt Hewett
Spring 2021
week 3 – April 16: Paper discussion, Tollan & Clemens (2021) “Syntactic ergativity as a constraint on crossing dependencies: The perspective from Mayan”
week 4 – April 23: Paper discussion, Blix (2021) “Spans in South Caucasian Agreement. Revisiting the pieces of inflection”
week 8 – May 21: Mini-talks – Akshay Aitha (UChicago), The Oblique Form in Telugu – A Morphological Puzzle, and Zeineb Sellami (UChicago), Complementizer Agreement in Tunisian Arabic
week 9 – May 28: Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh), As good as it gets: Person agreement and syncretism in Icelandic
Winter 2021
week 1 – January 15: Miloje Despic (Cornell), Consequences of Labelling for Morpho-Phonology: v*P Labelling, Feature Interaction and the Direct-Inverse Systems
week 3 – January 29: Paper discussion, Guekguezian (2020) “Aspectual phase heads in Muskogee verbs.”
week 5 – February 12: Adam Singerman, Suppletion and the Tuparí verb
week 7 – February 26: Laura Stigliano (UChicago), Fragment Questions in Spanish: evidence for syntactic and semantic identity
week 9 – March 12: Roberta D’Alessandro (Utrecht), Contact, language change and topicality: some thoughts
Fall 2020
week 3 – October 16: Matt Hewett (UChicago), Lexically selected PPs can vary by template in Semitic
week 5 – October 30: Brianna Wilson (UChicago), Clause-initial negation in Iquito
week 7 – November 13: José Camacho (UIC), Plural last names and the functional structure of DPs
week 8 – November 20: Martina Martinović (McGill), Control and restructuring in Wolof
AY 2019-2020: Organizer: Laura Stigliano
Spring 2020
Meetings will be held on Zoom.
week 3 – April 24: Paper discussion, Coon & Keine (2020): Feature Gluttony
week 5 – May 8: Paper discussion, Landau (2020): Constraining Head-Stranding Ellipsis
week 7 – May 22: NELS Abstract Workshop
Winter 2020
week 1 – January 17 – Cobb 107: Karlos Arregi (UChicago), What kind of movement is long head movement in Breton?
week 4 – January 31 – Cobb 107: Adam Singerman (UChicago), Evidence for Syntactic Recursion in a Native Language of the Brazilian Amazon
week 6 – February 14 – Cobb 107: Matt Hewett (UChicago), Fission as Feature Copying: Evidence from Allomorphy in Discontinuous Agreement
week 7 – February 21 – Gates-Blake 321: Ömer Eren (UChicago), Fake arguments as apparent valency changers: Evidence from Laz
week 8 – February 28 – Gates-Blake 321: Jonathan Bobaljik (Harvard)
Fall 2019
week 1 – October 4: Jason Merchant (UChicago), Dutch P-stranding and ellipsis: a wrinkle ironed out
*Meeting starts at 12:30*
week 4 – October 25: Laura Stigliano & Eszter Ronai (UChicago), Answerhood conditions of Hungarian multiple sluicing and wh-questions: Experimental investigations
*Joint meeting with LEAP Workshop*
week 8 – November 22: Jackie Lai (UChicago), Verb doubling and durative/frequency expressions: On the Chinese postverbal field
week 10 – December 6: Emre Hakgüder (UChicago)
Spring 2019
wk5 – May 3: Marina Ermolaeva (UChicago), Minimalist Grammar Induction
wk8 – May 24: Jon Sprouse (UConn), Experimental syntax and three case studies in movement
*Joint meeting with LEAP Workshop*
wk9 – May 31: Masaya Yoshida (Northwestern), Syntactic Prediction in Online Sentence Processing
*Joint meeting with LEAP Workshop*
wk10 – June 7: Yenan Sun (UChicago), Only with movement: Mandarin zhiyou
Winter 2019
wk2 – January 18: Aida Talic (University of Illinois), Accentogenic clitics and prosodic clitic incorporation by phase
wk3 – January 25: Nicholas Rolle (Princeton), The road or the door to exponence? Examining simultaneity at spell-out
wk5 – February 8: Matt Hewett (UChicago), Differentiating Dislocations in Biblical Hebrew
wk9 – March 8: Erik Zyman (UChicago), Antilocality at the Phase Edge
wk10 – March 15: Laura Stigliano & Eszter Ronai (UChicago), Adjectival sluices in Hungarian: an argument for isomorphic sources
Fall 2018
wk3 – October 19: Joanne Vera Stolk (University of Oslo), Hearing Greek, writing Coptic? Explaining non-standard spelling and morphology in a historical language contact situation –Joint meeting with LVC Workshop–
wk5 – November 2: Michelle Yuan (UChicago), Some new insights into Inuktitut morphosyntax, as revealed through a particular existential construction
wk7 – November 16 from 11 to 12:30, Landhal 009A: Cherry Meyer (UChicago), The Link between Gender and Classifiers in Ojibwe (Algonquian)
wk9 – November 30: Ksenia Ershova (UChicago), Reflexives in West Circassian: Ingredients of Subject Orientation
wk10 – December 7: Barbara Citko (University of Washington), Binarity of Merge and Structural Syncretism
Spring 2018
wk2: April 6 — David Pesetsky (MIT), Exfoliation: towards a derivational theory of clause size (and infinitivization in particular)
wk4: April 18 (Wednesday) 3 pm *Social Sciences 108* — Adam Singerman (The University of Chicago), The structure of the Tuparí clause, with special attention to the placement of pronouns/clitics
wk6: May 4 — Denis Ott (University of Ottawa), Sluicing = wh-movement + TP-ellipsis?
wk7: May 7 (Monday) 12 pm *Cobb 102* — Ricardo Etxepare (IKER, CNRS), Functional Dependencies in Basque
wk8: May 18 — Laura Stigliano (The University of Chicago), Revisiting the interaction between P-stranding and clausal ellipsis in Spanish
Winter 2018
wk2: January 12 — Michael Hamilton (Florida Atlantic University), Syntactic & post-syntactic elements of Algonquian theme signs
wk3: January 19 — Karlos Arregi (University of Chicago), Is Basque an ergative language?
wk4: January 26 — Jerry Sadock (University of Chicago), Greenlandic Negation Need Not Be in the Syntax
wk5: February 2 — Laura Kalin (Princeton University), The Ins and Outs of Allomorphy in Turoyo (Neo-Aramaic)
wk6: February 9 — Neil Myler (Boston University), Some Puzzles in isiXhosa Causatives
wk7: February 16 — Boris Harizanov (Stanford University), A unified approach to the syntactic movement of heads and phrases
wk8: February 23 — Natalia Pavlou (University of Chicago), On clausal complementation, successive cyclicity and locality in Cypriot Greek
wk9: March 2 — Joint meeting with The Greek Linguistics Workshop
Fall 2017
wk3: October 13 — Jackie Lai (University of Chicago), When verbs are shared: On the derivation of gapping in Mandarin Chinese
wk4: October 20 — Gabriel Martínez Vera (University of Connecticut), On the Spanish left periphery: double complementizer constructions and phase-over-phase configurations
wk6: November 3 — Adam Singerman (University of Chicago), Evidentiality, grammatical number and physical position in Tuparí (Joint meeting with LVC Workshop)
wk10: November 27 (Monday) — Ksenia Ershova (University of Chicago), What makes a West Circassian word: Evidence from Nominalizations
wk10: December 1 — Steven Franks (Indiana University), Some Thoughts on Combining Clitic Pronouns in Slavic
Spring 2017
wk2: April 7 — Amy Rose Deal (UC Berkeley), Covert hyperraising to object
wk3: April 12 — Kyle Johnson (UMass Amherst), Amalgams
wk5: April 28 — Emily Hanink (UChicago), Switch reference in Washo is agreement
wk6: May 5 — Karlos Arregi (UChicago), Is Basque an ergative language?
wk7: May 12 — Matt Barros (Yale University), TBA
Winter 2017
wk4: January 27 — Ksenia Ershova (University of Chicago), Reflexive resumption in West Circassian
wk6: February 10 — Dan Edmiston and Marina Ermolaeva (University of Chicago), Distributed Morphology over Strings
wk7: February 17 — Julie Legate (University of Pennsylvania), Personal passives, Grammatical Object Passives, and Impersonals
wk8: February 24 — Adam Singerman (University of Chicago), Finite embedding and quotation in Tuparí
wk9: March 3 — James Yoon (UIUC), TBA
Autumn 2016
wk2: October 7 — Jeff Geiger (University of Chicago),“Context can!”: Contextual accommodation in exophoric and anaphoric verb phrase ellipses
wk4: October 21 — Tanya Philippova (Ben Gurion), The phrasal comparative: a novel argument for the reduced clause analysis
wk6: November 4 — Hooi Ling Soh (University of Minnesota), Evidentiality and modality: The case of the discourse particle ‘punya’ in colloquial Malay
**Week 6 will be meeting in Classics 405**
wk7: November 11 — Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley), Hyperraising from pseudorelatives in Moro
**Week 7 will be meeting in Classics 405**
wk8: November 18 — Julian Grove (University of Chicago), Title TBA
wk10: December 2 — Gallagher Flinn (University of Chicago), Title TBA
Spring 2016
wk2: April 5 — Robert Lewis, Morphosyntax of Potatowotami
wk3: April 12 — Adam Singerman, Negation in Tupari **Joint meeting with LVC workshop **
wk4: April 19 — No meeting
wk5: April 26 — Ksenia Ershova, Applicative Blocking in Georgian: Evidence for Selection as Agree
wk6: March 4 — Marika Lekakou, Determiner spreading in two varieties of Modern Greek
wk7: May 10 — No meeting
wk8: May 17 — Karlos Arregi, Ostrove (in prep.): On the role of linear order in portmanteaux
wk9: May 24 — Ksenia Ershova, TBA *CANCELLED*
wk10: May 31 — No meeting
Winter 2016
wk2: Jan 12 — Mike Pham, Clustering properties of morpheme and phonaestheme networks
wk3: Jan 19 — Karlos Arregi, How to sell a melon: Postsyntactic mesoclisis in Spanish imperatives
wk4: Jan 26 — Emily Hanink, The dual nature of clausal nominalization in Washo
wk5: Feb 2 — Josh Falk, O’Donnell et al (2011): Productivity and Reuse in Language [link]
wk6: Feb 9 — Jacob Phillips, Noun incorporation in Sora
wk7: Feb 16 — no meeting
wk8: Feb 23 — Jonathan Pesetsky, How and When to be Alive: Animacy in Swahili
wk9: March 1 — Cherry Meyer, Booij (1995): Inherent versus contextual inflection and the split morphology hypothesis
wk10: March 8 — Asia Pietraszko, TBA
Autumn 2015
wk3: Oct 12 — Emily Hanink, Toosarvandani (2011): The role of nominalization in Northern Paiute relative clause formation
wk4: Oct 19 — Cherry Meyer, Noun Categorization in Ojibwe
wk5: Oct 26 — Jason Merchant, Stochastic and joint selection
wk6: Nov 2 — Ksenia Ershova, argument structure and the construction of the polysynthetic verb in Adyghe
wk7: Nov 9 — Yoolim Kim, “The grammatically underspecified Korean word kesiki”
wk8: Nov 16 — Jerry Sadock, Noun Incorporation in Greenlandic (link)
wk9: Nov 23 — Mike Pham, Clustering properties of morpheme and phonaestheme networks [postponed]
wk10: Nov 30 — Karlos Arregi, How to sell a melon: Postsyntactic mesoclisis in Spanish imperatives [work with Andrew Nevins] [postponed]