We are delighted to announce BieLeiCoS 2025, a workshop on Comparative Syntax organized by the universities of Bielefeld and Leiden. The two day workshop will take place at Bielefeld University, Germany, on Thursday 22 May and Friday 23 May 2025. Invited speaker:  Theresa Biberauer (University of Cambridge, Stellenbosch University) There will be two panel sessions…

This is a newly-published paper on ethics in theoretical linguistics that and I co-wrote with Mike Putnam and Pritha Chandra. I’m sharing it here in case it might be of interest: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2023-0154/html Roberta

Speaker: Yoad Winter (ILS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; joint work with Imke Kruitwagen, James A. Hampton, and Joost Zwarts) Title: Understanding Partial Reciprocity Time: 12 December 2024 – 11.30am-1pm Abstract Reciprocal pronouns (‘each other’) and reciprocal verbs (‘meet,’ ‘hug’) allow non-maximal interpretations: both ‘the men fought’ and ‘the men fought each other’ can describe a…

Speaker: Gianluca Porta (Ulster University) Title: Extraction from adjuncts: the role of Small Clauses When: Tuesday 26 November, 4-5pm Abstract A well-known distinction between arguments and adjuncts is that only the former allow extraction. A number of reasons for the island status of adjuncts have been proposed (e.g. Haung’s (1982) CED). Recent experimental studies challenged…

The online talk series REFLECTIONS: Foundations and Developments of Generative Grammar will continue with a talk by Adriana Belletti (University of Siena): Date: 8 February 2025, 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC) Topic: Comparative Dimensions in Morphosyntax: Theoretical and Descriptive Insights from Acquisition Studies How to attend: Zoom Live stream on YouTube Zoom Information (a new link) will be sent…

Speaker: Richard S. Kayne (NYU) Title: The DP-Internal Origin of Datives When: Thu 21 Nov, 15.45-17.00 (please note the time change!) Where: Lipsius 1.33 Zoom: Link / Meeting ID: 629 5474 2232 / Passcode: u^7gBg9! Bringing together Szabolcsi’s work on Hungarian possessive sentences, the possessor-raising tradition having to do with inalienables, locative datives, temporal datives, datives with modals, datives with psych-verbs and…

Tomorrow ​(12th November) at 12-1pm (UK time), Kim A. Groothuis (Universiteit Gent) will be giving a talk entitled, Neapolitan chillo at the syntax-discourse-prosody interface.     Abstract: Neapolitan, like other Campanian varieties, features a construction in which the distal demonstrative (chillo, chella, chello ‘that.M/F/N.SG’ < Lat. ECCU + ILLU(M)) is used as an apparent expletive subject, occurring with impersonal predicates, as in (1). Moreover, chillo…