On November 12th, we will host two talks by two PhD candidates who are visiting our department. Irene Fernández Serrano (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) will give a talk entitled ‘Agreement and Spanish psych-verbs: defective phases revisited’.       Rima Ben Ayeche (University of Carthage) will give a talk entitled ‘The syntax of ellipsis in…

Crash course in Formal Linguistics for PhDs  Registration deadline: 25 November We’re happy to announce a crash course in formal linguistics for all PhD students at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, as well as potential participants from other departments and universities. This course will give young researchers who do not have previous training in Formal…

The next Syntax Reading Group meeting will take place on Thursday, November 7th, in Trans 10, 0.26, at 11:00. We will discuss Merchant (1998). Pseudosluicing: Elliptical clefts in Japanese and English. In: Alexiadou et al. (eds), ZAS working papers in linguistics Vol. 10. Berlin, ZAS, pp. 88–112. The paper is available at this link: http://home.uchicago.edu/~merchant/pubs/pssluicing.pdf

The next Syntax Reading Group meeting will take place on Friday, October 18th, in Trans 10, 0.26, at 14:00. We will discuss Gallego (2018). Projection without agreement. The Linguistic Review 35(4): 601–623. The paper is available at this link: https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/tlir.2018.35.issue-4/tlr-2018-2002/tlr-2018-2002.pdf.

András Bárány (Leiden University) will give a Syntax Interface Lecture on 12 December at 16:00. Title: Universals and typological gaps in subject and object agreement The talk will be streamed on the StreamGram YouTube channel at this url Abstract Like (in)transitive constructions, ditransitive constructions can be characterised in terms of their case-marking and agreement alignment. In English, for…

The next Syntax Reading Group meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 25th, in Trans 10, 0.51, at 11:30 (bring your lunch!). We will discuss Bobaljik (2008). Where’s Phi? Agreement as a Post-Syntactic Operation. In Harbour et al. (eds), Phi-Theory: Phi features across interfaces and modules, pp. 295-328. Oxford: OUP. The paper is available at…

 On 9 October,  David Nicolas (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, EHESS, PSL, CNRS) will give a ROCKY talk with the title Mereological choices for count nouns and mass nouns. Abstract: Many semantic theories about count nouns and mass nouns use mereological notions like part and sum. At the lexical level, count nouns are often deemed to…